Anne McMillin Hired as PIO for Churchill County

By Rachel Dahl —  Twenty-five years ago a tall, lanky girl served as the Public Affairs Officer at Naval Air Station Fallon. Statuesque, intelligent, and calmly confident, Anne McMillin is reprising her public affairs role, but this time she takes the helm as the first-ever Public Information Officer for Churchill County. “I am happy, thrilled actually, to be serving Churchill County for the third consecutive time in as many decades,” she said. When she worked at NAS Fallon for seven years during the 1990’s, McMillin was responsible for media relations both internally and externally as well as crisis communications. She later worked, starting in 2004, as the staff reporter for the Fallon Star Press. Working for Anne Pershing to build a brand new, weekly newspaper provided McMillin the opportunity to cover all aspects of the Fallon community — from local government to business, and feature stories to new babies. While at the Fallon Star Press, McMillin won several prestigious press awards including from the Nevada Press Association: Journalist of Merit, Best Business Feature Story, and Best Investigative or In-Depth Series. Taking her talents to the Reno area in the late 2000’s, McMillin worked for the University of Nevada in several capacities for over a decade. She was primarily responsible for public relations and communications, and was the managing editor for the School of Medicine magazine, Synapse. Pete Olsen, Chairman of the Churchill County Commission said the county created this new position rather than hire a consultant or an outside agency as a way to bring the county into the 21st century in terms of communications. He said the commissioners didn’t feel like they had the coverage they needed, especially during the high water events of 2017. “We felt helpless not knowing how to get information to the community, we realized many people get their information only from social media,” he said. “We feel this gives us a much better way to communicate all of the issues, from the Navy expansion plan, to resource management with the Bureau of Land management, and it creates a way to outreach with the community and try to encourage better engagement with our residents.” “Anne comes with a wealth of experience and she is loaded with knowledge for this job,” he continued. Since coming on board with Churchill County on December 28th, McMillin has been putting her wealth of knowledge to work, reactivating the dormant county Twitter account and Facebook page. She attended the county commission meeting, the swearing in of the new Captain at the Sheriff’s office, and accompanied commissioners on department tours. McMillin was educated at the University of California at Davis and has a degree in International Relations and French. She laughs when she calls herself “a cat lady” because she has always loved cats and has two who sleep all day and are quite active late into the night. McMillin also grows beautiful, “prize winning” roses. She has won several ribbons at the County Fair and Cantaloupe Festival over the years, but hasn’t been able to participate for the past few years because of the commuting. She says she is looking forward to entering her roses in the Festival again this year. “I’m really happy to be back in Fallon and not making that drive every day,” she said. “I left the house fifteen minutes before I had to be here and even had time to stop for Starbucks,” she said. “And, I’m going home for lunch.” McMillin can be reached in her office at 775-423-2266 or by email at [email protected].