Clark County commissioners today will formally unveil their plan to respond to growth in Las Vegas, taking a cue from their past efforts to deal with seemingly intractable issues.
Commissioners Mark James, Rory Reid and Bruce Woodbury, who are scheduled to have a news conference today on their growth initiative, said they will convene a citizens task force to tackle the thorny issues of growth and its limits in Clark County.
The three said they hope to have nominations for task force members, representing a broad cross section of the community, in hand within the month and that the group would begin meeting in March. The recommendations, including potential policy initiatives, should be produced by the end of the year, they said.
They promised that any conversation would include the various constituencies affected by Clark County's rapid growth, a rate that regularly is about 6 percent a year and leads the list for growth in U.S. urban areas. The county topped 83 percent population growth in the 1990s.
"The time has come to think about what kind of community we want to leave our children," Reid said Friday. "We believe it's time for all of us to take a deep breath, take a step back and look at where we're going."
Reid said the county has done a good job in managing many aspects of growth. The air over the urban island in the center of Clark County is cleaner now than it was in the 1980s, officials say, and a water conservation plan developed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority is cutting consumption of one of the region's most limiting resources.
Clark County also passed last year a sweeping reform of its master-planning process, Reid said, a step toward protecting neighborhoods threatened by rapid development.
"We believe we need to take the next step," he said.
Reid and his colleagues promised that all sides would be represented in the discussion.
"Whether you're no-growth, slow-growth or pro-growth, we need to put everything on the table," Woodbury agreed.
Neighborhood activists, developers, environmentalists and representatives of labor and the gaming industry will be among those with a seat at the table, the commissioners said.
"We want to build consensus within the community," James said. He said the county is not trying to force solutions on the region, but is providing a source of leadership for a thorough examination of the myriad issues arising from growth.
"We're not trying to do this with a lot of ownership," James said. "We're trying to do this with leadership."
Reid said the end of the process may produce real policy changes implemented locally or by the state.
"The first thing we have to do as leaders is establish consensus," he said. "At the end of that process there may be very difficult decisions to make."
Woodbury said he has spoken with North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon, Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson and Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and said the cities, at some point, will have to be involved. He said the Regional Planning Coalition, which includes representatives from the cities, will be "very much involved with this."
"We don't know yet whether we will have elected representatives on the task force," Woodbury said.
Gibson said that his city would "welcome the opportunity to participate" in the task force.
"If you really wanted to reach out and arrive at solutions that would be meaningful, they have to be regional," he said. "We really do need to have a broad discussion that has to include all of us."
Gibson said he doesn't believe the county wants to force solutions on the independent governments in Clark County.
But Henderson has already started working on its own on similar fronts, Gibson said.
"The growth in Henderson has been very rapid, but it has been very successful and very orderly," he said. "There is a lot of growth management happening today in our city, but I think we can improve upon where we are.
"We have an economy that we need to sustain and we have resources that are limited," Gibson said.
He said the work of his local government could dovetail nicely with the work of the county.
"It would be irresponsible for us not to undertake a discussion and an analysis of where we are, and where we want to go," Gibson said.
The commissioners said that at some point, Clark County might have to call upon the state to support policy initiatives.
State Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, said she believes that the state could play an important role in the conversation, and volunteered her service on the task force.
Titus has for years advocated "smart growth" for Las Vegas, at one point advocating a development limit dubbed "the ring around the valley" to contain the sprawling urban growth.
"I've always thought that it would work better if it were a cooperative effort, and I think the county is now recognizing that this is the case," she said. "If good things come out of this committee, I will be glad to sponsor them in the Legislature."
James, a former state senator, said he believes that the state took action on growth issues in past years because the county commission was not inclined to deal with the issue. The new county commission, however, is poised to take the lead role on this issue, he said.
"Even starting a process like this would not have happened on the county commission in years past because the attitude was pretty much to allow any kind of development," James said.
The commissioners said that a discussion for Las Vegas has some significant advantages now. One is that the Southern Nevada Water Authority is already doing a financial analysis of the impact that halting growth would have on the community.
Another advantage is that other cities across the United States already have experience both with rapid growth and experiments to control that growth. The county, in effect, can pick and choose those solutions and mitigating measures that have worked in other areas.
The county and allied independent agencies also have experience with the type of consensus-building groups such as the one proposed for the growth issue. The Regional Transportation Commission, then led by board chairman Woodbury, built a community consensus for a $2.5 billion tax package for transportation improvements two years ago.
More recently, the water authority has used similar broad-based citizen groups to draft recommendations to respond to the drought. The county itself has used such groups to draft recommendations dealing with the University Medical Center financial crisis and new ethics rules for elected commissioners and county department heads.
County Manager Thom Reilly, who has played a role in forming the other county task forces, said nominations for the new group would come from county staff, from commissioners and from the general public.
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