(Jim Clark) – What does the New Year have in store for Incline Village/Crystal Bay? This is a good time to take stock of where we are and think about the future.
IV/CB local jurisdictions include IVGID, a limited purpose local government agency and the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District. The entity of general governmental jurisdiction is Washoe County, but it is a 100-mile round trip if you need to go there to register to vote or get a building permit. There are numerous sounding boards, such as the Conversation Café, the Tuesday Bonanza meetings and the like, but who is “driving the IV/CB bus?” Who is holding the road map showing our future direction?
There may be an answer in the offing.
Recently, IVGID trustee Joe Wolfe and former trustee Gene Brockman attended a Nevada League of Cities meeting in Mesquite, northeast of Las Vegas. Other delegates in attendance from Nevada cities and towns universally expressed a general dissatisfaction with the lack of home rule for communities in the Silver State. The legislature sets all policy and basically unless state law says local entities have express power to do something they don’t. The result, with few exceptions, is remote government from county seats or Carson City.
At the same event, they were introduced to officials from the Nevada Rural Development Council. The Council is a non-profit corporation based in Carson City formed to show Nevada’s cities, towns and districts how to conduct a community assessment. This is the means by which citizens can collectively come up with a vision of where they want their community to be in the future.
The council provides a “resource team” consisting of trained volunteers and professionals who conduct “listening sessions” with all segments of the community. They focus on three questions:
1. “what are your community’s major challenges or problems?
2. what are your community’s major strengths or assets?
3. what projects would you like to see accomplished in your community over the next year? Five years? Twenty years?” Every comment is recorded.
After the listening sessions are concluded, the resource team compiles all of the comments and assembles them in written form. Then a “town meeting” is scheduled at which the responses are read and discussed, major themes are identified and reported and more community input is encouraged.
Finally, resource team members write up recommendations in the form of a report. Local residents then establish priorities for goal attainment and an action plan is adopted. The final report is typically used as a tool for grant writing for funds to pursue agreed on goals and can be used to support requests for county ordinances and state legislation that may be necessary to clear paths for goal attainment.
The plan is to establish a non-profit Nevada corporation . . . “IV/CB2020VISION” . . . to pull all this together for the community. Parasol Chair Dean Meiling has agreed to chair the corporation aided by Gene Brockman, who will serve as its president. Local residents interested in this process are encouraged to contact Gene at gbrock91@earthlink.net.
Reports prepared by the Council for other Nevada cities and towns may be viewed at the Council’s web site, www.ruralnevada.org.
(Jim Clark is President of Republican Advocates and a member of the Washoe County GOP and Nevada GOP Central Committees; he can be reached at tahoesbjc@aol.com.)
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