Did Nye County recently raise its planning fees?

As the price tag attached to just about everything continues to rise, the Nye County Planning Dept. is adjusting its fee schedule as well, with the first increase in many years going into effect this January.

The last time the fee schedule was amended was in 2017, when certain fees were increased while others were lowered. For instance, business license review applications for mobile food vendors, which were becoming quite popular in the valley around that time, went from $0 to $50. Master Plan amendments, both major and minor, were increased from $750 to $1,500 plus public hearing noticing cost and $1,000 plus the public hearing noticing cost, respectively. Various parcel map fees were changed to include the cost of travel outside of the Pahrump Regional Planning District (PRPD).

On the other side of the coin, in 2017 the fees for boundary adjustments outside of the PRPD were lowered from $650 to $500 and conditional use permits (CUPs) for class II and class III liquor service were changed from $750 to $500 plus public noticing costs.

“The Nye County Planning Dept. has conducted a review of the current fees charge by Nye County for the processing of planning-related matters such as land use applications, zone changes, zoning reviews, conditional use permits, subdivision maps, etc. The fees charged in the current fee structure are not reasonable fees sufficient to recover incurred costs of review, nor do they reflect the Consumer Price Index increases over the years,” information on the fee hikes detailed. “The proposed fee changes are necessary and appropriate.”

Approved by a unanimous vote of the Nye County Commission, the new fees went into effect on January 1. They have been raised across the board in an attempt to make them align better with the CPI, with supporting CPI figures included in the agenda item information. In addition, all references to public noticing fees have been removed, with those costs wrapped into the new fee structure.

Business license reviews are now $65 for mobile food vendors and $25 for all others. CUPs for each class of liquor service are now a flat $850 each while CUPs for highly hazardous materials are up from $750 plus $25 per acre to $1,415 plus $30 per acre. All other CUP fees are $450. Major Master Plan amendments now run $1,885 and minor ones are $1,430.

The biggest change to the fee schedule, however, is the inclusion of brand-new fees for the solar industry, with Special Use Permit fees ranging from $75,000 to $200,000 depending on the size of the solar development. Though no large-scale solar projects have been built in the Pahrump Valley, the public lands surrounding the town have become a target of commercial photovoltaic solar projects and the Special Use Permits, along with a requirement for development agreements for solar, were created as something of a stop-gap as the county continues to grapple with that ever-growing industry. Development agreement fees for all projects that require them were raised, too, from $6,500 to $10,710.

Two of the planning department’s fees were inadvertently left out of the initial changes, leading to a second adjustments of the fee schedule last month.

“The business license fee – we missed that so we put that in, a $25 fee for that,” Nye County Interim Planning Director Steve Osborne explained for the Nye County Commission on Jan. 22. “Site development - we had meant to go with the flat fee, the $750 per review, but we also want to keep the square footage fee, so we’ve added the square footage fee onto the flat fee.”

Nye County Commissioner Debra Strickland, who has extensive experience in the development industry locally, noted that she had received no negative feedback from developers on the fee increases before making a motion to accept the second round of amendments. That motion also passed 5-0.

Contact reporter Robin Hebrock at rhebrock@pvtimes.com