Loop road may cost STPUD customers $10 mil.
Shannon Cotulla, STPUD assistant general manager, talks about water-sewer lines in the loop road area. Photo/LTN
By Kathryn Reed
Ten million dollars. That’s what it could cost to move South Tahoe Public Utility District’s water and sewer lines if the loop road goes through.
“It could have devastating impacts for our utility,” Shannon Cotulla, STPUD assistant general manager, said of the relocations process.
Cotulla and General Manager Richard Solbrig explained at the Feb. 1 South Tahoe Chamber of Commerce meeting at the Cantina restaurant that while many questions remain to be answered, the easements are what are most important.
“If they give us the easements for the facilities, then it would be up to the developer to come up with the cost to relocate the lines,” Cotulla said.
The district has encroachment permits, but not the easements.
Solbrig put a preliminary estimated price tag of between $5 million and $10 million to move the water and sewer lines. Part has to do with whether the road would be lowered to mitigate noise issues. Digging down, like what the Nevada Department of Transportation is doing in Carson City, is a normal engineering tactic.
With STPUD having gravity lines in this area bordering Nevada, it would become more costly to have to put lines deeper than if they operated in a different manner.
Last week South Tahoe PUD finished mapping its assets in the proposed project area. An exact dollar figure is hard to pinpoint because it’s not known how far the lines would have to move. Just to plan such an endeavor costs about $300 per foot.
The district officials said a 30-year loan would likely be needed to foot the bill. This in turn would equate to about a 10 percent rate hike. Solbrig envisions that cost being spread out among all customers in the district.
It’s not just the water-sewer lines that would need to be relocated if Highway 50 were routed behind Harrah’s Lake Tahoe and MontBleu and the current highway becomes a city-county street through the Stateline casino corridor. Cable television, gas, electric and phone infrastructure would also need to be moved. And those rates would then likely spike.
—–
Notes:
· There will be a meeting about the loop road on Feb. 10 from 4:30-7pm inside South Tahoe Middle School’s multipurpose room.
Outrageous!!
And NO one thought of any of these additional cost BEFORE NOW?..well ‘they’ are incompetent, therefore not qualified to manage a project like this. OR ‘they’ are liars and should be jailed…like the HOLE…what about electricity? Phones? OMG!! STOP!!
Exactly how much should be foisted onto the backs of your 30yrs? GRANDCHILDREN
Calm down Robin Smith. The online City Council meeting just concluded and at that meeting JoAnn Conner, also considered “The Caped Crusader” by many in this community, referenced the comments made in this article during Council Member comments. She was quick to command that every utility company send a representative from their business to address the City Council and provide any information on the above matter, but alas she couldn’t get a second person to agree to her request. Council Member Sass stated that those were the types of questions that needed to be answered at the already scheduled PUBLIC community meeting on the US 50/South Shore Community Revitalization Project on Wednesday, February 10th from 4:30 p.m.-7 p.m. at the South Tahoe Middle School in the Multi-Purpose Room Gym. A presentation of the project is scheduled along with a question and answer session, and you can submit questions in advance to the City’s website at:
http://www.cityofslt.us/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1031
You should go to the meeting, ask all of your questions, and listen to the answers to your questions.
4-mer…TY for the info
I’ve asked three questions , to the TTD, City and a TRPA, 1. Where will the displaced people be relocated, and at what cost? 2. Where is the money coming from? 3. Who will condemn? No answers yet, so do they have any? These meetings are dog and pony shows. Don’t encourage them, they will proceed as they want.
And she should have received a second.
Mr. Pierini:
“These meetings are dog and pony shows. Don’t encourage them, they will proceed as they want.”
Your remarks sound as though you’ve already made up your mind about everything and won’t bother attending the community meeting and asking any questions. I disagree with you about the Loop Road Project and prefer the direction that’s being recommended to what you’re recommending, but since I haven’t heard anything from you I must presume that would be the status quo.
I also think since Tom Davis generally offers JoAnn Conner more support than the other Council Members, that if she couldn’t convince him to go along with her then she didn’t deserve a second.
For the record, I am personally acquainted with several individuals who are absolutely intent on locating their businesses inside what would be the proposed Loop Road since they recognize the eventual advantage of operating their business within a pedestrian friendly area.
former, 1.I think the bypass should start at Hy. 50 and Park Ave. and go east to Lake Parkway so I haven’t made up my mind. 2. You seem to know about the project, so can you answer any of my questions listed above?
Mr. Pierini,
For the record, I have no insider information on this proposed project and my knowledge has been gained from listening to numerous presentations about this for the past five or more years, and my opinions are largely based from my own experiences.
I would speculate that the most relevant change that will impact this project occurred with the December 2015 passage of a Federal Transportation Bill which changed the status of the Tahoe basin from being treated as a “rural entity” for transit project funding purposes to “formula funding” for transit capital projects. In essence it has been recognized that while the Tahoe basin cities may have small residential populations that those populations can swell to 100,000 on a weekend or during the summer and that greater funds are needed to address transportation purposes, with the always intended goal of restoring Lake clarity since just about everything that goes on in the Tahoe basin circles back around to protecting the Lake (which is a good thing).
With that change to formula funding there will be the opportunity for other types of funding to become available such as for affordable housing. The ultimate goal is to get grant funding in addition to private entity partnerships to construct affordable housing that would take place prior to the highway realignment so that individuals who may be displaced would have some amount of decent, affordable housing available instead of the existing housing, much of which right now is no better than dilapidated slum housing.
