A road used to run through this South Shore meadow. Photo/Lake Tahoe Historical Society

Before there was an officially-routed and designated Highway 50 at South Shore, there were various unpaved other roads. One such road ran along the shoreline from Stateline toward Tahoe Valley in the early 1900s, part of which became today’s Lakeview Avenue.

It traversed the Upper Truckee marsh area where Mt. Tallac is visible behind Tahoe Mountain.

This is the same meadow in 2014. Photo/Bill Kingman

Remnants of the old bridge remain today. Photo/Bill Kingman

That long-gone road crossed the Upper Truckee River in mid-meadow and connected to what is today’s Washington Street (the Dunlap Ranch). The concrete and wood remnants of the bridge can be visited today via an easy and scenic walking trail starting at the Sunset Avenue cul de sac next to the river.

— Bill Kingman

Publisher’s note: Lake Tahoe News asked the seven South Lake Tahoe City Council candidates a series of questions. All are the same except for one that is specific to each candidate. The responses are being run in the order LTN received them.

Name: Tom Davis

Profession/work experience: Director of General Services for Heavenly Ski Resort; convention manager, transportation manager for Sahara Tahoe Hotel Casino; executive director of sales and marketing for Sahara Tahoe, High Sierra, Horizon hotel and casinos. Director of sales at the Ridge Tahoe, president and managing partner for Tahoe Keys Resort. For a short time director of marketing, casino host for MontBleu Resort Casino &Spa.

Age: 68

What organizations, committees or groups are you or have you been involved with?: Board of directors of the following organizations:
California Tahoe Conservancy
El Dorado County Fair Board
Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority
Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care
Christmas Cheer all Year (Food Bank)
Kiwanis Club Lake Tahoe.

Why are you running for City Council?: To make a difference, which I have done.

Why should people vote for you over the other candidates?: Because I have done what I said I was going to do. I made promises and I kept them. My brochure when I ran said we would invest in our future. The following were promised and completed: Highway 50 improvements with Caltrans $43.1 million. That is going on right now. Get the lawsuits settled at Lakeview Commons and get the project complete. That has been done. Get the Chateau project completed. That is finished. Get Harrison Avenue streetscape project going. That is going right now. Fire Station 2, new ladder truck to replace 33-year-old truck. That is done. Linear Park pedestrian lighting and landscaping and repaving of the bike path and pedestrian pathway. That is done. Pedestrian lighting curbs and gutter from Ski Run to Larch Avenue. That is done. New police vehicles. That is done. El Dorado Beach bathrooms. That is done. The Aspens 45 units affordable housing project. That is completed. The Bijou erosion control project that will keep 21,000 pounds of sediment out of the lake each year. That is done. That is completed Class 1 bicycle trail rehabilitation. That is done. I’ve been the common thread through all those projects because I believe in building bridges not fences.

What do you think is the most pressing issue facing South Lake Tahoe and how will you deal with it?: The economy, the economy, the economy. Improve the built environment just as we have been doing. More recreation facilities and opportunities and entertainment. Encouraging more retail to locate to Tahoe. Encourage locals to remodel their businesses. This can be accomplished with the incentives in the recently adopted area plans.

If the city cannot reach an agreement with its bargaining units, are you willing to go to impasse? Why or why not?: Yes, but it is my hope we will reach an agreement. Our employees are a valuable community asset.

How would you resolve the CalPERS and health care issues in the city?: CalPERS is a state issue that cities, counties and special districts have no control over. The California rule needs to be eliminated. That is shortages in CalPERS have to be made up by the local governments and special districts. They also keep changing the rules in the middle of the game which only adds to the liability. We have made some progress by our having our employees contribute to CalPERS. The city has been actively working to reduce the health care liability from retirees by having those over 65 go into Medicare. It has reduced the liability from $47 million to $25 million. The health care we provide for our current and retirees is too expensive and will be reduced over the next few years. The council has directed the city manager to reduce this unfunded liability. We have no choice but to do that. Every city is facing the same issues. In addition, all new hires do not receive that benefit. But much more needs to be done.

