Meyers restarts process to be a more livable community

By Kathryn Reed

MEYERS – Another meeting, another plan, another promise the next document won’t sit on the shelf, but instead will actually be implemented.

That last part kept being pounded into the more than 40 people who attended the Meyers Roundtable meeting this week. But only a fraction of those people are ordinary citizens of this enclave at the base of Echo Summit. The rest have jobs with El Dorado County, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, or other planning-design-consulting firms.

County Supervisor Norma Santiago, after the more than two-hour meeting on April 4, told Lake Tahoe News, “The teams will define the projects they want to implement so then we can shop for funding to pay for it.” (Santiago is also on the TRPA Governing Board.)

She said the now much-outdated community plan never came to fruition because there was no funding.

Sue Novasel, who leads the roundtable, was instrumental in getting the 18-year-old document off the ground. Back then teams worked on various components. That same way of doing things is going to be implemented this year.

The old document has things like walkable, livable communities – just phrased differently. It talks about a town eager to have connectivity through bike paths.

The original Meyers Community Plan came out in October 1993, with revisions made five years later. That document says, “The community plan for Meyers is intended to serve as the comprehensive land use and development plan through the year 1997.” The current Meyers plan may be accessed via the TRPA’s website.

The problem isn’t what is in the document – in fact, much of it will likely be used in the revision. It may just need to be tweaked to use today’s language and incorporate 21st century building requirements.

The problem is the plan has served as nothing more than a paperweight.

Community plans are one of those TRPA mandates. While in some ways they are slated to disappear if the Regional Plan update is approved at the end of the year, they are just going to be replaced with action plans that come with different criteria and mandates.

“The local community is determining their own character,” is how TRPA COO Ed Gurowitz described the new, friendlier agency and its proposed Regional Plan.

He said with Meyers starting now and intending to have its plan done as the Regional Plan comes to fruition, this particular South Shore plan could be a model for other jurisdictions around the lake.

Michael Ward, who is with the Lake Tahoe Prosperity Center and working with the Tahoe Sustainable Communities Program, spoke to the group assembled at the magnet school about the grant his group is using to help Meyers. He was evasive about the exact dollar amount that will be allocated to Meyers. Ward kept saying this is seed money that could attract other money. But for that to happen a real plan approved by TRPA that outlines priorities needs to be in place.

In the coming months a series of workshops-meetings will be scheduled so the people of Meyers can plot a course of action, with the goal being action – not just another plan.