Unfortunately no one has the absolute bottom line estimate of what all this will cost at this precise time, and the TTD probably will end up requesting that the City exercise eminent domain for those property owners who don’t reach a selling price agreement with the TTD. But leaving everything the same won’t make anything stay the same and the only guarantee will be more congestion and continued slum housing.
In 1955 my family moved from Europe to Menlo Park. Menlo Park for a long time was a really nice, quiet little town but everything really started changing in the mid to late 1980s. Population growth on the Peninsula was beginning to skyrocket and a way that the then South Pacific Railroad began to address transportation issues was scheduling more trips between San Jose and San Francisco. That meant that the railroad crossings were down much longer which was really starting to back up traffic on all the arterial roads and even back into some of the neighborhoods. Federal grant funds were offered to Peninsula cities that had railroad crossings to construct underpasses to eliminate the railroad crossing delays and to reduce traffic congestion, but Menlo Park along with some other cities decided that they didn’t want all that traffic going through their cities anyway and thinking that they could prevent that or divert it to other neighboring cities they declined to accept those Federal funds or to construct the underpasses. The not so funny outcome was that it didn’t prevent or divert vehicles from traveling through Menlo Park and all it did was create a huge bottleneck where traffic came to a dead stop for long periods of time. In the early 1980s I was working 2.1-miles away from my home and only needed to cross El Camino Real and not drive on that main through-way. It would take me 10-minutes to get to work. By 2000 that same trip took me 30-40 minutes because I’d need to sit at the same stoplight on a perpendicular street to El Camino at least 3-times just to get across that road, and I didn’t drive it in regular commute hours. Instead of staying ahead of the curve those Menlo Park City Council Members were completely unrealistic and their shortsightedness caused many of that town’s roadways to become horribly congested. In 2000 before I left there to come to SLT, trying to drive on every single day had become just like what last weekend’s horrendous Highway 50 traffic leaving SLT was like.
Believe me, I wish it was possible to turn back the clock to what things were like in the 1960s and 1970s but that’s not going to happen. So here I am in Tahoe enjoying my “later” years of life, shoveling snow, and still thinking that moving here was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Sorry for the long dissertation—I’ve likely got too much time on my hands.
Quite honestly, you couldn’t pay me enough to do Carl Hasty’s job, but I hope that the present improved economy and the increase in local tourism has been a benefit for your business.
The questions that Lou asks are completely relevant. The last time we heard “you can know what’s in it after it passes” we ended up with an insurance pyramid scheme that is crumbling all over America. My son lost his leg to cancer. He bought the Obama care. The company went under and now he is stuck with enormous MRI bills. The voters now don’t trust either party now. I don’t see them going for a blank check to anyone, especially unelected folks from another state. I’ve always bought the one state one economy thing until the past few years. Lou and Joann are on the right line of questions.
Mr. Wallace,
I’m very sorry for your son’s cancer, the loss of his limb, and that the company that took his money and was supposed to provide him with healthcare went out of business leaving innocent people with horrendous medical bills. I as a voter haven’t trusted either party for 50-years. I think that most people who are ELECTED to office (especially at the Federal and State levels) don’t really care about the constituents they represent, only care about their own interests, that their focus is primarily on getting re-elected to their next term so they don’t lose/get fired from their jobs, and that they’re indebted to corporations/businesses who buy their re-elections through donations to campaigns.
There is something wrong with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people that places the obscene profits of a corporation above the health and well-being of its citizens, which is exactly what the majority of the U.S. Congress and most State Legislatures do. In a world where there are models of decent healthcare coverage in other countries you’d think that the United States could figure out a way to replicate what works well and eliminate what doesn’t work so everyone in this country would have access to medical care and it wouldn’t be only the rich who can afford to have QUALITY medical attention. If it’s too costly for an employer to pay for medical care, what makes anyone think that it’s going to be more affordable for individual workers? People have been left twisting in the wind. The entire healthcare system in the U.S. needs to be revamped, but as long as there are big profits to be made in the “healthcare industry” that won’t happen because our government supports the profits of corporations/businesses more than it does its citizens.
I want to emphasize that my comments are directed toward ELECTED officials and not at the “worker bee” government workers, the majority of whom I think would like to do a good job in spite of some lousy situations, the disrespect often shown them by their superiors, but even worse the disrespect doled out to them by much of the public.
I have attended and participated in dozens of these meetings in my past life and Lou, SOME of these meetings are pure Dog and Pony shows but not necessarily for the reasons you intimate. Some meetings are held purely to satisfy some legal requirement, but most meeting planners really do want to educate the public and receive input.
The problem I have seen over and over, is the public comment is rife with whining, crying, b!tching and moaning. All of which provides almost NO direction to the questions at hand and are therefore almost universally ignored. What decision makers need to hear ARE the questions you asked the TTD, City and TRPA. But it needs to be 99% of the public demanding valid answers and 1% whining not the other way around.
I have seen groups as small as 3 people who show up at ALL the meetings, ask relevant questions, demand honest answers (and almost NEVER complain) steer these kinds of projects to their satisfaction. Let’s have a good productive meeting on the 10th and get these questions answered.
Tuffy, intimate? Elections only require 51%.