What is your opinion about term limits for the council?: The voters in South Lake Tahoe are educated and well informed. Every two years they can vote us in or out. And they do.

If the city has positive cash flow, where should the money be spent?: Infrastructure which includes paving our roads, improving our recreation facilities and protecting our citizens.

What are your ideas for increasing the city’s revenues?: This record July shows that our road to success lies with providing quality facilities in our city. Visitors and locals are now saying that the town looks great.

What is your vision for the 56-acre project?: We need to partner with the county because they actually own that property. However, they are working with us and are part of the recreation master plan process. This plan will establish the future of the 56-acre project. Looking forward to seeing the plan soon.

What would you do to improve relations with El Dorado County?: I have always had a good relationship with the county supervisors, most likely because I sit on the EL Dorado County Fair Board which provides me with opportunities to build friendships.

Is the city on the right course with restructuring debt and focusing on recreation? Why or why not?: Yes. We just refinanced and may do more because of lower interest rates which frees up millions for infrastructure and recreation.

Name one vote the City Council made in the last four years you are proud of and one you are disappointed in – and why?: I’m proud of voting to get the Chateau project done that helped fix the hole in the ground.

The hardest vote for me was reducing our workforce and laying off 70 employees which came to about one-third of our entire staff. We had no choice.

What is working in the city and what isn’t; and how would you go about changing what isn’t working?: What is working is that we are getting our financial house in order.

We could do a better job of communicating with the public and transparency in government in the city. To our credit we see the problem and are working on it. For instance you can go to the city web site and get information on the budget and most all of the city programs and all City Council meetings www.cityofslt.us
Or you can call me anytime at 530.545.1168.

Being on the council requires working with four others. Give readers an example of how you work well others in difficult situations with differing opinions: I believe in building bridges not fences and even when I’m in the minority on a vote I still respect the majority decision. I always respect the majority vote of the council and never try to undermine their decision even when I don’t agree.

What is your opinion about the following topics:

· Ferry service on Lake Tahoe?: I think it will be a financial black hole. There just isn’t enough demand for it. However, free bus service would be the smart place for the Tahoe Transportation District to seek grant funds. It is common sense that when fares are free rider ship goes way up and greatly benefit’s the working community.

· Loop road?: The city has made it clear that we will not seize properties through eminent domain. If it is possible to have all those who own property there to be willing sellers then if the TTD can accomplish that it is a better project.

· Future of Lake Tahoe Airport?: Airport proved its value in the 2007 Angora Fire disaster. We are seeing an increase in general aviation small plane traffic. What I would like to see is an airport district that would include portions of Douglas County, El Dorado County and our city. It’s a fact that our airport serves a regional market that should help bear the costs of the district.

· Increasing the transient occupancy tax?: Only if it was not going into the black hole. It would have to be for something that increased other revenues for our businesses and city government.

· Changing the vacation rental ordinance to reduce the number of such units in neighborhoods?: No. We have a very comprehensive city ordinance that addresses all the issues such as noise, number of people and parking. The ordinance also provides for elimination of a vacation rental if it is a recurring problem. I am in the vacation rental business and my company has provided many great family experiences. The problem we see is usually from out of town single home vacation owners (VRBO) who rent properties but don’t live here so they can’t supervise them. And local vacation rental companies are responsible good community neighbors and are proactive in policing the units they handle. They have staff that are available for that. Parties in quiet neighborhoods are not tolerated. The biggest complaints that I get are illegal marijuana in our neighborhoods. That is what I will push to have addressed. We must have safe neighborhoods. I was doing a ride along with our police department and witnessed a fire at a house used for a illegal marijuana grow. The renter had bypassed the electoral panel which overloaded the system and caused the fire.

Why do you have a concealed weapon permit? How often do you carry that weapon to council meetings or other public places?: The Second Amendment allows law-abiding citizens to have protection for them and their family. The whole point of concealed carry is just that. No I do not carry it to City Council meetings. The police provide security at our meetings.

