It takes billions of dollars to preserve and improve Lake Tahoe’s environment
Tahoe City’s Lakeside Trail is decorative, has interpretive signs, seats and endless views of Lake Tahoe. Photos/Kathryn Reed
By Kathryn Reed
TAHOE CITY – A catastrophic inferno like the Rim Fire could wipe out the more than $1.4 billion worth of improvements that have been made to Lake Tahoe through the Environmental Improvement Program.
That was the warning Julie Regan, external affairs chief with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, issued Oct. 18.
While 50,000 acres in the Lake Tahoe Basin have received a fuels treatment – or thinning – to make them more fire safe, many have never been touched.
“We can choose our fire. It’s a matter of will and funding,” Mike Vollmer, TRPA forest fuels manager, said.
The TRPA officials along with others were speaking during a tour of a handful of the more than 400 EIP projects that have been completed in the last 15 years. The EIP was created out of the inaugural environmental summit in 1997.
Having trees be spaced out, branches not dangling on the ground and brush removed can help prevent a canopy fire. A goal of thinning is to create terrain that would keep fire on the ground.
Vollmer said a healthy forest has between 90 and 100 trees per acre, whereas there are places now in the basin with 400 trees per acre.
But all of this thinning takes money and that is practically an endangered species these days. If the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act is reauthorized, it calls for $135 million going to fuels reduction projects.
Blackwood Creek near Lake Tahoe was restored by the California Tahoe Conservancy, while the U.S. Forest Service fixed the upper watershed.
Money is an issue with most of the improvements.
It cost $12 million to build one mile of trail along the lakefront in Tahoe City.
It’s considered an economic benefit considering more than 400,000 people use it each year. Known as the Lakeside Trail, it’s a definite showcase as the entire lake is visible, with snow on the higher elevations and aspens at lake level. A play area is being used, cyclists are out, and pedestrians are brushing past.
Kelli Twomey, with Tahoe City Public Utility District – the lead agency on the trail project, and Wally Auerbach with Auerbach Engineering spoke of the collaboration needed to get the trail built, how it was a redevelopment project, and that besides recreation it brought water quality and other improvements to the area.
Keeping fine sediment out of the lake is a major component of most environmental improvement projects. Stuart Roll with the California Tahoe Conservancy pointed out how the 54-acre Blackwood Creek project is an example of how restoration of a channel can reduce dirt from clouding Lake Tahoe.
This area has been logged twice and had a quarry in the creek. Banks were steep, the forest was so thick the aspen stand couldn’t thrive, and a user-created trail to Eagle Rock was steep. Now the channel meanders more naturally, sediment reaching the lake has been dramatically reduced, aspens are in full bloom, and a new trail to Eagle Rock has been established.
Milfoil near the dam in Tahoe City.
The federal government shutdown prevented the milfoil removal project by the Tahoe City dam from starting, so it will be delayed until next year.
The plan is to put black tarps on the invasive weed to kill it.
There is so much milfoil that it almost covers the width of the channel near the dam. The weed comes from Lake Tahoe and is making its way down the Truckee River. (It’s also going up the Upper Truckee River.)
Tahoe Keys on the South Shore is the largest area with milfoil. Boats distribute it to the rest of the lake via propellers. It’s possible one day herbicides could be applied to kill the milfoil.
But it was pointed out that it’s near impossible to eradicate any of the aquatic invasive species. It’s all about controlling them.
Supposedly there were no year around residents a few hundred years ago in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Maybe 50,000 now, combined with climate change,…………
.. A billion or so is pocket change to undue the damage.
What exactly is the point here being made. That the whole Basin can be managed for a homogeneous looking forest of 90-100 trees per acre is pretty unrealistic – and is not likely to have been the historic landscape as well. Periodic low level burns may have been an element of historic forest ecology, but so was catastrophic fire.
Although patchiness may not be the best vegetative mix for fighting fire, from a wildlife habitat and forest diversity point of view, large scale 90-100 tree per acre forest isn’t any better than if everything was choked with manzanita.
It’s pretty interesting, in the years I have been here we went from you can’t cut anything and people lined up for rationed 2 chord per person woodcutting permits (and for a long time you couldn’t even get an x-mas tree cutting permit in the Basin) to the Forest Service and Liberty Electric cutting trees that serve as visual screening and aesthetic elements for bike trails (go look at the section marked between the 4-lane and Pope Beach and what was cut down between Homewood and Tahoe City) and toppling trees even in people’s planters in front of their houses over 20 feet from power poles.
So perhaps in the only way institutions can respond, it went from do nothing to turning trees into boogie-men. This all or nothing approach isn’t really useful in the long run. I think like most things, what makes sense is something in the middle.
If you really want to be completely fire-safe, then you might think about not living in a forested region and certainly making folks more conscious of how one can inadvertently start a fire (and enforcing laws against unsafe fire use) – BTW, what ever happened to the Forest Service’s “Dont Do It in the Duff Campaign?” TRPA could have just as easily commented about the threat to Lake Tahoe infrastructure from an earthquake and tsunami….and maybe we should have thought better about building so many homes in such high risk environments?
A bicycle path costing over 2200 dollars per foot does not seem a good idea. How long is it going to take the added local business income to pay this off? NEVER…it won’t even cover the interest. if there were any. Why does it take that kind of money to make an asphalt path roughly 10 feet wide?
I am not anti bike path, but they seem to get all too much attention, especially in an area where snow keeps them from being used 4 to 6 months of the year.
Methinks the emphasis is really to qualify for grant money that is used to bolster county and agency coffers.
Did anyone notice when the parking along Venice blvd was taken away for a bike path to justify grant money that had been misused?
I agree with the question as to what exactly the point is from this story, if not a constant reminder that money (in ever increasing amounts, it seems) will be needed to ‘prop up’ the work of the EIP. . .there are better ways to assure success, starting with reaching out to other methods, as part of the thinning is actually part of the increasing problem. . .but ‘risk averse’ becomes ‘gun-shy’ when only the ways already known are used.
“Ever increasing amounts” refers to the $ 12 million to build ONE mile of bike trail; as ljames recollects, I can recollect when the estimated cost per mile was $500,000, then $ 1,000,000, at-a-point $ 2,000,000; now it’s “12,000,000” (?) – that guess would seem to ‘shore up’ Observer’s comments, as they don’t mention anything other than how often they won’t be used (for that kind of money), and a lament for a loss of parking – are these the kinds of emphases that will get people to even notice or think about not using a car so much (?). . .
Using numbers like $ 12,000,000 just encourages other than ‘multi-modal’, exactly contrary to directions now being sought. . . as “to the point being made” is this a PR piece gone astray (?)
wow 250 per square foot is crazy. I have a friend who is a paving contractor that charges about 15 a foot to lay down a driveway, that includes excuvating, base rock, bmps and asphault. The number mentioned in this article may have a lot of pork involved.