It was appropriate former Nye County Commissioner Patricia Cox went up to shake hands and congratulate county commissioners after they approved the first zoning map for the Pahrump Regional Planning District Wednesday (See related story, page A1).

Cox was one of the commissioners who saw the zoning process completed, after it all began with approval of a master plan in 2003, that set a general guide to development but didn't have any statutory authority.

On April 4, 2006, county commissioners approved a $617,225 contract with Hogle Ireland consultants, based in Irvine, Calif., to draw up a zoning map, based on recommendations of the master plan. That was amended to add work on drawing up new zones, figuring out the troublesome catch-all mixed use zone and scheduling workshops, which ran up their total cost not to exceed $715,188.

"It's a very positive step forward. You need zoning to implement your master plan," Nye County Planning Director Jack Lohman said after the vote. "It's a great step in the future destiny of the community."

Mike Thiele, a principal partner with Hogle Ireland, said his firm may be called to assist in zoning 1,241 lots that needed more study.

"I think it went very well. It's a big project. We got a lot of community input which we're happy to get on a project like this," Thiele said, as the consultants packed up exhibits and left the Bob Ruud Community Center Wednesday. "We do a lot of big projects, but this one was very interesting, very challenging."

The job included mailing out 48,500 notices of rezoning to owners of all the parcels in Pahrump Valley. About 1,800 parcels are owned by residents in foreign countries.

Consultants ended up setting up five categories. Category one included 259 parcels rezoned due to technical errors to the proposed zoning map. Category two included 728 properties where Hogle Ireland consultants recommended changes to the proposed zoning. Another 285 properties where zoning was requested were left unchanged.

Properties left for further study include 370 properties that will remain open use for now, that were mostly part of the former 4,184 parcels listed as mixed use in the master plan and 871 properties in problem subdivisions, called category five.

The fifth category, which requires further study, involves:

Properties at the Calvada Meadows Air Park, where the VR-20 zone needs to be amended to allow larger accessory structures for airplanes;

The Calvada North subdivision, where sales maps don't match master land use designations;

The Industrial North area, south of Tiffany Street and east of Leslie Street, where some residents opposed the industrial park;

The Calvada multi-family district, south of Mount Charleston Drive along Pahrump Valley Boulevard, where property owners opposed the multi-family zone originally proposed as multi-family by Calvada;

The Calvada mobile home subdivision, southwest of Highways 372 and 160 where the RV parks conflict with the existing single-family use.

Planner Robert Zegarra sought to refute accusations there will be too few commercial properties with the zoning map. He said 3,097 parcels are being proposed for commercial zoning, about 10.4 square miles, of which about 66 percent are currently vacant. Using a ratio of 2.5 acres of commercial zoning for 100 residents, the commercial acreage can accommodate up to 200,000 people, Zegarra said.

Tri-Core Engineering prepared the original $1.4 million master plan, approved in November 2003.

Various applicants came in to rezone property after that was approved. The Nye County Planning Department received 124 applications to change the master plan and 530 applications to rezone property since that master plan was approved.

Some RPC meetings last year began at 3 p.m. and lasted until midnight to consider the applications from people who wanted to get the jump on hard zoning. Those rezoned properties remained the same in the zoning map recommended by Hogle Ireland consultants.

Nye County commissioners originally planned to move right into enacting hard zoning after the master plan was approved.

"What happened was I would say disagreement between the commissioners. Part of us wanted in my opinion to move forward and part of us didn't. Learning what zoning was about we all agreed to hold off on it. That was so we could identify the different zoning categories," Cox said.

When commissioners decided to start the zoning process, they hired a different firm rather than Tri-County Engineering and Consensus Planning, which worked on the master plan.

"We paid a lot of money to get a master plan, and the master plan is not complete until we have zoning, and if we really want to have this community grow we need to have zoning," Cox said. "That would bring in more property taxes because everything would be zoned properly and assessed properly and then everyone with property would know what their surrounding zoning was."

The mixed use zone was a trouble spot too for commissioners since it was created in the 2003 master plan, Cox said.

"Tri-Core, after we hired them, they kind of fell apart midstream and we did not get the full team we thought we were going to have in the beginning. So having Hogle Ireland on board they came in highly recommended and I was comfortable with having that section completed by someone else because I was not pleased with the product we got from Tri-Core," she said.

"We thought we were hiring the experts that knew how to master plan and when it was all said and done, we did not get the experts, we got more college graduates that did not understand certain things," Cox said.

Hogle-Ireland consultants remarked they primarily used the master plan as a guide in drawing up the zoning map. However the zoning map expanded on their proposed master plan uses, spinning off for example various residential zones into rural residential, village residential, village estates and categorized them into permitted lot sizes. Instead of just commercial, properties could be neighborhood commercial or general commercial.