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April 27, 2005
Press the rewind button back to 1969 if you really want to fix PV
Once again, they have decided the best way to determine how best to provide their service to us is to hire an outside consultant to tell them where they are. Once again, they will spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in order to find new and better ways to spend even more. And once again, they will most likely ignore the obvious, embrace the most grandiose scheme presented, and then proceed to enact the absurd. Now don't get me wrong. Each and every one of the commissioners and their advisers believe they are proceeding in the most prudent manner available. They have been informed there is a problem needing addressing, and since none of those who pronounced the problem can offer a solution, they feel compelled to seek solutions from outside. This is the classic Nevada way of shifting the blame for the subsequent increase in taxes to a non-elected entity. Sometimes this entity takes the form of a special panel such as the one Gov. Kenny Guinn setup to study the "investment needs" of the state some five years ago. Sometimes it takes the form of an ad hoc committee of citizens such as Nye County's former planning advisory board. But most of the time our elected officials will defer to the expert guidance of some unknown, distant and therefore unaccountable specialist who is either all seeing or knowing and can put on one heck of a sales presentation. Nye County officials have fallen into this trap for more than 40 years. The biggest sales presentation and the one that continues to be is when Preferred Properties Corporation presented the single greatest headache for the future of this valley back in 1969. They were a known land sales company with a history of moving into an area, subdividing land, selling to people who don't live in the area and then getting out of town before the gavel comes down. Until they came to Nye County, that is. Unlike California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, Nye County and the state of Nevada welcomed this land sales company with such adoration the company's original 5 years-and-out plan turned into a 30-year cash flow dream unthinkable in most other jurisdictions. PEC had been kicked out of other states, but Nevada and Nye County said welcome aboard you unscrupulous bastards. Protected by the Federal Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act of 1975 and the rules and regulations of Nevada Revised Statutes 119, commonly known as the Preferred Equities Law, they subdivided or bought and sold more than 33,000 pieces of land in the Pahrump Valley. Many were sold more than once. They were required to put in only the absolute minimum in development improvements. Less than 30 miles of paved roads after creating hundreds of miles of gravel roads. No utility infrastructure development to more than 16,000 parcels of land. It seemed all the governments wanted was the steady flow of taxes on properties that many people might never be able to use. They bought into the fantasy simply because they refused to admit what was really going on. The growth happening in most of the valley today is on parcels of land created and sold long ago. Ninety-five percent of parcels existing today were created without any thought of paying for growth. Subdivisions have been approved over the last dozen years that condemn thousands of people to travel on roads never designed or built for the level of traffic. To start from this point is more akin to closing the barn door after the cows have left town. In the early 1990s the commissioners hired a firm from Reno to study the road situation. The LUMUS study produced volumes of paper, provided specific road maintenance and improvement guidelines and was totally ignored after three years. The cost was in excess of $375,000. The commissioners paid the money not because they really expected to improve road infrastructure. They were forced to pay because state law requires such studies to be completed every decade. LUMUS is currently working on another study that won't go anywhere. The former Pahrump Planning Advisory Committee studied zoning issues for years before coming up with recommendations for the commissioners to adopt the current zoning regulations. The fact the same plan had been proposed and provided to the county by a tax-funded research group in 1990 has been all but forgotten. The only part objected to originally and adopted by the county for revenue purposes was the term of open use zoning. Because it is as specific in language as the Americans with Disabilities Act, a fee is attached to just about anything you might want to do with your "open use" property. Hiring TischlerBise is simply another veiled means of government wanting to develop new and creative ways of extorting money from the public - but not knowing how to do it on their own. Their fear of lawsuits is most commendable, especially in light of the ever-growing amounts budgeted for this line item. But the real question is what do they really expect this firm to accomplish? When it is all said and done, the Nye County Commissioners and the bureaucracy that runs them is going to have to wake up and see for the first time what it is their predecessors left for them. Only then can they make the hard decisions and allocate current resources to begin the process of correcting more than 30 years of neglect. Or not. Little writes from Pahrump. His column, "The Other Side," appears here on Wednesdays. |
