Reno. It ain't so little anymore.

As reported by Ken at the Urban Blog, Reno City Council voted 4-2 to give the developer permission to pursue further development of the Spring Mountain at Winnemucca Ranch. Thanks to Ken, who watched the video stream of the council meeting to develop his story.

The dissenting council members were Dan Gustin and Jessica Sferazza, who opposed the project because of concerns that the project is out of character with the region and doubts about the developers’ ability to follow through on the trip capture curve as set forth in the Planned Unit Development plan.

Speaking before the council, Erik Holland of Citizens for Sensible Growth argued for more planning within the preexisting, urban and developed areas, or for growth along east I-80. This would have placed much less burden on the infrastructure, and it would have kept residents within the city limits and spending money locally.

Ken makes an important observation:

The City of Reno defended their motives against suggestions that this development was before the City in an effort to short-circuit the standards in Washoe County’s open space and wildlife mitigation plans and to grow the size of Reno’s physical plant, respectively.

Watching how developers operate over the years, I suspect that the Reno City Council defending themselves against these accusations means that those people who pointed out the questionable motives were probably right on the mark. The Spring Mountain developers have paid loads of cash to lobbyists to push this project, and it looks like that investment is paying off.

Many questions remain unanswered.  Can this development succeed in establishing a complete place with a population of 50,000 and its own economic engine that is complimentary to, and not overly dependent on, cities and towns tens of miles away?  Can it meet its goal of being fully powered by renewable energy sources?  Are the water resources established by the plan truly sustainable and for how long?  Only time will tell.

Hmm…Ken asks significant questions, and I believe that the Reno City Council should have placed these questions at the top of their list with a “yes” answer required for each. My own gut feelings on the answers are very pessimistic; I predict the answers will be, “No, no, and no.” I’ve addressed these same questions in my prior posts, and I believe that we are going to be sorely disappointed.

From a related story from Reno News & Review:

Bob Fulkerson, an environmental activist who directs the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, [...]explained the reasons the group opposes this particular bill.

“They have had different iterations of legislation to grease the skids for the Winnemucca Ranch project,” he said, estimating a half a million dollars’ worth of lobbyists on the side of the developers. “This latest [bill] says, ‘Oh, it’s just a GID bill. It’s going to help with General Improvement Districts.’ Well, baloney. What this is, is just a Trojan horse to get the city of Reno to do what they want to do all along, which is leapfrog annexation.”

There’s lots o’ money to be grabbed up here, and it seems that the city and the developers are eager to enactlegislative end runs around valid objections to the project. I watched flagpole annexations destroy communities in the Denver area, with local tax revenue siphoned away from the local community. It also results in a downgrading of essential services, such as local fire stations being replaced by apparatus responding from further away. Finally, it encourages the development of godawful malls and giant swaths of big-box stores and rubber-stamp houses for the sole purpose of generating tax revenue.

Remember, developers have only their own profit interests as a driving motive, and their pretty proposals never live up to the hype. One by one, the expensive, low-profit, “nice” parts of the plan are hacked away in favor of bringing in as much cash as possible. The concerns of citizens are merely a small hurdle to overcome by the liberal application of money and influence.

I constantly wonder why politicians are so opposed to smart growth. Smart growth, New Urbanism, and other forward-looking growth plans are extraordinarily beneficial to the cities that enact them, but the politicians and developers don’t want to build them, because they initially cost more. This is a case of the “free market” mentality ruining a city. At the Reno Gazette Journal forum discussion about Spring Mountain at Winnemucca Ranch, a comment by Solarmon caught my eye:

backroom dealings? HERE?
I’ve heard that an honest politician in Nevada is
a> one who stays bought
b> one who takes the money on top of the table

Aurora, Colorado...Is this the future for Reno?

Sadly, I think this extends to most politicians everywhere and not just Nevada. Having moved from the Denver, Colorado, area, I’m seeing some scary similarities with developers and politicians here in Western Nevada. When Spring Mountain is said and done, we will have lost a beautiful, rural area, and gained ourselves our very own Aurora, Colorado.