Growth is still the big county issue

Monday, Dec. 27, 2004 | 11:15 a.m.

The Clark County Commission, a group of seven men and women who collectively govern a population of more than 1.7 million and an area the size of Massachusetts, has had a busy year wrestling with the strain of growth.

In the coming year, those efforts will continue. The biggest challenge, said incoming Commission Chairman Rory Reid, is "just dealing with the whole growth issue."

That means providing services, including the critical services of public safety, to a population that continues to grow by about 80,000 people a year. It means securing more water resources for the population. It means building roads, expanding the public hospital, hiring more police and keeping a wary eye on the region's quality of life.

"Almost any issue mentioned within the county's jurisdiction has something to do with growth," Reid said. "Air, water, transportation, land-use planning, all of them."

While the growth has been relatively constant for more than a decade, Reid and his colleagues sparked a larger conversation on the issue with the creation of a Growth Management Task Force. The group, whose members include citizen activists, representatives of businesses and developers, environmentalists and academics, has been meeting since last spring in an effort to come up with recommendations for dealing with growth.

Reid -- who is to be designated as chairman a day before his father, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., assumes the post of Senate minority leader in Washington, D.C. -- said the task force recommendations could be very important.

"Everything we deal with has to do with growth, and the growth task force was a significant undertaking," the commissioner said. "We spent hours and hours trying to develop new policy with respect to growth, and it's complex and there's no easy answers."

Growth even complicates the county's response to more than five years of drought that has threatened the region's principal source of drinking water, the Colorado River. There is enough water for the region now, but the margin is thin, and so the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the regional wholesaler, is looking for various new sources and strategies to keep the resource coming, Rory Reid said.

He is a member of the water authority's board, and also, as a commissioner, is a board member of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which delivers to homes and businesses throughout Las Vegas and the unincorporated county, including the Strip.

Reid, a former chairman of the Nevada Democratic Party, has gotten the support of his colleagues from across the political spectrum. Reid worked with commissioners Bruce Woodbury and Chip Maxfield and former commissioner Mark James to create the growth task force.

Maxfield said the growth task force recommendations should come in the first quarter of the new year and "will help us better understand the growth-related issues and hopefully lead to some changes to make things better."

The main challenge, he said, is to maintain the ability to effectively deliver services to the public while also maintaining a fiscally responsible budget. Reid's chairmanship would be an asset in confronting the challenge, Maxfield said.

"Rory has great leadership skills and the ability to lead the commission," Maxfield, a Republican and 2004's commission chairman, said of his colleague.

Woodbury said he is comfortable with Reid taking the center seat in the commission chambers.

"I support Rory," Woodbury, who has served several years as commission chairman in his 24-year tenure on the board, said. "I've worked closely with Rory on many issues over the past several years and think very highly of him. We agree on most issues.

"I think he has the knowledge, the demeanor, to hold meetings appropriately," Woodbury said. "He will do a fine job."

Although the commission seats are technically partisan positions, party labels are not usually dividing points, Reid and Woodbury agreed.

"Potholes aren't partisan," Reid said. "The issues we deal with aren't partisan. The board has (four) Democrats and (three) Republicans, and we work well together.

"One thing the public has noticed is that this is a commission that can work well together," he continued. "We can disagree and not be disagreeable.

"We're all pulling our oars in the same direction."

Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald was a mid-cruise replacement on those oars. Gov. Kenny Guinn appointed her in March to replace James, who resigned to spend more time with his law practice and family after a little more than a year in office.

Boggs McDonald, who was a Las Vegas city councilwoman up to the time of her new appointment, immediately faced two challenges: thorny land-use planning issues and a campaign for election, which she won.

She said successfully passing master land-use plans for the unincorporated county towns of Spring Valley and Enterprise this year were among her most important accomplishments. Under the county's land-use rules amended this year, the master plans are harder to change than they have been in the past.

