For Clark County officials, it will be the governmental equivalent of a good spring cleaning. Of sprucing up the yard. Of holding a big garage sale.
Acting County Manager Mark McCauley has announced plans to inventory the properties owned by the county and to determine whether those sites are serving any purpose for taxpayers. “Essentially, we’ve just got to validate, ‘Why do we have it? What purpose do we have for it?’ ” McCauley said, bringing up questions that probably should have been asked long ago by previous county leaders. As County Councilor David Madore suggested during a meeting a few weeks ago, leaders must address whether the county is “sitting on property that’s doing nobody any good, that we don’t know about or that could be sold. We all have the fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we’re financially smart.”
Indeed. Although it should be pointed out that Madore would be wise to apply some financial smarts and eliminate his fee waivers for developers. But we digress.
It is because of that fiduciary responsibility that officials will begin assessing the 1,278 properties owned by the county — an average of two for every square mile. Among those parcels are parks and public buildings and conservation areas — the types of things that are best left to government. For example, it would be unreasonable to expect private landowners to be responsible for providing and maintaining parks for public use. Yet there are certain to be many properties that county officials are unaware of, or that are serving no purpose, or that would be more useful if they were bought by private owners and generated some tax revenue. McCauley said: “We’re stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars. If we’re holding property that we shouldn’t be holding, we ought to get rid of it.”