Master plan update goes back to RPC

Nye County Commissioners Tuesday sent revisions to the Pahrump master plan back to the Pahrump Regional Planning Commission with orders to bring it back in 75 days.

County Commissioner Butch Borasky even suggested scrapping the revisions completely.

A seven-member master plan update steering committee began revising the 2003 Pahrump master plan in monthly meetings that began over three years ago, in February 2011. The RPC adopted the plan on May 1.

“If I had my way I’d throw the whole thing out. I don’t know why we’re doing this and spending taxpayer money and change everything and it just pisses people off,” Borasky said.

Borasky said the average person may not understand the master plan. He questioned the need to change the master plan.

“You’re changing people’s lives, the value of their property when you put in a different category and a lot of people have a lot of plans and spent a lot of money in this valley with what their future hopes and dreams will be,” he said.

County Commission Chairman Dan Schinhofen said state law requires a master plan to be reviewed every five years but doesn’t require changes.

“I agree we don’t need to do all of this. I don’t think we need all of those changes but we have to look at it. That’s why we looked at it. There are a lot of changes but I certainly would like to see this done, we’re going on four years,” Schinhofen said.

Nye County Planning Director Darrell Lacy said the old master plan had a lot of shortcomings and needed changes to meet the needs of the community, like addressing the limited water resources and the lack of water and sewer infrastructure on some lots.

Commissioner Lorinda Wichman thought Lacy was acting before a state agency required the county to take action.

“What you are doing is controlling the sage grouse before the sage grouse are endangered. It’s the same concept. You can’t put those things in place before the agency in charge has made those decisions,” Wichman said.

RPC Chairman John Koenig again emphasized the master plan revision is not zoning.

“There’s no nefarious plan to change the zoning in the future because we’re adopting a master plan,” Koenig said. Instead it’s merely a plan of how they want Pahrump to look in the future, he said.

“We need it done. it’s holding up things. People want to make changes, they can’t because it doesn’t fit anymore,” Koenig said.

Nye County Planner Cheryl Beeman said there’s some scrivener’s errors that have to be cleaned up in the document.

“I have a list of customers that would like their land use designation stay the same,” said Bill Clark, 200 E. Mesquite Ave. Other potential developers in the audience declined to speak.

Wichman had a problem with wording from county planning staff that if adopted the revised master plan requires parcel owners to rezone the property.

“Simply stated that’s horse shit,” Wichman said.

But Beeman said that’s only an option if for example someone had property designated for rural development that was changed in the master plan to commercial development and they wanted to take advantage of being allowed higher density development they could rezone the property themselves.

“You’ll want to rephrase that. A lot of the confusion and heartache that is brought before us is because of that explanation,” Wichman said.

Beeman said the master plan needs to take into account the available natural resources in land use planning and the population that the natural resources can support.