‘Community’ more than a label for retiring county official

By Timothy Pratt

Saturday, July 5, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In 1989, there he was in a New York Times story, warning about Las Vegas’ becoming hooked on tourism and not having enough moving parts to its economy.

In 2005, he popped up in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, quoted as being concerned about the valley’s way of treating growth as a means and an end at the same time, and a lag in services to the growing masses in the desert.

A year later, in a wire service story, he was consulted about a law he helped push through Congress creating a mechanism to use some of the region’s vast expanses of federally owned land for affordable housing.

Douglas Bell has been a voice in the desert, of sorts, for 30 years, head of a little-known part of Clark County government called Community Resources Management. His office has brought a total of $330 million to the valley for its most vulnerable, including the homeless. He has overseen the construction of 115 buildings and a few large parks.

More than 30 three-ring binders in his office catalog the ribbon cuttings and the meetings that led up to them.

That’s all over now. Bell retires Friday.

Until then, he’ll continue working out of his tight and tidy office where not a thing lacks explanation, down to the pictures on the wall. One side features Democratic presidents, the other, Republicans.

He calls himself a bureaucrat, but he’s the kind who quotes Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy. And the Bible.

He describes his three decades of work as having been “focused on real money to do real things” for people, including marshaling funds to build homeless shelters, affordable housing and community centers.

“It’s becoming more difficult for the poor,” he says, noting that the cost of living and the ability of wages to cover that cost have gone in opposite directions. Especially when it comes to housing, one of the key issues his office has addressed since the 1970s.

“For many of the working poor, homeownership is not a possibility anymore,” Bell says. And in the near future, whenever the current real estate crisis subsides, the working poor in the county will also face problems finding affordable apartments to rent. This is because many people are now renting homes at lower rates. When the market picks up, those houses will be flipped, he says.

“We’re going to have a shortage of rental apartments,” Bell predicts.

Bell points to disappearing mobile home parks and cheap apartments near the Strip as examples of how “in recent years, it’s appeared to me that, instead of a war on poverty, it’s become a war on the poor.”

“We’re not replacing the housing stock for the working poor,” he says.

Then there’s the lack of a developed mass transit system in the valley, he adds.

Bell thinks casinos — the industry he once said could become for Nevada what oil was to Texas — might eventually have trouble attracting employees if affordable housing and transportation become scarcer.

Which leads to one of his pet ideas: casinos building housing.

“We might get to the point where casinos and other business developers would have to see building housing as part of the cost of doing business,” he says. “We need the private sector to be more engaged with government ... (and) maybe laws will have to be passed to make that part of the rules of the game.”

Much of the money that has passed through Bell’s office — federal, state, county and private — has gone into the hands of nonprofit organizations during these decades.

He has learned over time that those groups function best when they act in some ways like businesses, with strong financial controls and sources of funding apart from government grants. Also, they need to “stay focused on their missions and not just go after money because it’s available.”

“If you don’t do this, you’ll dig a hole,” he says. And he has tightened the oversight of grants to nonprofit organizations in recent years to help ensure that doesn’t happen.

Most of his agency’s best projects have resulted from working across governments — Clark County and the valley’s three cities, for example. Bell sees more of this in the future, citing the oft-discussed but as-yet-unrealized idea of rolling the region’s three housing authorities into one.

“Essentially what we have right now is government by interlocal agreement,” he says. “Realistically, we’re all within this 400-square-mile valley.”

He’s philosophical about the corruption he has seen in government.

“It’s the nature of human beings. They make bad choices.” But he thinks most people in local government are motivated by “the role of service.” “The product we work on,” he notes, “is for our neighbors, families and friends.”

He says that on occasions when staff have asked him if something is right or wrong, he has answered them with a question: “Would you like to see that on the front page tomorrow?”

Bell is critical of Nevada’s prevailing view that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “that’s not always possible.”

The best aspects of Las Vegas have always come out of collaboration, he says.

“It comes back to being an island in the desert surrounded by mountains. If you don’t work together, you’re sunk.”

He sees Las Vegas as an endless fount of creativity and invention, powers that can be harnessed, he thinks, for good.

Bell also recognizes the power of luck.

That’s why he chose 7/11 as the date he’s calling it quits.