9-year-old chamber claims it is 60

Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce came into being in 2006. On Feb. 25 it is celebrating its 60 anniversary. (That was not a typo.)

It was a 13-0 vote by the Tahoe Douglas Chamber of Commerce to merge with the South Lake Tahoe Chamber of Commerce. Three board members were absent and one abstained. The South Lake Tahoe chamber board voted 18-6 to combine resources. Those two chambers were then legally dissolved.

The new board created a new name, didn’t hire either of the existing executive directors and in one of the more controversial decisions entered into a long-term lease agreement for a building in Stateline.

Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce Executive Director B Gorman deferred questions about why the chamber is celebrating the Feb. 17, 1955, birth date of the South Lake Tahoe chamber instead of its own to Mike Johnson, a board member and attorney by trade.

“As for the ‘birth date’, a component of the current chamber was ‘born’ in 1955 and (the) merger with another component did not serve to alter that date,” Johnson told Lake Tahoe News.

He chose not to answer these questions posed by LTN:

• But how was it decided which birth date to recognize?

• And why not recognize your true birth date of a few years ago?

— Lake Tahoe News staff report