Officials OK residency rules
Unless their jobs are in Laughlin, future Clark County employees will be required to live within the county’s borders under new residency rules first suggested in April by Commissioner Tom Collins.
Commissioners on Tuesday approved a slightly watered-down version of Collins’ original idea but not before exempting county workers in Laughlin and allowing waivers for other employees.
“There’s no downside to this, especially with these amendments,” Collins said.
“I don’t think it’s fair that we would pay someone in some cases more than $100,000 to live in St. George, Utah, and take their money out of Clark County,” he said. “I’m just trying to find a few more bucks and a little more loyalty to this county.”
Of the county’s 7,400-plus employees, 106 do not have Clark County addresses.
The new rules only apply to full-time county workers hired after the ordinance goes into effect on July 17. After that, new employees will be required to establish county residency within 90 days of starting work.
Current staff members are exempt from the rules.
Commissioner Susan Brager joined the 6-0 vote in favor of the amended ordinance, but she appeared to do so reluctantly.
Early in Tuesday’s discussion, she said she respected what Collins was trying to do but worried about the larger freedoms involved.
“People work hard to earn a living, and if people want to live somewhere, they should be able to,” Brager said.
The ordinance will come back for review and re-enactment each year.
If the rules need to be changed or discarded because county employees cannot afford to live here, that will be useful information for commissioners to have, Collins said. “This is going to be an antenna in the air” for tracking that issue, he said.
Laughlin was excluded from the residency requirement at the request of Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, who said the community has unique characteristics that might complicate hiring only people willing to live within Clark County. For one thing, he said, much of the available housing in that area is located across the Colorado River in neighboring Bullhead City, Ariz.
About 25 percent of the county’s 71 workers assigned to Laughlin live outside the county.
In a staff report to commissioners, County Manager Virginia Valentine said that of the applicants for three county jobs recently filled in Laughlin, fewer than half were Clark County residents.
Before Tuesday’s vote, Valentine said the ordinance could have one negative effect that would be almost impossible to measure. “If we start noticing a job opening with this requirement in it, we might never see the best candidate for a position.”
Collins made clear he wasn’t crazy about the idea of exempting Laughlin or any other Clark County community, but he said he would accept Woodbury’s amendment in the interests of “consensus building.”
According to Valentine’s report, similar residency requirements are in effect in Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, which since 1903 has required its employees to live in the area.
Such rules are relatively new in Western cities. Denver began dictating where employees must live in 1994. Phoenix adopted its residency requirement in 2000, the same year Detroit abandoned its rules.
