Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Where I Stand — Guest columnist Jim Deacon: Now let’s get it right

Editor's note: In August the Where I Stand column is written by guest writers. Today's columnist is Dr. Jim Deacon, recently retired from more than 40 years as a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, science professor. His work led to the formation of the Ash Meadows and Moapa National Wildlife Refuges and he has long been involved with Southern Nevada's water issues.

OVER THE MORE than 40 years I've been here, the community's been growing so rapidly that visions of the future become memories of the past almost before they're realized. The consequence is that long-range planning has always been too shortsighted.

Forty years ago community leaders boasted that by learning from the mistakes Los Angeles made we would build a better, more vibrant city. Today our smog, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, homeless population, suicide rate, water and power concerns, inadequate educational system, crowded parks and recreation areas and increasing response times for emergency services make it obvious we haven't avoided all the mistakes Los Angeles made. We have avoided some of them, however, and because we haven't quite yet reached an unmanageable size, we still have opportunities to create a city that offers quality-of-life benefits no longer available in the Los Angeles/San Diego megalopolis.

In addition to world-class resorts and a few recently designed "people friendly" communities, we have extensive public lands, including the Lake Mead and Red Rock recreational areas, the Spring Mountains Conservation Area and the Desert Game Range. These nearby public lands offer recreational opportunities, open space, scenic grandeur, and ecological services unavailable near most major cities in the world.

The many problems mentioned above make it obvious that our current tax structure cannot support essential infrastructure. As a result, we are near the bottom of most quality-of-life indicators. If the Governor's Task Force on Tax Policy identifies reasonable alternatives to our inadequate tax structure, and the Legislature finds the political will to enact the necessary legislation, our chances to get it right this time will improve.

A research and public-service project recently completed by one of my colleagues at UNLV illustrates a process, which, if used widely by government and business, could help achieve community goals with efficient expenditure of tax revenues. It involves hard-nosed evaluation of the costs and consequences of alternate development strategies.

Last summer Dr. Krys Stave, working with the Citizens Advisory Committee appointed by the Regional Transportation Commission, produced a model of the Las Vegas transportation system. The model permitted the committee to quickly evaluate strategies for reducing traffic congestion while complying with air-quality standards over the next 20 years.

Stave's success with the RTC committee leads me to suggest that the process could help us respond more effectively to many other community problems. For example, a recent article in this newspaper reported that, compared to other states, Nevada government has an unusually high percentage of employees working in our prison system and an unusually low percentage employed as teachers. The article suggested that by scrimping on our educational system we may be creating social conditions leading to a high prison population. Are there similar connections between our homeless population and our under-funded mental health and social services? Could we analyze other connections?

Everyone recognizes we have a water supply problem in the valley. But what are the connections between water supply and flooding, water pollution, sewage treatment, erosion control in Las Vegas Wash, federal land disposal, and development of parks and recreational opportunities?

We are spending millions on a regional flood control system designed to move rainwater runoff through the valley as rapidly as possible and dump it into Lake Mead. The runoff destroys real estate, our new Desert Wetland Park, requires construction of erosion control structures and dumps pollution into Lake Mead in violation of water quality standards. At the same time we're spending millions in an effort to find new sources of water, improve sewage treatment and expand park and recreational opportunities.

It's entirely possible that a model to aid decision making would show us how to use the flood waters to increase our water supply by designing some of the flood channels as linear parks capable of moving floodwaters into storage reservoirs.

A popular computer game, Sim City, allows users to create a simulated city and teaches them how public-policy decisions are all ultimately connected with each other. Similarly, using a model such as Stave used, we might discover that instead of turning BLM land near the Las Vegas Wash into flood-prone subdivisions, it's more cost effective to retain enough public land to accommodate a functional, meandering river -- a river that could distribute floodwaters over a flood plain where water-cleansing wetlands would offer recreational opportunities and reduce or eliminate the need for erosion control structures.

Now, while we're in the process of attempting to work our way out of a broken tax system, wouldn't it also be a great time for community leaders to mount an effort that might show us how to get the biggest bang for the buck -- a sort of Sim City Las Vegas?

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