Different background.
Different commission.
ABOUT MANNY
Husband. Father. Builder. Neighbor.
Manny is a father and a husband first. The county he wants to serve is the same county where his daughter will grow up. That is the entire commitment.
Manny Kess grew up in New York, attended the U.S. Naval Academy, and lost his father while he was there, an experience that shaped how he approaches leadership, responsibility, and resilience.
He survived the 2008 Recession, moved to Las Vegas in 2011, and built The Kess Group from scratch in 2012: restaurants, real estate, travel services, and responsibly farmed food, working with athletes, entertainers, business leaders, and local families. Building those businesses meant living inside budgets, regulation, and land use, the same things this board decides. In December 2025, he declared his candidacy for Clark County Commission, District E.
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He has made fifteen years of payrolls. He has fought permit boards. He has fired people. He has hired people. He has looked someone in the eye and said no when they wanted him to look the other way.
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He is not a career politician.
The Five Stops that brought Manny here.
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A timeline a career politician can't fake.
Each chapter taught a specific lesson about how Clark County actually works.
1997 - The Naval Academy.
1.
Annapolis taught discipline that does not require an audience. The chain of command. The names on the wall of Memorial Hall. The standard you keep when nobody is watching. He lost his father while he was there. That loss shaped everything that came after.​
2008 - The Recession.
2.
Twenty-something during the worst economy in eighty years. The industry he was in collapsed. Most of his peers got out. He stayed long enough to learn what a P&L really means at the bottom of a cycle before the recession took its toll on his family business.
2011 - Vegas.
3.
Manny headed west and moved to Clark County with a fresh start. He had almost no contacts. He had no apartment. He was here a month before landing his first job. The desert was honest about who he was: somebody who had to build it from here.
2012 - The Kess Group.
4.
Formed in 2012 as a hospitality company of one. Just Manny. It grew to more than a dozen team members, and then came the restaurants, real estate, travel services, and responsibly farmed food. Fifteen years of payrolls since. Hospitality teaches you what a county actually feels like, one staff and one permit at a time.
2025 - The Candidate.
5.
Declared in December 2025. Posted his cell number online the same day. Won the Republican primary in June. Now the general election, November 3, 2026. The fifth stop is the one the rest were quietly preparing for.
Where Manny stands.
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The problems he is actually running on, straight from his campaign and grounded in what this board controls. Specific numbers. Specific commitments. No "fight for working families."
Built, not borrowed.
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Not a resume. A record. More than two decades building and leading businesses,
fifteen of them right here in Nevada.
20+
Years building businesses
More than two decades in regulated, competitive fields.
15
Years building in Nevada
He chose Clark County and built here.
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4
Industries he has operated in
Restaurants, real estate, travel, and consumer ventures.
