Letter: SLT failing when it comes to street repair

Publisher’s note: The following letter was read by Brady Hodge at the Jan. 19 South Lake Tahoe City Council meeting and is reprinted with permission.

I don’t have to remind anyone in this room that the reason this city was formed in 1965 was for better basic essentials, including police, fire, snow removal, and street maintenance resulting through local control.

The poor and deteriorated and neglected condition of the streets in this city is failing one of the basic commitments made by this city when it was founded.

The poor condition of the streets, and complaints by residents and property owners in the Tahoe Keys, have forced the property owners association to form a separate, special committee just to address this one issue.

The Tahoe Keys provides the city with significant revenue streams:

• The 1,529 Tahoe Keys properties are the source of over 20 percent of the city’s residential property taxes.
• The 328 VHRs, at last count, located in the Tahoe Keys are paying annual license fees and substantial transient occupancy tax to the city.

For the city to fail to reinvest in the infrastructure of these neighborhoods by allowing the streets to deteriorate to the point that they’re at today, is incomprehensible. The poor condition of the streets in this city is deplorable, and disgraceful.

The streets in the Tahoe Keys represent only 9 percent of the city’s streets. Yet to my recollection, the only street in the Tahoe Keys that’s been repaved by the city during the last 20 years is a portion of Venice Drive. TKPOA — the property owners association — has done more repaving than the city during this time; it repaved Kokanee and Marconi when it replaced water lines. The only other street paving work has been done piecemeal by water and utility companies and the [California Tahoe] Conservancy.

And the poor condition of many of the streets in other neighborhoods throughout the city is even worse than in the Keys.

This is not a record to be proud of. My opinion, and that of many of my neighbors and other city residents, is that the poor condition of the streets in this city is by far the city’s most serious problem today.

Why are these streets in such poor shape? The responsibility for these crumbling streets rests directly upon your shoulders. Something has to change. The responsible thing to do would be to rearrange priorities to budget annually for pavement maintenance and replacement to return the city’s streets to their prior, more acceptable condition.