Monday, May 9, 2005 | 11:01 a.m.
A Regional Transportation Commission advisory panel is back at the drawing board after a bill its members said would reduce construction-related traffic backups failed to reach the floor of the Legislature.
The proposal, Senate Bill 322, was put forward by the agency's Citizens Advisory Committee and would have required agencies, subcontractors or utilities working on the project to coordinate when and where any road closures would occur and what alternate routes would be available to motorists.
Proponents said the changes would have cut down on road closures and would have given drivers a better sense of what roads are closed and for how long. The existing system had led to unnecessary traffic jams on roads that were often reopened to traffic only to be closed again by another agency days later, committee members said.
The bill went before the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security committee earlier last month but never made it the full Legislature because senators said there was not enough time to hear the bill before the April 15 deadline for submission to the Legislature, Andy Maline, a member of the citizen board, said.
"That bill did not need to die," said Maline, a real estate broker who helped write the bill. "It's really sad. The members on the committee put their hearts into it."
Maline said conversations he had with Sen. Dennis Nolan, R-Las Vegas, the Senate transportation committee chairman, had led Maline to believe that Nolan supported the bill, so Maline was disappointed when the bill didn't make it out of Nolan's commmittee.
Nolan said Sen. Mike Schneider, D-Las Vegas, the bill's official sponsor, withdrew the bill after discussing it with the entities -- including the RTC -- that had publicly criticized the proposal for being too vague.
Maline, however, sees it as politicians placing the interests of government employees above those of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
Maline has long pointed to sometimes back-to-back lane closures on a heavily traveled stretch of Durango Avenue as a prime example of miscommunication between utilities whose representatives fail to talk to each other before launching separate projects the required they dig holes in the street.
Nolan said he wanted to hear the bill -- and that he said as much to his Senate committee -- but its provisions were too complicated to iron out before the April 15 deadline.
"I don't agree with Sen. Nolan's logic at all," Maline said. "He really didn't have Southern Nevadans' best interests at heart. The logic doesn't fit the outcome. It's just too bad it's politics as usual."
Nolan said it would have taken a lot of work "and not the kind of work that can happen in a couple of hours in a legislative committee," Nolan said. "We're talking about coordinating projects between municipalities, the city (of Las Vegas), North Las Vegas and Henderson. It really is a monumental task."
Schneider said Nolan's belief that there was not enough time to hear the bill left him with no other choice. Withdrawing the bill prevented legislators from voting to indefinitely postpone the bill, "an insult" that would have likely led to it being killed, Schneider said.
Nolan has since told the citizens committee that he will work to implement individual suggestions within the bill, Maline said.
The bill had garnered bipartisan support within the transportation committee.
"It wasn't partisan differences at all," Schneider said. "The bill is really a bipartisan bill. You know when the committee chairman makes a decision that's the final word but when you're in the minority (party) you don't get as much consideration. I think that had something to do with it. I don't have as much clout as a Republican does."
Instead, Schneider said he has asked Nolan to write a strongly worded letter to agencies urging them to work together. Nolan said he will write the letter and will present to the Senate committee.
Some state and local transportation officials said the proposed law would have been redundant. They complained it would have created an added burden for already strained public employees who would have been tasked with coordinating myriad separate projects across numerous city, county and state agencies.
Citizens committee members including Maline said they purposely left language in the bill vague, saying last month it would give them the opportunity to "add teeth" in future legislative sessions.
Schneider said those teeth could likely grow out of amendments in future hearings.
"Yeah there was a little vagueness there and some things I would want to change a little but that's why we have hearings about them," he said.
RTC General Manager Jacob Snow said that vagueness may have been the bill's undoing, as it failed to adequately spell out how agencies would carry out the provisions,
Snow agreed that communication snarls have at times created unnecessary traffic delays, including a recent lane closure on Bonneville Avenue, which runs adjacent to the county government complex housing his office. But Snow questioned whether the bill would have prevented similar problems in the future.
The RTC formally withheld its support of the bill, although Snow said he would work with the citizens committee to possibly implement portions of the failed legislation.
"The bill as a whole was just so vague that many parts of it were rendered meaningless," Snow said. "It might have passed and no one would have known how it worked."
An RTC spokeswoman said in March that much of what the bill sought is already being done by the agency's existing Utilities Coordination Committee, a 19-member group created in 1992. It includes representatives from Clark County Public Works, the Regional Flood Control District and Southwest Gas. The state Transportation Department already employs a staff of professionals whose duties include meeting with local utilities and county agencies to preclude redundant efforts, a spokesman for that agency said in March.
Maline said he and others have since met with Snow to discuss implementing portions of the bill, including a measure supported by RTC chairman and Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury that would have required contractors to rent traffic lanes from public agencies before closing them.
The lane rental proposal may still appear before the full commission for a vote later this year, Snow said. The county agency is also working to install newly purchased software that would create an interagency database that would spell out what projects are on-going, he said.
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