Gary Schmidt likes just about everything about Sparks. The city hosts some of the region’s major events and offers good food and music for locals and visitors. The citizens pursue a quality of life in Nevada’s rural and urban areas. And the people make an effort to capture the Rail City’s train heritage with buildings and items proudly displayed downtown. All of these are reasons why Schmidt moved to Sparks less than a year ago.

But when it comes to the way Washoe County operates, he sees need for improvement and believes he can help.

“I hope to return the respect of the people, the citizens, on the county commission,” Schmidt said. “Between the three political entities that run the Truckee Meadows – the Reno City Council, the Sparks City Council and the Washoe County Commission – I have greater respect for the Sparks City Council currently. ... I hope to change that.”

Schmidt is running for the Washoe County Commission District 4 seat, the position Commissioner Bob Larkin currently holds. District 4 includes Sparks, Spanish Springs, the Warm Springs/Palomino Valley area, East Truckee Canyon, Nixon, Wadsworth and Pyramid Lake.

The retired small business operator who’s been involved in restaurants and tourism, having owned the Reindeer Lodge on the Mt. Rose Highway, for about 30 years, and owns rental properties said providing funding for the infrastructure for new development should be in place before new houses are even planned for and built. But sprawl growth has confused the process, Schmidt said, and Reno’s desire to leapfrog areas like Winnemucca Ranch and Spring Mountain are encroaching on many aspects of urban development.

“The communities are less safe and I hope to open up the process and bring the public in and begin healing and starting the process of restoring the qualities of life that have been denigrated to irrational density approvals for sprawl growth that were not based upon sustainable resources or revenues,” Schmidt said.

The big-ticket item he’s campaigning on is sprawl growth and its effect on quality of life for both long-term residents of the district and new homebuyers who are attracted to northern Nevada’s rural and urban life. Also, the spiral toward recession is sparking desperate solutions for businesses and residents.

“Many say the financial collapse is the result of the housing bubble and I say it’s not,” he said. “I say the financial crisis is the result of poor planning and failure to charge impact fees and fees on impact. The bursting of the bubble was predicted for almost two years. There had to be a substantial correction in the housing market. Now, they have an acute financial crisis beyond the annual budget and the day-to-day funding of county services.”

Schmidt is not an opponent of growth, but he is a proponent of responsible, infill growth and has a plan of attack in mind to help District 4’s residents.

“The first solution is to stop the bleeding,” Schmidt said, “and that is by immediately applying all the impact fees the law will allow,” such as application fees, nonrefundable fees for zoning or land use changes.”

Other means may be a chance to relieve the county’s financial burden, including the consideration of alternative energy sources, Schmidt said.

“We have the opportunity to capitalize on those things we have a natural advantage in,” he said. “We have here, within Truckee Meadows and northern Nevada, alternative power sources. We have thermal. We have existing thermal operations, the potential for solar, the potential for wind-generated (sources) and I would like to see encouragement in those areas because it could be high technology.”

Preserving the region’s natural history is also on Schmidt’s agenda for service.

“I’m a firm believer that gaming is no longer unique to Nevada and tourism is important and we have a lot of quality recreational and historical and entertainment potential here,” he said. “We have access to the great outdoors here and preserving an alternative lifestyle of the rural life is important. People that want to live in the country and don’t want to be on the city water and city sewer, people that want to be self-sufficient, it kind of ties into that potential of wind and solar.

“We do have people in Nevada off the grid – there should be incentives for that. I like what Sparks has done with their downtown with its rail history and the preservation of it here. I think they should continue in that direction.”

If elected, he also hopes to affect changes in the commission’s meeting structure to spur citizen participation.

“Bob Larkin, the current chair, had, a couple of years ago, instituted a policy of restricting pubic comment to two minutes,” he said. “(The commission) is the only public body I’m aware of that has a two-minute limit; it’s three minutes in most communities and some allow five minutes. It’s the principle of it.”

In addition to expanding public comment time, Schmidt’s plan includes restructuring the commission’s current Tuesday meeting time by dividing certain agenda items and reserving Monday for such matters to abbreviate Tuesday’s meetings.

“The public shouldn’t have to wait endless hours for their item to come up, and (commissioners) should engaged in public conversation more often,” he said.

He said he would want to use more citizen committees to encourage participation in the commission’s affairs.

“It seems county staff has preordained agendas and they’re not listening to citizens. The citizens keep telling them what they want to see. ...Citizen committees are very effective ways to gather information and knowledge, but they can’t just be for show; you have to listen to what people say and reflect on it,” Schmidt said.

He said he will maintain an optimistic attitude throughout his campaign because there’s a reason.

“Northern Nevada remains a great place to live and the problems that have occurred within the core of Truckee Meadows and with sprawl growth is not yet irreversible, but we need to start the process of reversing it,” he said. “The nature of planning, the nature of growth, the nature of development – we need to make sure that roads, schools, fire services and policing are provided before we grow and we need to stop artificially competing with infill and infill will naturally occur.”