Tell the voters something about yourself that they may not know: I hold a 100-ton United States Coast Guard license. (Currently inactive.) When I worked for the Sahara Tahoe Hotel Casino I took out on the hotel’s 42-foot yacht Elvis, Tom Jones, the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, Joey Bishop, Engelbert Humperdinck, Liberace, Mac Davis, Helen Reedy. I met some great people.

By Charles J. Moore, New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The world is awash in plastic. It’s in our cars and our carpets, we wrap it around the food we eat and virtually every other product we consume; it has become a key lubricant of globalization — but it’s choking our future in ways that most of us are barely aware.

I have just returned with a team of scientists from six weeks at sea conducting research in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — one of five major garbage patches drifting in the oceans north and south of the Equator at the latitude of our great terrestrial deserts. Although it was my 10th voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste since my last trip in 2009. Plastics of every description, from toothbrushes to tires to unidentifiable fragments too numerous to count floated past our marine research vessel Alguita for hundreds of miles without end. We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.

Plastics are now one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters worldwide. Pushed by winds, tides and currents, plastic particles form with other debris into large swirling glutinous accumulation zones, known to oceanographers as gyres, which comprise as much as 40 percent of the planet’s ocean surface — roughly 25 percent of the entire earth.

Read the whole story

By Charles Fleming, Los Angeles Times

Who’s riding motorcycles in California? Older, married, educated men with money — and getting more so.

New statistics prepared by the Motorcycle Industry Council show the median age of California motorcycle owners was 45 years old in 2012 — having risen from 33 years in 1990, 38 years in 1998 and 41 years in 2009.

But the age number is a little misleading. Almost 40 percent of the study’s respondents were 50 and over — compared to only 10 percent in that age range in 1990.

That rising number is unnerving to motorcycle industry professionals, many of whom have said they’re afraid their core audience is rapidly aging out of the sport, and soon will be too old to ride at all.

The average biker is male — 88 percent of them, down from 94 percent in 1990 — and married — 63 percent of them, up from 57 percent in 1990.

Read the whole story

The South Lake Tahoe Moose Lodge is hosting the 12th annual Kids’ Fishing Derby on Sept. 21 at Tahoe Paradise’s Lake Baron.

The derby is free to all children 15 and younger.

Registration begins at 7am at Lake Baron, near the main entrance. Fishing continues until 3pm.

Hot dogs, ships, Sodas, and water are provided free to all registered children.

The lake will be planted with more than 1,000 pounds of trout, ranging from 1 to 5 pounds. Prizes will be awarded for the largest fish caught.

For more information, call 530.541.1632 after 2pm.

South Lake Tahoe is accepting applications for the fall Citizens Academy.

The free academy will be on consecutive Wednesdays from 5:30-8pm beginning Oct. 8 through Nov. 12.

It is an interactive course designed to provide residents with an in-depth look into municipal government, as well as, information about the services and programs of the city. This course is open to all community members.

Academy participants will:

• Learn about city government operations and services.
• Participate in dialogue with city leaders, city staff and other civic-minded residents.
• See taxpayers’ investments at work.
• Expand their knowledge and become more informed on current and proposed projects within the city.
• Learn about opportunities to become more involved and help build a sustainable community.
• Receive first-hand information and have the chance to ask questions on any topic at the end of each session.

Participants are required to complete an application by Sept. 26 at 5pm. Applications and the course outline are online.

By Rebecca Klein, Huffington Post

Closing the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students could be as simple as do-re-mi.

In a study out Tuesday from Northwestern University, researchers looked at the impact of music education on at-risk children’s nervous systems and found that music lessons could help them develop language and reading skills. The study is the first to document the influence of after-school music education on the brains of disadvantaged children, as opposed to affluent children receiving private lessons.

Researchers from the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern spent two summers with children in Los Angeles who were receiving music lessons through Harmony Project, a nonprofit organization providing free music education to low-income students. In order to document how music education changed children’s brains, students were hooked up to a neural probe that allowed researchers to see how children “distinguished similar speech sounds, a neural process that is linked to language and reading skills,” according to a press release.

