By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

The Moapa Valley incorporation process is officially at an end. Members of the local Committee for Moapa Valley Incorporation pulled the plug on the process last week stating that the group hadn’t been able to navigate a solution to key problems in providing for the needs of a proposed new City of Moapa Valley.

Committee Chairman Ben Robison said last week that he had recently been contacted by Nevada Department of Taxation staff members and asked to provide his Committee’s final report on budget numbers for the proposed city. The numbers were needed in order for the staff to prepare its final report for the Nevada State Committee on Local Government Finance (CLGF), scheduled to hear the matter at an upcoming August 4 meeting in Carson City.

“They needed it right away and we really had nothing to give them,” said Robison in an interview with the Progress. “The fact is, we were unable to find any way to make the numbers line up and allow incorporation to proceed. So I responded that we had decided not to proceed with it any further.”

This notice effectively ended the process.

The main obstacle that the local committee couldn’t get past was the issue of police coverage, Robison said.

“In our conversations with Metro, they had set such a high cost on police services; and they were frankly not willing to negotiate with us on it,” Robison said.

Early on, Robison had expressed an interest in keeping Metro’s service in the proposed new city. He had ruled out the possibility of starting a city police force from scratch because of the high costs of start-up. So he had sought an agreement to contract services with Metro.

In that process, Metro finance officials tabulated up the costs. Currently, the Northeast County area is staffed by nine officers, one sergeant and an administrative position. In addition, the cost of equipment, vehicles, supplies and capital expenditures was considered. Metro officials stated that the total cost to operate the Northeast substation was currently around $1.9 million per year.

Robison and his committee had projected a cost of $800,000 to $1 million per year for police coverage; just over half of the $1.9 million total. They had felt this would be a fair figure because the proposed incorporation territory, including Logandale and Overton, was small compared to the overall northeast County area, Robison said.

But Metro officials stated that they would allocate no less than 85% of the total substation cost to the new city. They said that this was accounted based on the distribution of calls for service. They cited that 85% of the calls for police service come from the proposed incorporated area. Only 15% come from outside of that area, they said. That total was more like $1.7 million per year.

This was too much, given the fledgling city’s projected revenues, Robison said.

“If we had to spend that much on just police protection, it would only leave about $85,000 for everything else in the city,” Robison said. “It just wouldn’t work.”

During the negotiations with Metro, Robison said that he had asked what the remaining cost would be if Metro was left covering the rest of northeast Clark County following the proposed incorporation.

“They told us that the cost would be about the same to cover the remaining area as it is now,” Robison said. “So we said: well if the cost stays the same, and the new city agrees to pay half of that total cost, around $1 million, then wouldn’t you still come out ahead? That extra million dollars could be used elsewhere, right?

But the answer was still the same, Robison said. The city would have to shoulder the full 85%.

In a later interview with the Progress, Metro Finance official Rich Hoggan said that Metro would be willing to discuss the possibility of providing fewer officers in the area and thus reducing the cost.

“We could definitely have those sorts of discussions, it wouldn’t be a non-starter,” Hoggan said. “We’ve never really been through that process before so it would be new territory. But we’d be willing to have discussions about reduced service levels.”

Hoggan said that meetings could be set up with the local incorporation committee, the local sergeant and his chain of command to try to determine the baseline need in the community, consider a reduction in service and calculate new cost estimates for the community.

But Robison said that he didn’t think that the community would be interested in that.

“We talked to a few members of the community including business owners and others; and, from what we could tell people didn’t really want to talk about a reduction in police coverage,” Robison said. “They didn’t like the idea of losing our gold-plated Metro service. So we ended up with golden handcuffs as far as incorporation goes.”

Robison said that he had tried to contact other cities in the region about providing contract police services. North Las Vegas and Boulder City police organizations told him they weren’t interested. Mesquite police officials wouldn’t return his calls, he said.

Last week’s folding up of the incorporation effort ends a process that has continued for the past 15 months. It began in April 2010 with a petition being circulated for signatures to request a feasibility study to be done.

The effort began with a groundswell of support in the community. During the first few days of circulating the petition, the local committee had obtained over 800 signatures. Law required 33% of the registered voters in the community to sign the petition. By July 2010, 41% had signed it.

The petition was quickly submitted, certified and a request was made by the County Commission for the study to be completed. But the process began to bog down in the weeks following.

The CLGF met to hear the feasibility study on October 22, 2010. But Department of Taxation analysts expressed having trouble obtaining all of the necessary information.

There had been little problem in projecting the proposed city’s revenues. The city’s share of Consolidated Sales Tax revenue was projected at $1.15 million for fiscal year 2012. It’s Gas Tax allocation for road construction and maintenance was calculated at $381,587 per year. Property tax revenues at current rates were projected at about $636,000 per year. Other revenues were also possible through special grants and other revenue generating efforts available to cities, Department of Taxation analysts said.

But where Dept. of Taxation analysts said they had run into trouble was in projecting expenditures. They had been told that Clark County was unable to isolate expenditures for a single township. Thus their report lacked hard numbers on things like road maintenance, park and facility upkeep, staffing and more.

The CLGF ended up creating a subcommittee to give the matter further study. They sent Robison and his local committee back to work with the County on filling in the blanks.

“The county was helpful and cooperative,” Robison said.

But County staff often tended to bring up hurdles rather than seek effective solutions, he said. The issue with Metro was one example of this. But there were others which came up including providing for fire protection and dealing with sewer service.

“We didn’t get too far into those other issues because we never got past the Metro thing,” Robison said. “There would just be no money left after paying for police.”

Though community support for the effort started strong, Robison said he saw that support wane as the process continued to grind on over a year. He reported that he had 15-20 people in addition to his five member committee, that helped collect signatures on the petition. But the help fell apart quickly after that, as the process got bogged down with details. By the end of the 2010, there were only two committee members still functioning, he said.

Robison thought that part of this fall-off in involvement may be partly due to the process itself. “The way we did it (by petition) sort of required a small group of people working with the finance department and other entities over details,” Robison said. “It was very difficult to get people involved and to find leadership. Perhaps going to the legislature at some point in the future would bring more of the community into the process directly.”