Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2005 | 8:58 a.m.
The Clark County Commission on Thursday will begin setting spending priorities, but it will have to do it without knowing how much money it will have to work with.
The seven commissioners and the top staff from the county already know some of the topics that are expected to be at the top of their funding list: public safety, including the funding of new stop lights and new police positions; flood control projects; and continuing efforts to deal with the still impressive rate of growth in the region.
But until the Legislature decides if or how it will provide relief to constituents clamoring over sharp increases in property tax bills driven by soaring property values, the county can't settle on a good estimate of how much revenue it will collect.
Property owners have seen those taxes go up an average of about 35 percent, but some have seen the taxes go up even more. Any caps or cuts to those taxes would directly affect revenues to local governments, including the county.
About a third of the county's current $950 million general fund budget comes from local property taxes.
"We're going to have to make our dollars stretch as far as possible," Commissioner Bruce Woodbury said. "I'm sure there's going to be property tax relief. We just don't know what it's going to be yet."
Clark County Finance Director George Stevens said the county leaders can still set the priorities for funding, even if they don't know how much revenue the county will have. Stevens said he will try to provide some general scenarios as to how the funding situation could shake out.
"I can give them a feel for what kind of revenue growth we might see," he said.
Commission Chairman Rory Reid said the county is going to continue to "need to be cautious about what we do. Whatever happens in Carson City will affect our ability to provide services here locally.
"Clearly it does impact our discussions, but we need to have that discussion anyway to try to say what our priorities are," Reid said. "It's an opportunity to hear from our staff and hear from the public."
Reid said that as it was last year, growth and the demand for government services that growth engenders will continue to dominate the agenda.
"Growth affects everything we do," Reid said. "Anything we do has to touch on that."
The County Commission should hear the results of a yearlong discussion on a wide range of growth-related issues when the county's Growth Management Task Force reports its recommendations to the commission in April, Reid noted.
Issues that have become contentious in recent weeks, including land swaps involving the county's Aviation Department, will likely come up in the upcoming strategic discussions, Reid said.
Public safety is always a perennial concern for the county, but some related issues could come into sharper focus during the conversations on priorities.
"There is going to be some significant discussion about the public safety issue and whether we are providing traffic safety devices as quickly as we could," Reid said.
Public Works has prepared a plan to install warning devices at intersections controlled by stop signs in the unincorporated county. The issue of when and how to install such devices came to public attention after the death in September of a young girl after a driver ran a stop sign at an intersection that warranted a full traffic light.
Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald, appointed last April and elected in November, said such needs are particularly apparent in the southwestern part of Clark County. Unlike other parts of the urban county, the southwest does not share boundaries with cities such as Las Vegas, North Las Vegas or Henderson, so the area has received less attention than others, Boggs McDonald said.
"I'm going to be talking a lot about the needs in the southwestern part of the county," she said. "I've never seen a comprehensive southwest plan."
Boggs McDonald said one way the area has gotten short shrift is in transportation planning, because the southwest has had no way to ally county and city interests before the Regional Transportation Commission.
"The southwest is all Clark County and only Clark County. It has not received the attention it needs for a segment of the county growing at the pace it has. ... Because it is 100 percent Clark County, we have to make sure that is a high priority. We can't rely on a North Las Vegas or Las Vegas to help us in the quadrant."
Other services also have not come to the area as fast as they should have, Boggs McDonald argued.
"It's the whole public safety infrastructure," she said. "It's the roads. It's the fire department. It's the police department.
Boggs McDonald said another priority will be developing a master plan for the development of the southern part of the county along Interstate 15. Henderson is considering expanding its city boundaries, and the county has an interest in ensuring that utility corridors are maintained by the county, she said.
"We have to start planning for these major future issues that are going to impact the county."
The other new commissioner on the board, Tom Collins from North Las Vegas and much of the north part of the county, said his priorities remain those that he brought to the voters in November's election: "More cops, more parks, less sleaze. And better planning."
Planning is especially important for communities in the Moapa Valley which are beginning to be affected by growth, he said.
Better planning is "what we have to do for the county as a whole, because we're going to grow," Collins said.
Collins also said he has another concern: the potential impact of federal budget cutbacks on the state and local governments.
"I fear the federal economy and federal deficits more than our Legislature," Collins said. President Bush is "out there selling a program. He's like one of those guys offering everything, but he's not paying for it. He's going to dump it on local government."
County Manager Thom Reilly said that despite the wide-ranging concerns of the commission members, the goal of the management will be to focus, rather than broaden, the issues.
"We're narrowing the focus," he said. "We're focusing on what are the core services, what matters most to citizens and how we know we're doing a good job on those.
"The reason we're doing that is because of the continuing uncertainty over the financial issues. We're going to be presenting the commissioners each of the core functions and there will be a lot of discussion about how we get back to the core.
"If it is not in this core, then maybe we shouldn't prioritize it, or maybe we should stop doing it altogether," Reilly said.
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