Tahoe planning group exerts outsized influence on legislative oversight committee • Nevada Current

Overtourism, conflicts of interest, developer-initiated blight, vast pollution combined with microplastic contamination, and the lack of a comprehensive Tahoe basin evacuation plan are just some of the public safety and environmental problems raised by Tahoe residents during public comment at this year’s first two interim Nevada legislative oversight committee hearings.

Unfortunately, members of the Legislative Committee for the Review and Oversight of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) and the Marlette Lake Water System have so far failed to pose any probing questions about these critical issues or move to have these topics explored in more detail on a future agenda. Furthermore, emails obtained in April by a resident through a public records request demonstrate an alarming chumminess between the oversight committee chair staff and the TRPA government affairs manager.

Correspondence leading up to the first two meetings reveals that the oversight committee leadership has little interest in TRPA accountability or supervision—in other words the actual job of oversight. There was, however, an extended email discussion ahead of the March 8 legislative meeting held offsite at TRPA headquarters in Stateline, NV, about snacks and lunch as part of a pre-meeting bus tour of recent tourism and development projects arranged for committee members, TRPA staff and their tourism “partners”’

During that meeting, legislators and staff barely glanced up or engaged in any way with resident-initiated topics about serious issues, including the lake’s health and the Tahoe basin’s increasing degradation and environmental threats. Some checked their email; others kibbitzed with one another and sometimes shared a private laugh. It was as if public comment was merely something to be endured.

The legislative committee’s response to agenda presenters was an entirely different story. Committee members exhibited an unusually friendly rapport and served up softball questions.  After multiple references to a gathering earlier in the day it became apparent to Tahoe residents (post-tour) that Tahoe tourism presenters benefited immensely from their previous interactions.

The agenda omitted tour details so I queried the committee chair, Democratic Sen. Skip Daly, asking if the tour was an open meeting law violation. The chair never responded. The public records request provided evidence that there was email discussion about how the public might be involved, but the pre-meeting tour was never publicly noticed.

Mind you, Nevada taxpayers provide several million dollars to TRPA’s operating budget. (TRPA also derives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government and California.) However, legislative oversight agendas to date have been shaped to accommodate and highlight economic interests, tourism revenue and attractions, and whatever TRPA prioritizes as part of its expansive development and public relations plan.

In the late 1960s, Nevada and California governors (Paul Laxalt and Ronald Reagan) worked together to protect Lake Tahoe. But it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Compact, ratified in 1969 by Congress, that paved the way for what was supposed to be Lake Tahoe’s guardian angel: a one-of-a-kind environmental super-agency. Challenges ensued. It took a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2002 to keep it functioning as a check on development.

More than 20 years ago in a piece headlined Fighting for Tahoe’s Life, The Los Angeles Times wrote: “the ruling is monumental in a broad sense because it upholds the power of state, federal and local government to restrict land uses to protect the environment.”