Task force on growth to offer potential plans

Wednesday, July 28, 2004 | 9:21 a.m.

The Clark County Growth Task Force wrestled with the thorny issues of sprawl and affordable housing Tuesday, and after five hours of testimony back-and-forth among the board members, it finally produced 11 potential strategies for dealing with the issues.

The task force, which began meeting in June, is charged with finding ways for the county and perhaps other regional governments to better manage the region's nation-leading pace of population growth.

The task force moved a step closer to having hard recommendations for the Clark County Commission on Tuesday, forwarding the list of proposals to a soon-to-be-hired consultant to do a cost-benefit analysis on each point.

The task force also heard from the Clark County School District on Tuesday. School District officials Joyce Haldeman, government relations director, and Dusty Dickens, zoning director, told the task force that rapid growth has created huge challenges for the system.

In the last decade the district's population of school-age children has grown by 85 percent and continues to grow, the pair told the group.

"We built 112 schools between 1986 and 1996 and that didn't really catch us up," Dickens said.

The School District, like developers and those who have been priced out of the housing market, has been hit by the scarcity of property on which to build, Dickens said.

"Vacant land in this valley is disappearing," she said.

Issues related to the lack of vacant land fueled conversations on the other subjects tackled by the task force. The group of volunteers talked about "urban villages," the mix of residential and commercial uses in small footprints on land. Developers increasingly are turning to the concept, which often centers on high-rise condominiums.

But Jane Feldman, a Sierra Club member, and Gabriel Lither, deputy attorney general and community activist, questioned whether the high rises are always the best policy. Feldman said some of the urban villages failed to provide access to efficient mass transit, so the communities create the same kinds of traffic and infrastructure problems that characterize sprawling subdivisions.

Lither, who helped engineer a successful effort to cut the height of a proposed 300-foot hotel tower in Summerlin, said too many high rises are "300-foot tall towers on the edge of town with a coffee shop at the bottom."

Hal Rothman, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas history professor who has written on the city's development, agreed.

"I am, in principle, in favor of these kinds of developments," Rothman said. "What I fear is the creation of a lot of little tiny towns."

The task force agreed, however, to support urban villages where they encourage compact development and use mass transit efficiently. The group also voted to encourage "infill" development in the urban core, and to establish incentives -- monetary and otherwise -- to revitalize older urban neighborhoods.

The group also voted to push the creation of more affordable housing, including asking the BLM to set aside land for the development of affordable housing projects.