Douglas County Masterplan

Douglas County, Nevada

Douglas County, faces opposing pressures of growth and quality of life. Residents enjoy open space and the small town feel of their communities, yet housing and infrastructure are needed to serve residents. With no “teeth” to drive desired outcomes, the existing Master Plan was not effective. Design Workshop addressed this issue and many others with an update of the County’s Master Plan through a joint effort with County staff and the Sierra Business Council. Through public workshops, stakeholder focus groups, and collaborative work sessions with staff, the team helped these groups come to a shared understanding of the policies and strategies the County needed. The team developed a new Agriculture Element for the Master Plan, the first in Nevada, with the goal of maintaining the economic and cultural importance of agriculture in the County.

Three major strategies in the Master Plan work to achieve the County’s goals:

Establish an overlay system to identify areas for preservation and areas suitable for growth.
Investigate the feasibility of a mitigation fee system to ask new development to pay for its impacts to open space.
Strengthen the existing Transfer of Development Rights program by hiring a staff member to oversee it, working directly with ranchers and developers to bring interested parties together.

The outcome is a Master Plan that is supported by the County staff, Planning Commission, Board of Commissioners, and some of the most local detractors of the existing Master Plan. In the words of one stakeholder, this Master Plan will allow his family to keep ranching in Douglas County.