When Nye County Commissioner Peter Liakopoulos blasted the Nye County Planning Department and the Pahrump Regional Planning Commission in the May 9 Pahrump Valley Times for totally killing entrepreneurialism in Pahrump, it led to a swift response from both the RPC chairman and Planning Director Jack Lohman.

Liakopoulos' comments were explaining the county commission's rejection of a division of land ordinance for areas outside Pahrump.

RPC Chairman Mark Kimball made his comments known in the May 16 edition of the PVT. Lohman had this to say regarding his department:

"The planning department is attempting to do the very best job we can to process development applications in an expeditious way in compliance with Nye County codes.

"As a county department we are duty bound to abide by the planning and development codes and fees that have been adopted by the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) as a matter of law. Only the BOCC, if they desire, can amend or repeal these ordinances and/or fee schedules."

Lohman outlined a series of steps he undertook to make the site plan development review process more efficient and seamless as possible.

They include:

* A pre-application process, where applicants -- for no charge -- receive early feedback from county departments on their projects before entering into the formal review.

* A critical path flow chart, that allows the planning and building departments to forward projects to the Public Works Department for concurrent review, saving time.

* The submission of conceptual site plans for projects to the RPC and the county commission instead of more costly working drawings.

That allows applicants to get approvals from government boards before investing in more expensive engineered drawings that go through public works.

* Weekly internal staff meetings to get a consensus on upcoming agenda items.

* A second level of review so approvals submitted over the counter are checked for accuracy.

In a follow-up interview, Lohman said the Planning Department and the RPC will examine changes to parking and landscaping requirements.

But he said it's a slippery slope if developers want him to have authority to approve waivers without going to the RPC.

"People criticize me for being by the book. If I'm not by the book, I'm not within the law. Now they talk about giving a zoning administrator authority to waive the rules. I'm concerned about that. Where do you draw the line?" Lohman said.

It's also not always prudent to suggest a solution to developers like that suggested by Ken Murphy, he said.

"If I tell them how to do one course of action and they go to the commission, we get blamed for it," Lohman said. "We can offer alternatives and tell them the pros and cons, but we're not going to be giving them the course of action."

Lohman said plans often go to the Public Works Department concurrently with planning. He said there isn't always a round robin, as Tim Hafen described, between planning, public works and the Building Department.

The Planning Department doesn't like to continue reviewing site plans once the 21-day review is over, Lohman said.

He also denied the Planning Department has deliberately delayed projects.

"The last thing I want to do is having stuff laying around. Get it through," Lohman said.

Responding to Al Balloqui's criticism, Lohman said it's standard practice to take a code from other communities, copy and paste it into the code for the local community. But he added Pahrump has a simple, basic code.

"We're pretty user-friendly when you get down to it. The reason is Nye County is one of the last vestiges in the country that hasn't had zoning for the past 50 years. It was such a free, 'Wild West' reign a year ago," Lohman said.