On Thursday, November 13, 2025, The Lyon County Board of County Commissioners along with CORE Construction and Developer Project One will hold a groundbreaking ceremony to commemorate the official start of construction for the Charles J. Kirk Lyon County Government Complex in Dayton.
This facility will be the future site of the Dayton Justice Court, District Attorney’s Dayton Office, Human Services Dayton Office, and Sheriff’s Office Dayton Substation.
Commissioners announced their intention to name the new government complex for Kirk roughly a week after he was shot and killed.
Charles “Charlie” Kirk was the co-founder of Turning Point USA in 2012, which had the mission of bringing more youth in conservative movements, specifically by targeting college campuses which he said were “indoctrination zones where free speech is crushed.”
In this mission, Kirk was successful: he was an excellent rhetorician (someone gifted in the art of rhetoric) and began touring college campuses and setting up debate tents. He would make provocative statements with the intention of “baiting” progressive students into debates.
“I founded Turning Point USA to take the fight for ideological diversity directly to a progressive stronghold: the nation’s leading colleges and universities,” he wrote in an opinion piece to the Washington Post in 2019.
His early posted clips resonated with conservative college audiences, which lead to steady donations and eventually created one of the largest grass-roots political organizations in the country.
He was assassinated in Utah on September 10, 2025 during the first stop in his Fall 2025 ‘American Comeback Tour’ while he was debating mass shootings in the US with an audience member. He was shot by a sniper from the roof of a building 142 yards away. A 22-year-old named Tyler James Robinson surrendered to police the next day and has been in custody ever since.
Since his death, a multitude of clips of Kirk have flooded social media, either arguing he was an alt-right white supremacist who wanted to ban anyone who wasn’t a Christian conservative Libertarian from the US, or on the other side, nothing more than a free-speech advocate who wanted to advocate for Christians in a country where religion and conservatives was becoming less popular, especially with the youth.
The truth is, like all things, somewhere in the middle. He wasn’t necessarily a propagandist — he was an insistent advocate for critical thinking, and acknowledged that he used provocative rhetoric to start conversations. He was an advocate for free speech and religious freedom — but also argued that the law should determine who should be allowed free speech (for example, not Satanists). But he also crossed religious lines more than once to advocate for other Christian factions like Catholics (Kirk is an Evangelist).
He also had complex and controversial opinions on race — for one, after the murder of George Floyd, which kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, he called it an “inexcusable altercation” between police and an unarmed citizen, and criticized celebrities and leftists for their “rush to judgment,” as well as “conservative commentators for largely defending the police officer before the country knew the facts.”
“In fact, the death of George Floyd might be one of the most singularly clear-cut incidents of police brutality ever captured on camera, revealing absolutely zero cause for Chauvin to take such drastic action,” Kirk wrote in his opinion piece for NewsWeek.
This isn’t the first time that the Lyon County Board of Commissioners has chosen to name public property after figures that were divisive at the time.
In 2021, a commissioner attempted to quietly push through the renaming of Old Dayton Valley Road to ‘Pres. Trump Way,’ which was initially approved until a mass of public backlash from liberal and conservative constituents alike caused the board to bring it back. That, and the fact that the decision broke Open Meeting Laws by not being agendized properly.
Commissioners instead later chose to rename the Lyon County Justice Complex in Yerington the Donald J. Trump Justice Complex in 2022.