Sales of federal land in the past several years have created thousands of acres for development in those areas on the southwest side of the urban area, Boggs McDonald noted.

"All of the stakeholders had an opportunity to participate in designing the blueprint for the future," she said. "I'm looking forward to adhering to those master plans now that they have been adopted, so the public will have a degree of predictability."

Boggs McDonald said a goal in 2005 will be to adopt new rules governing the size and shape of neighborhood casinos. While a 1997 state law dictated how many of those casinos could come into the urban area and where they would go, plans by Station Casinos to build them have sparked opposition.

The state law "did a good job in defining the where, but it left a large hole that needs to be filled by Clark County as to the what," she said. Boggs McDonald, who served on the board of Station Casinos before her appointment to the county commission, said she wants to include many stakeholders, including the region's cities, in the discussion on what is appropriate for the design of neighborhood casinos.

Transportation will remain a key issue for Boggs McDonald and other commissioners. Boggs McDonald, who helped open a 3-mile stretch of the county-built Las Vegas Beltway between Decatur Boulevard and Buffalo Drive Thursday, said work on the next segment from Buffalo to Sunset will begin immediately and should open in 2006.

For Boggs McDonald and her colleagues, issues affecting Metro Police also will be critical in the coming year. The voters in November passed their recommendation to increase the county's sales tax by a half-cent by 2009 to fund more police officers, but the Legislature still must approve the measure this session.

Boggs McDonald said she wants to see new substations to bring police to the growing areas of her district.

"The whole public safety aspect, as it relates to the sales tax question, will be dealt with in Carson City, but where the rubber meets the road is how we implement (the increased funding) here," she said.

Police issues are also important to Tom Collins, a newcomer to the board. Collins, a North Las Vegas assemblyman, defeated fellow Democrat Mary Kincaid-Chauncey in the primary race for the commission seat.

Kincaid-Chauncey was indicted over a year ago on federal public corruption charges stemming from the investigation of alleged payoffs by owners of a Las Vegas strip-club to elected officials, including three other former county commissioners who had already left office. She and her former colleagues await a trial that could come in 2005.

Collins, the lone new face on the commission, said his goals this year are the same as those he campaigned on: "More cops, more parks, less sleaze."

He has proposed restrictions on campaign contributions to commission races, and said he hopes the Legislature will pass a package of ethics rule changes proposed by a county task force last year.

Collins said he believes the commission is mostly united both in facing the challenges and in getting along.

"My priorities are to get sworn in Jan. 3 and get sworn at thereafter," said Collins, who added that he is still learning the ropes at county government.

Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who easily won re-election in November, said she believes the county has made "giant strides dealing with zoning issues, land-use rules and regulations, that will be a benefit to neighbors and communities."

In 2005, Gates wants to ensure that police substations, community centers and a planned tennis complex come to her district at the center of the urban area.

Although population growth is not affecting her district, traffic will be "a big ticket issue," as will the growing lack of affordable housing -- another issue tackled by the growth task force.

"That will be one of my top priorities," Gates said.

Thom Reilly, Clark County manager, said other issues loom: The Legislature is likely to have what could be a contentious discussion over proposed caps on potentially skyrocketing property taxes. Those discussions could ultimately affect county finances. About a third of the county's budget comes from property taxes.

"How that comes out will require quite a bit of debate and dialogue that will dominate the early session," Reilly predicted.

He said ongoing issues will include the fiscal situation for the University Medical Center system, which includes the UMC Hospital, the area's only public hospital.

Working to prioritize the county's programs, and the spending on those programs, will be an issue, Reilly said.

"I'm hoping we can put more resources into public safety, more resources into the public defender's office, more resources into child welfare," Reilly said.

Another issue in the coming year will be dealing with the growth in county salaries and benefits, which have been outstripping the growth in inflation and could limit the ability of the county to provide services in the future, Reilly said. County management wants to keep the cost increases close to the inflation index.

"My hope is that we can deal with that in a thoughtful, constructive manner," Reilly said. --

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