Master plan rule change in works

Developers looking to amend the county's master plan may be given more opportunities per year to do so if a new resolution passes.

On Tuesday, Douglas County planning commissioners will hear the community development department's request for a resolution, a master plan text amendment, and a zoning text amendment that would change the master plan cycle from an annual one-time window to a quarterly schedule, allowing an applicant to submit a master plan amendment up to four times per year.

Currently, an applicant must submit a master plan amendment by June 1 each year. Public hearings on a proposed amendment are scheduled for the planning commission in August and county commission in September. Although continuances of an amendment hearing are allowed, if the requested amendment is eventually denied, the applicant must wait for the next June 1 cycle to resubmit.

"Staff does not agree with the arguments posed in the past that master plan amendment applications should be few and far between and that increasing the number of submittal opportunities will increase the number of applications over time," Community Development Director Mimi Moss wrote in a staff report. "In fact, staff believes that additional submittal times will create a more efficient development process whereby submittals can be reviewed and disseminated without the rush of meeting the once-a-year time line.

"If staff believes applications are deficient, then the applicant will be given the opportunity to correct the deficiencies and resubmit for the next cycle. The true test for amendments is whether they meet the findings and criteria of the master plan and county code and whether there is support from the planning commission and board of commissioners based on the adopted findings. The number of applications submitted per cycle does not change that requirement."

Moss said additional cycles will give staff and an applicant more time to work on any given application.

"[D]uring the past two years, staff shortages have taken a toll on how we do business," Moss said. "The department can no longer take on a large number of master plan submittals in any one cycle, and we can no longer assume that due to the economic downturn, the number of master plan applications will remain at the lower levels we see today.

"The department needs to attain a higher level of efficiency in reviewing such applications, and the development community needs to know that staff will work with them to create a better, more predictable process."

Moss also said that county staff must follow the same one-year cycle when proposing their own changes to the master plan.

"Over the past 12 years, county staff has initiated a total of 24 master plan amendments," she said.

In a June 24 e-mail to Moss, Sustainable Growth Initiative Committee member Jim Slade said he supports allowing county-initiated master plan amendments to be heard twice a year, but disagrees that private applicants should be allowed more than the June 1 window.

"Developers have an entire year to get the application complete," he wrote. "If they plan ahead properly, they shouldn't have any problems. It's their responsibility to meet the deadline.

"This is overly generous to developers. They need to make an effort to get it right the first time. If they can come back every three months, then you will be constantly reviewing their applications. They will be tempted to indulge in incrementalism, where they make minor concessions every three months rather than meeting the county's requirements in a once-a-year process."

Slade said a better option would granting more time between the submittal deadline and public hearings.

"We would recommend having the master plan amendments come before the planning commission in September and before the board of county commissioners in October. If you need even more time, you could move the submittal date back to May 1."

Slade argued that a quarterly process would overload not only county staff but the public hearing process as well.

"Our thought was that staff, commissioners and (importantly) the public would have one specific time each year to hear all requests for master plan amendments," he wrote. "If you allow master plan amendments four times a year, that would be four planning commission meetings plus four board of county commissioners meetings. Throw in a few continuances and it's going on constantly. Developers have their paid representatives, but the public comes on their time. They should not have to come nearly every month."

The debate on the master plan cycle comes a year after one of the most controversial proposed master plan amendments in Douglas County.

Last year, Park Cattle Co., now known as Edgewood Companies, failed to get approval for a master plan amendment that would have converted hundreds of acres of agricultural land into thousands of residential units. The company's proposed site plan would have also preserved a vast tract of open space along the East Fork of the Carson River.

But the application, complex and massive in scale, was continued once and then ultimately voted down.

In a previous interview, Edgewood Chief Executive Officer Brad Nelson said the company's application might have been difficult to consider in the required time frame of the June 1 deadline.

"People couldn't get their arms around it," he said. "Part of the problem was the process. In other places you would have to submit, but you wouldn't go to hearing until you worked through all the issues. It wasn't so much the acres, but the kind of uses we were talking about and particularly the time frame. Remember we got postponed because the airport issue came up. We were not aware of a whole lot of issues that came up on traffic mitigation. We said we can solve all that, but people didn't want to go forward without the solution."

The proposed changes to the master plan cycle will be heard by planning commissioners after their lunch break around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday in the county administrative building, 1616 Eighth Street, Minden.