Read the whole story

Businesses in El Dorado and Placer counties may apply for Economic Injury Disaster Loans through the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The loans are for economic losses this year sustained because of the drought. Eligible businesses include: small nonfarm businesses, agricultural cooperatives, small aquaculture businesses and most private, nonprofit organizations.

The deadline to apply is Sept. 23. Applicants are online.

By Steve Janjic

By all accounts, America’s emerging cannabis industry is shaping up to be the country’s biggest business experiment of the 21st century.

But the mushrooming niche sector could quickly become an unnavigable morass of conflicting state and federal laws, with banks reluctant to touch the industry’s abundance of money and a patchwork of state and local laws governing everything from transporting to selling the marijuana derivative.

While many entrepreneurs are eager to put business plans into action if and when legalization occurs in their state, the nature of marijuana legalization on the local, state and federal levels creates problems for buyers, sellers and users.

We will soon hit the tipping point, when state after state legalizes some form of cannabis sale and use.

What’s the best way to ensure a legal, fair and accountable business model for the young industry? The solution is a Wall Street-like forum that allows commerce in a fully-disclosed and transparent marketplace, he says.

Here are the benefits of such a system on the industry:

• Ensure regulatory and tax-agency accountability and reporting: One of the benefits touted by cannabis legalization proponents is increased tax revenue, but will an understaffed IRS be able to track the money flow? A digital commodities exchange system would monitor, track and audit orders, activities and transactions of all market participants in a simple, online user-interface or automated reporting format. Growers and retailers could calculate, apply, debit and credit taxes and related fees in real-time at the point of transaction.

• Helps cultivators, distributors and retailers stay connected to market trends, ensuring a fair and open market and business success: A Wall Street-like model would provide cultivators and vendors a central electronic platform to sell/buy their inventories anonymously, so that only product, quantity and best-available pricing are shown, creating a transparent, neutral and non-manipulated free market. Under such conditions, supply and demand are the only factors affecting price discovery.

• Forces the industry to self-regulate: The more states that allow for cannabis usage, whether for medical or recreational purposes, the bigger the industry will get. The longer the industry endures without a unifying and orderly structure like a commodities exchange, the more exposure to scrutiny it’s likely to receive. An automated system would avert unnecessary criticism by allowing all parties to monitor, track, account and audit every aspect of every transaction for every participant within the intra-state network.

• Ensures fair and orderly transactions, efficient dissemination of pricing, market trends and more: A Wall Street-like model should display the full depth of market with live, executable prices and associated quantities per a given product or strain. A real-time interface would provide market access to participants using prevailing best sell/buy prices. Goals of such a model should include a diverse base of clients within the market, true price competition, tailored solutions to suit the needs of all participants and 24/7 access over the Internet.

Steve Janjic is CEO of Amercanex, founded to provide a transparent, neutral and non-manipulated marketplace for institutional cannabis-industry participants, including growers and retailers.

Liberty Utilities will present a check for $17,085.85 to the Lake Tahoe Community College board on Sept. 9 at 6:15pm.

The check represents the total of all incentive rebates the college is eligible to receive based on energy efficiency improvements it has made since 2013.

Liberty Utilities offers an energy efficiency program to residential and commercial customers. The comprehensive Schools Program provides technical reviews to identify potential energy savings measures and provides schools with technical assistance to get projects implemented. The Schools Program, as well as other energy efficiency programs, are required and approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. The goal of the program is to help customers reduce their energy consumption which saves them money, as well as help the utility manage customer demand. Another benefit of energy efficiency programs is the positive impact it has upon the environment.

Since 2013, LTCC has implemented five  improvement projects utilizing energy efficiency lighting. These projects include lighting retrofits in the library, the gym and Child Development Center and exterior lighting upgrades in the parking lot and sculpture display in addition to other miscellaneous locations around campus. All projects resulted in total estimated savings of nearly 114,000 kwh per year — enough to provide electricity to nearly 16 California homes. The improvements will result in an annual energy savings to the college estimated at $12,412 in addition to the one-time rebate of $17,085.85.