When was the last time you voted for a planning commissioner?

If you’re like most Nevadans, the answer is never. The people responsible for reviewing and deciding upon a wide range of urban planning, development and land use issues, such as whether a new basketball arena is permitted to be built, are appointed by the chief executive officer of each city with the approval of their city council. In most cities, that chief executive officer is the city manager, who you also likely never voted for.

This system is intentionally undemocratic by design.

When I say it’s undemocratic, I want to be clear that I’m making an observational statement, not a normative one. Put another way, I’m stating a fact, not making a judgment. 

After Las Vegas created its planning commission in 1927, the Las Vegas Age published a platform adopted by the 19th National Conference on City Planning. It called for the creation of “appointive, non-political” planning commissions that would be “authorized to adopt regulations” pertaining to land use, streets, drainage and various other improvements.

An editorial published in the Nevada State Journal before Reno approved the creation of its own planning commission in 1944, meanwhile, argued that a planning commission “would relieve the governing bodies of many disturbing problems, where politics might be involved, and through the force of public opinion accomplish many things for the communities.” A subsequent civil grand jury report in 1945 further recommended that planning “should be divorced from all political and pressure groups.” 

The adoption of the council-manager system that places unelected and well-paid city managers in charge of most incorporated cities in Nevada — Carlin doesn’t have a city manager; Wells and Elko city managers are delegated limited administrative duties — was similarly pitched to be as divorced from direct electoral pressure as practically possible. An editorial published in 1945 in the Reno Evening Gazette argued that running the city was “big business” — therefore, the council-manager system, which places city councils in the role of a corporate board of directors that hires and fires city managers as chief executive officers, would be a better system of government.

With all that history established, I am consequently amused by the nature of the pushback against SB48 in this legislative session, which seeks to make planning commissioners somewhat more directly accountable to the city councilors we elect.

For context, state law allows planning commissioners to be appointed by the chief executive officer of each city — in most cities, including Reno, that person is the city manager. Municipal code, however, may constrain how the city manager makes that appointment. Reno’s Land Development Code, for example, requires the city manager to appoint commissioners at the direction of the city councilor who represents the ward the commissioner will represent. Once appointed, commissioners serve for four years (or unless they are removed for just cause by a majority vote of the city council following a public hearing). 

In cities located in any county whose population is 700,000 or more (that’s Legislature-speak for Clark County; Article 4, Section 21 of the Nevada Constitution be damned), however, state law permits planning commissioners to serve “at the pleasure” of the person who appointed them — a public hearing for removal is not necessarily required. Additionally, commissioners serve coterminously with the elected who recommended their appointment to the city manager — once they leave office, their planning commissioner leaves with them, regardless of how many years the commissioner has remaining in their term.

As currently amended, SB48 would make the appointment and removal of planning commissioners more general and uniform throughout the state by permitting cities outside of Clark County to adopt by ordinance — if and only if they publicly choose — the rules that have been statutorily required in Clark County since 2003.

This brings me to Ward 1 Planning Commissioner Silvia Villanueva, who was originally recommended for appointment by former council member Jenny Brekhus in 2021. Brekhus’ and Villanueva’s ward, however, was subsequently redrawn to facilitate the creation of Reno’s sixth ward — a ward that, after arguing in favor of its creation in 2017, Reno unsuccessfully tried to erase in 2023. To create Ward 6, Ward 2’s boundaries were redrawn to incorporate most of pre-2023 Ward 1. Ward 1, which used to represent the Old Southwest neighborhood, now represents downtown Reno and UNR, which were previously northeast of its original boundaries.

Villanueva, in other words, represents a ward that functionally no longer exists. 

Or, alternatively, she and Planning Commissioner Kerry Rohrmeier, who represents Ward 2, jointly represent the residents of Ward 2 as it’s now drawn while residents who live in the current boundaries of Ward 1 remain unrepresented.

Understandably, neither commissioner is fond of SB48. Their reasons why, however, were surprising.

Rohrmeier told the Reno Gazette-Journal that she “had a very strong problem (with) the idea of removing a (planning) commissioner based on perhaps a decision or a line of thinking and inquiry that the (city) council doesn’t agree with. That, to me, is not democratic.” 

What, exactly, is undemocratic about an elected official removing an unelected appointee?

Villanueva, meanwhile, stated that “the council has taken a lot of steps over the last couple of years to really try and take control just for themselves.” She further added, “This is not good governance. This undermines public trust.”

As opposed to maintaining the appointment of a commissioner who’s arguably representing a rotten borough?

These are, once again, observational statements, not normative ones. Whether planning commissioners should be democratically accountable or “divorced from all political and pressure groups” is a separate discussion. Before that discussion can happen, however, we all must first share a common reality — and that reality is planning commissions are designed to be undemocratic. 

If they were democratic, we’d elect them.

As local commentators, such as professional historian Dr. Alicia Barber, bemoan the lack of community engagement and the lack of attention paid to municipal boards and commissions, it’s helpful to remember that cities intentionally began to mimic the governance of public corporations to grant voters and city councilors the same level of control and input over their cities that shareholders and boards have over most corporations — namely, not much.

There were good reasons for this. Chesterton’s fence is real — this didn’t happen by accident and it’s important to understand why. The modern city councilor’s role has been limited over the past century to permit cities to plan past a politician’s re-election campaign and to maintain stable land use rules that developers can reliably invest in. These benefits were hard fought over multiple generations and must not be casually discarded.

Even so, city councils still have to answer to voters, many of whom expect their vote to count for something and deliver meaningful results within four years. When faced with a system of municipal government that intermediates their role through hundreds of pages of code, expansive master plans, overlapping regional plans, and — my personal favorite — advisory boards for agency boards, it’s no surprise that city councilors fight for every chance to exercise some direct influence over the government they’re ostensibly supposed to be overseeing.

And why not? Thousands of voters elected each of Reno’s city councilors. How many people attend most planning commission meetings?

If we actually want community engagement in our cities to improve, we need to acknowledge that the primary way most residents hold their cities accountable is through the ballot box, not through public comment. 

SB48 brings Nevada’s cities one cautious, careful step closer to returning power over how our cities are planned to the voters through the city councilors we elect. By doing so, its passage may help rebuild public trust in our democracy.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.