Congressional support for Tahoe funding iffy
By Michael Doyle, McClatchy News Service
WASHINGTON — Capitol Hill and courthouse shadows will cloud the Lake Tahoe Summit that convenes Tuesday.
No doubt, the political A-listers gathering for the 18th annual summit have much to celebrate, starting with the spectacular views from the location near South Lake Tahoe. They also have their work cut out for them.
“We have our challenges, environmentally,” Amy Berry, CEO of the Tahoe Fund, said in an interview. “There’s a lot more to be done.”
Little time, for instance, remains for the current Congress to finish Lake Tahoe restoration bills introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Lake Tahoe Restoration Act would authorize $415 million over 10 years for forest fuels management, watershed restoration, storm-water management and other projects. It would continue an earlier law passed in 2000 but that expired in 2010.
The House version introduced last October has not yet had a hearing.
Underscoring the political challenge, the House bill is not co-sponsored by Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, whose district spans California’s share of the 191-square-mile lake. In the Senate, where members of the minority party can easily erect roadblocks, four Republicans voted against the Senate’s version in committee in June.
Brian Baluta, spokesman for the House bill’s author, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., said, “We hope to get a hearing by the end of this Congress.”
The dollars come the dollars go into black holes and what real restoration and lake clarity improvements actually happen with the millions of dollars that have flowed into the Tahoe Basin over the years?
Funding for more curb and gutter so the polluted water can get to the lake even faster! Ridiculous. Other places are paying people to remove curb and gutters and infiltrate; Tahoe’s using up precious restoration dollars to add more pavement and infiltrate less under the guise of ‘stormwater management’. Who benefits? Vail & Edgewood. Who loses? Lake Tahoe & Taxpayers.
The Tahoe basin has unfunded mandates imposed on it by the State Water Quality Board/Lahontan, called “Total Daily Maximum Loads (TMDLs”) aimed to protect and improve the clarity of Lake Tahoe. The costs for the construction of these unfunded mandates are such that there is no way possible that the home owners and the residents in the Tahoe basin can pay for these TMDLs.
The curbs and gutters that are being constructed in Tahoe don’t aim the storm water directly to the Lake but to infiltration systems where that water then percolates into the ground which is a natural filtration system. The Bijou Erosion Control Project for example is eliminating the present straight dumping from a culvert of dirty street storm water directly in to the Lake and via a complex system it will actually collect that street storm water runoff and then pump it to a meadow for infiltration. The Tahoe basin absolutely must have federal funding if we are to be expected to continue work toward improving Lake clarity via TMDLs, this is not something we can pay for ourselves.
The local agencies like to brag that they have spent over $1,000,000,000 in federal funding in the past 20 years. What exactly has it gotten us? Imagine if one agency had just used that billion dollars to purchase and restore sensitive properties on the private market. ALL of the Tahoe Keys would’ve cost only a fraction of that cash pile.
We have started making serious improvements to stormwater and a better, more attractive community in the past ten years, and there is no reason to stop now. Until no untreated stormwater runs directly into our beautiful lake during storms, and you can bike anywhere in town on great bike paths or ride frequent, easy transit across the basin, and until our towns are as beautiful as the lake they sit on, we should continue funding these Environmental Improvement Projects. There will always be naysayers, but let the forward thinking voices be louder than theirs and we will make a positive impact on our communities. Keep up the good work.
Cautious and Kody can NOT be serious. WE put in curbs and gutters, filter systems BMPS etc to CATCH RUNOFF! We lay down tarps to eliminate Asian Clams. We setup standards and check points to attempt to keep out more foreign invasive species. We volunteer to pick up tons of garbage from our beaches… YEARLY! We volunteer to remove Eurasian Milfoil.
What is “ridiculous” is the “black hole” of knowledge on this blog from people posting keystroke vomit.
The filters which are supposed to treat this runoff do not work. Bijou is an exception because the treatment relies on infiltration in the wetland. Most other stormwater treatment systems rely on collecting and piping water and running it through filters before sending it out to the Lake. See the numbers. http://tahoercd.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Interim-IMP-Monitoring-Report-WY2014-140310.pdf. It was known they did not work many, many years ago but the TMDL rewards their use.
Of course, infiltration is far too inconvenient for those who want to build big resorts because it requires open, unpaved/unbuilt land.