County unveils plan for dust

Tuesday, March 6, 2001 | 11:15 a.m.

A long-awaited plan to control stray dust in the Las Vegas Valley was to get a public airing today.

The Clark County Commission will almost certainly open a 42-day period for public comment on the plan, which incorporates many of the new dust-control rules put in place Jan. 1 by the Clark County Health District.

The county plan and health district rules are designed to control fine particles of airborne dust, a persistent problem in the desert Southwest. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has put the area under a mandate to clean up the dust problem in the air over the valley or regional governments could face federal sanctions.

Those sanctions could include the loss of federal highway funding -- which pays for about $200 million a year in regional road work -- or even the loss of local control of zoning approvals.

The federal sanctions were a prospect feared by developers, local elected officials and government planners.

The 1,000 page document to be presented today consists of the plan itself and 18 separate technical appendices, said Clete Kus, acting assistant planning manager for the Clark County Comprehensive Planning Department.

Kus said the plan includes input from throughout the community -- environmentalists, developers and construction contractors, home builders and government officials.

"We had numerous workshops in conjunction with the Clark County Health Department in developing each one of the regulations," Kus said. "As a result of working with the stakeholders and the regulated community, we were able to address their concerns as well as draft regulations acceptable to the EPA."

Local environmentalists said they look forward to seeing the full plan.

"We're very interested in really digging into the dust plan and seeing if it will bring real improvement to Las Vegas," said Jessica Hodge, Sierra Club organizer for Southern Nevada.

The EPA should receive the plans in June, Kus said. That would give the federal agency one year to accept the plans as "complete," a move that would stop sanctions from kicking in as soon as June 2002.

It usually takes only a couple of months for the EPA to accept a plan as complete, Kus said. It can take the agency more months to certify a plan as approved, but unless the EPA outright rejects a plan, the sanctions are kept at bay.

Kus said that because the county has worked closely with the EPA over the last two years of work to draft the plan, he is confident that it will be approved.

The EPA has never approved previous plans -- or deemed them complete -- because rules governing dust emissions from unpaved roads and vacant land were not in those earlier plans. Both dust sources are regulated in the new draft plan.

Clark County is scheduled to have a formal public hearing on the plan before the commissioners' April 17, during the regular commission meeting.

Kus said the county staff will have a workshop on the plan March 27, at 7 p.m., at the Clark County Government Center, 500 S. Grand Central Parkway, Las Vegas.