2-day TRPA meeting before Regional Plan vote

By Kathryn Reed

One month from today the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Governing Board is expected to vote on the much-anticipated, much-overdue Regional Plan update.

This voluminous document is the planning bible for the Lake Tahoe Basin. It was last updated in 1987. However, it was supposed to be updated in 2007, but got bogged down because of a multitude of reasons.

More than 5,000 people have weighed-in on the plan in the last five years, with others and many of the same who show up each meeting expected to talk some more on Wednesday and Thursday.

This week two sessions of the Governing Board will be all about the update. But everything is not a done deal.

Board members Mara Bresnick and Byron Sher at the October meeting raised some questions. Concerns that some people believe could have been brought up months ago so they could have been carefully vetted instead of having the potential to derail the process. Plus, Bresnick was asked to be on the Regional Plan Update Committee, but said she was too busy.

“I’m hesitant to assign a motive (for Bresnick and Sher’s late comments),” Kristi Boosman, TRPA spokeswoman, told Lake Tahoe News. “I think everyone on the Governing Board is committed to the well-being of Lake Tahoe and there are some differences on how to achieve that end.”

Here are Bresnick and Sher comments from the October meeting. Bresnick is the California Assembly speaker appointee and Sher is the California Senate Rules Committee appointee.

“If the state of California would like to monitor everything that comes out of our decisions here, then I suggest that the economy be a measurement because the economy is absolutely critical for what we are suggesting,” Claire Fortier, South Lake Tahoe’s rep to the Governing Board, said at the Oct. 25 meeting. “We recently completed the Tahoe [environmental] forum where both governors supported a public-private partnership to increase the environmental gain as well as the economic sustainability of this community. There is no measurement of that.”

Local and state reps from California and Nevada who are appointed govern the bi-state board.

The two states have been bickering for almost the entire 40-plus years TRPA has existed. It came to a head in the last couple years with Nevada threatening to pull out of the federally created agency if changes were not made.

Since then, top officials in each state have been meeting to help foster a better, more cohesive relationship.

John Laird (California Natural Resources secretary) and Leo Drozdoff (Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources director) wrote a letter to the TRPA board that in part said, “The states of California and Nevada take seriously our unique and shared roles at Lake Tahoe. Through our personal engagement we believe we have fostered a bi-state relationship that is healthier now than in recent memory and has engendered stronger trust among the stakeholders and represents a new start.”

Clearly, not all the board members share that view.

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Notes:

• Nov. 14, public comments will be taken at 10:30am at the Chateau in Incline Village.

• Nov. 14, in the afternoon the Regional Plan Update Committee will convene to discuss issues recently raised by Bresnick and Sher.

• Nov. 15, public comments will be taken at 1pm at Harveys in Stateline. In the morning, it’s likely the board will discuss what the update committee talked about the day before.

• Dec. 12, Governing Board meeting starts at 9:30am at Harveys in Stateline.

• For $15 TRPA staff will have USB thumb drives available for purchase at this week’s meetings that contain the final draft Regional Plan update and associated documents.

• Here is the agenda for the meetings this week.