Growth Task Force lines up priorities

Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 | 9:39 a.m.

The Clark County Growth Task Force winnowed its lists of priorities for dealing with natural resources, sprawl and housing affordability issues Tuesday, a critical step toward its ultimate goal of producing policy recommendations for local governments.

The Clark County Commission created the task force last spring to look at the challenges that rapid growth pose for the urban area. The task force is supposed to bring its recommendations to the commission and the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition early next year.

The task force Tuesday voted to establish its priorities on urban design issues. They are:

The task force also looked at natural conservation issues. The group picked strategies to further develop that would include looking at the impact of land-use planning and mass transit on air quality, encouraging mass transit to reduce time spent in cars and use of more low-pollution alternative fuels, exploring the thorny issues of development restrictions for protection of rare desert plants and animals, and looking at water-conservation issues including the ongoing drought and restrictions that homeowner associations have placed on the use of artificial turf.

The task force, made up of community activists, developers, academics, environmentalists and assisted by a host of government agencies, can still look at other strategies that will go to the county next year.

The task force meeting on Tuesday came on the heels of a study released by a Seattle-based environmental group that found that Las Vegas does well in some measures of sprawl compared with 14 other cities.

The Northwest Environment Watch shares with other environmental groups a disdain for sprawling suburbs, which encourage long drives to work, play and shop. The group mirrored other analyses that show that Las Vegas is a compact place, with high population densities, which often means that people don't have to drive far to get where they need to go.

Of the 15 cities studied, Las Vegas had the highest population density and share of residents living in compact neighborhoods in 2000. Las Vegas was second to Denver in the growth in such environmentally desirable compact neighborhoods.

Other cities in the study were Salt Lake City; Sacramento and Riverside in California; Minneapolis; Nashville, Tenn.; Charlotte, N.C.; Orlando, Fla.; Phoenix; Seattle; Boise, Idaho; Austin, Texas; Madison, Wis.; and Portland, Ore.

"We looked at cities that were growing rapidly," said Clark Williams-Derry, research director for the group. "What we found, somewhat to our surprise, is that Portland gets a lot of attention for smart growth policies, but overall, Las Vegas has much higher density.

"People think of Las Vegas as a sprawling place because it's growing so rapidly, but Las Vegas is pretty compact," he said. "There's not a lot of leap-frog development."