Seven years ago, state Sen. Dina Titus wanted a ring around the Valley—a growth restriction that would collar urban sprawl. Culled from a plan proffered by the state Public Lands Task Force, which copied sprawl-limiting initiatives in Portland—the poster city for smart growth—Titus' bill delineated no-growth boundaries, carved out 121,000 acres of developable land and encouraged infill construction. AB 490 marked the first time the state weighed in on growth.
And the last.
Mired in acrimony—North Las Vegas leaders wailing over strictures near the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, county commissioners threatening to imperil casino and other development—the legislation crawled out of the Assembly, only to die in the Senate.
Titus' failure came to mind last Tuesday as I sat in the Winchester Community Center for the first meeting of the Clark County Community Growth Task Force. The most recent quasi-governmental attempt to commandeer runaway growth, the 17-member task force is made up of politicians, businesspeople, conservationists, developers and citizens.
County Manager Thom Reilly opened the forum, which was followed by introduction, mission statement blather and hours of roundtabling.
The result? More than 90 "strategies," representing smart-growth options, including rerouting roadways to increase traffic efficiency, prohibiting construction of new golf courses and regulating the timing of new developments based on the availability of public facilities. Task force members will decide which of these measures will help boil down macro issues—such as urban containment, natural-resource conservation, facility adequacy among others—to micro matters, among them traffic pollution, zoning standards, conservation and more.
The task force's recommendations are due to the County Commission by December 31. Well, the Weekly couldn't wait. We faxed the list of strategies to three respected urban planning experts to get their take.
While serving on a local Urban Land Institute panel several ago that explored synergy between Valley jurisdictions on regional planning, Douglas Porter glimpsed disunity.
"The city person and county person were going at it right in front of us," says Porter, president of Chevy Chase, Maryland-based Growth Management Institute. "I'm not sure if they've addressed those issues."
Sorry Doug, they haven't. Jurisdictional quibbling is a Vegas pastime. (See failed regional approaches to the homeless problem, law-enforcement funding and water-conservation measures.) Porter sees nothing wrong with the task force; its approach is fairly benign. What's missing is clear direction.
"What is it that we really want to do? They have to answer that question," Porter says. "I sense a missing link in every one of the areas between the goal and a more particular, more specified set of statements about what they mean by what they're saying. Once you find out what you mean, then you get down to specific tools and strategies."
For example, he says, "urban containment" surmises that containment is good. "But what is it that we're containing? What kind of qualities do our urban areas need to be to make sense? What the task force lists are not strategies, they are tools, actions."
Also lacking, Porter says, is an outline to create jurisdictional teamwork. And the environmental component needs clarity. Explicit in it should be the details of resource conservation and how those efforts tie into preservation of open space.
"It looks like they put down some fairly obvious goals, then made a great leap to 'What are we going to do about it?' without thinking through the list of ideas to see if they are great ideas," Porter says. "The thinking process seems to be incomplete."
Nancy Frank doubts eight months is enough to game-plan for a city's long-term growth.
"The time line is very ambitious. There are least 100 strategies, and each one would require at least one full meeting to understand how that strategy works, what the costs are, the likely benefits, the drawbacks," says Frank, director of Urban Planning Programs for the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try."
First up, though, the task force needs to explore how its work relates to the county's comprehensive master plan, Frank says, determining what's in the plan, what's been enacted and what's in the offing. Frank's also concerned with citizen participation.
"I didn't' see where the public had an opportunity to contribute," she says. (The meetings are open to the public.)
And to the extent that Portland has innovated smart-growth policies, Frank says the task force should consider pilfering.
"Why reinvent the wheel?"
Bare bones.
Good laundry list.
A huge amount of work still needs to be done.
The first is John McIlvain's assessment of the task force's goal. The second, a summation of its strategies. The third, an appraisal of the work ahead. At present, the county is only implementing 27 of the 94 strategies.
Fine-tuning and implementing, says McIlvain, a senior fellow for housing at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute, can take three years.
"They would have to triage the list to the five most important strategies and take two or three of them that the county will focus on adopting," he says. "I'd be surprised if there was anything enacted by this time next year, especially with all the things they list. Some things could take five years just to study. Done properly, these things [smart growth plans] are often considered quite controversial."
Many of the strategies represent a marriage of urbanist thought with metropolitan reality. Promoting infill growth. Decongesting the suburbs. Creating inclusionary housing options to make home ownership possible for the lower classes. But McIlvain cautions against plagiarizing and cities growth management blueprints.
"A county should look at what lands it does not want to have developed—recreation, natural habitat, etcetera. Most counties do the reverse and look at what lands they want to be developed. They should do everything they can to protect those lands they don't want developed. Take them off the table and turn to what's left and determine where you want your nodes of density," he says. "Then you find out how you are going to link them by transportation and how to tie the housing and commercial and retail into that."
Potentially problematic, he says, is a task force strategy to employ one-way road systems. Revivers of downtowns in some cities, they've had a negative effect in others—limited parking and a maze-like streets prompted people to blow through downtown without stopping. Modern one-wayers trend toward carefully designed grids that breed continuity and encourage people to park and explore.
"Vegas needs to decide on what kind of downtown it wants," he says.
One of his ideas, transit-oriented development, uses mass transit to seed growth. It's a good idea for the Strip, he says. Take a heavily traveled corridor, add rapid bus service, spreading stops several miles apart. Encourage retail or commercial and residential activity at each stop.
We'll know in December if anyone's listening.