Placer County moving forward with buying SLT hotel
By Mark Anderson, Sacramento Business Journal
Placer County officials have backed away from a land-use battle with South Lake Tahoe, but they’re moving ahead with the larger effort aimed at allowing development of a hotel on the north side of the lake for the first time since 1959.
The county had planned to pay private owners about $3.7 million for two hotels in South Lake Tahoe. It planned to demolish them, getting credits for doing so from the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. Those credits would help the county entice developers to create a larger project in the north shore’s populated areas.
Placer County dropped its interest in the Howard Johnson, but is moving ahead with the other property, the 34-unit Lake Tahoe Inn at 3520 Lake Tahoe Blvd.
Bulldoze it! Not like there’s a shortage of low-rent dumps here.
Mel that’s not the point. The Tourist Accomodation Units are being transferred north and that means the city if permanently and forever denied the taxes that would accrue if the motel was rebuilt or demolished and the TAU kept locally. This should be shut down immediately so that it is never brought up again.
Sometimes it is wiser to focus more on what we can become rather than miserly holding on to everything we already have.
Those properties aren’t vital to the SLT economy nor tax base. They do not add to the character of this town in a positive way. Let them go and be replaced with open spaces that will inspire and perhaps attribute to positive impressions of our ‘city’.
South Lake Tahoe fills to capacity during peak times and seasons. Those few rooms do not make a difference. Our focus should be on filling rooms during the ‘non-peak’ times…
How many rooms sit idle midweek during the shoulder seasons? What good is that? And why keep them if they don’t really ‘do’ anything for this town anyway?
Anyway, that’s my two cents
PEACE!
the Marvelous Makeover marches forward.
old Hal and the Team doing a great job of fulfilling the wish list of the Folks Behind the Curtain.
Environmental benefits to South Lake a good thing. The impacts of transferring development to North Lake a MUST!
Would anyone reading this want to give away their Land Coverage on their property or have it taken away from them by someone else? The TRPA designated commercial commodities to the City of SLT of Tourist Accommodation Units (TAUs), Commercial Footage Area (CFA), and Residential Units of Use (RUUs) are all finite, valuable commodities that have the same degree of importance to commercial properties and construction projects as Land Coverage has to the individual property owner. If these TAUs are transferred out of the City of SLT they are gone for good and that means that if a developer came along and said they wanted to demolish the Howard Johnson or the Lake Tahoe Inn, build something in those spots or restore those parcels to conservancy and build something that was an environmental and an esthetic improvement elsewhere in the City, they wouldn’t have those TAUs because they would be in Placer County. New construction projects that could ultimately bring more money to the City in TOT, Property Tax Revenue, and Sales Tax Revenues while making environmental improvements in OUR community would be impeded because those TAUs wouldn’t be available for use in SLT.
The City of SLT cannot afford to have those commodities transferred elsewhere with no compensation so that another community having greater wealth than ours can plan for a better economic future for their jurisdictions at our expense. This should be fought like h*ll in court and Placer County should have to pay the City hugely if they want those TAUs and the opportunity those commodities will provide for Placer County’s future economic benefit.
For the record, Hal Cole has been leading the fight of protecting the City’s commodities and keeping them in SLT for as long as I’ve been watching the City Council meetings, and all the other City Council Members on every City Council I’ve seen have always agreed with him. No one in the City intends to give these away to anyone either in front of or behind any curtain.