|
April 20, 2005
Vol. 1, No. 9
|
|
Proposition 13-style
tax limits
fuel discussion
By Erin Neff
REVIEW-JOURNAL
The
director of the California taxpayers
group spawned by Proposition 13 said Tuesday the
climate might be right in Nevada to try a
similar tax limit measure.
Jon
Coupal, executive director of the Howard Jarvis
Taxpayers Association, instructed a group of
conservative business and political operatives
just how they should go about such an initiative
even though the Legislature might have taken
some of the wind out of the movement's sails by
capping residential and business property taxes.
"Whether or not you can reach critical mass here
in Nevada again, I really don't know," Coupal
said during a Nevada Policy Research Institute
luncheon at the Las Vegas Country Club.
Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, R-Reno, has vowed
to launch an initiative drive mirroring
California's 27-year-old voter-approved
proposition. The majority of state lawmakers say
a new law [more]
|
|
Commentary
Growth Task Force Follies
By Doug French
The Clark County
Community Growth Task Force has completed its
work, producing a hefty 190-page report. Affordable
housing is listed as Clark County’s number one priority.
Yet, instead of restricting its focus to policies that
would aid builders in the development of housing that is
affordable, the growth task force is suggesting
“workforce” or “inclusionary” housing ordinances that,
if implemented, will actually cause the dream of home
ownership for low-to-middle income families to vanish.
Task force members
correctly noted that the “high cost and decreasing
availability of land and other factors” are behind the
shortages and rapidly rising prices of the homes that
would be needed to meet the community’s affordable
housing needs.
The task
force also discussed positive ways to increase the
amount of affordable housing. Speeding up the process
for disposing of federal land to private owners,
examining construction defect litigation, and
streamlining permitting processes to reduce costs, were
all mentioned.
But task
force members also suggested that the “larger community”
might like to explore requiring that inclusionary
housing provisions be inserted into master development
agreements, and that subdivision ordinances mandate
“dispersing lower income households throughout the
community.”
Inclusionary housing rules require developers to sell a
certain percentage of the homes in their projects not at
the market prices, but at below-market prices. Yet the
designated inclusionary units must blend in with, and
cannot be segregated from, the market-rate units.
[more]
|
73rd Session
 |
Subscribe
to
BUSINESSNevada
Know a colleague who’d be interested? Forward
BUSINESSNevada!
|
