By Richard N. Velotta, Las Vegas Review-Journal

For Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s lengthy and, so far, triumphant climb out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it was “Veni, vidi, vici” — “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Nevada Gaming Commission Chairman Tony Alamo, like his state Gaming Control Board counterpart, A.G. Burnett, two weeks earlier, quoted the Latin phrase attributed to Julius Caesar on the Battle of Zela after commissioners unanimously approved a series of registrations and licensing that will enable the Las Vegas-based gaming giant to clear Nevada’s final regulatory hurdle while in bankruptcy.

Caesars has 47 properties worldwide, including two in Stateline.

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Bruce’s Legacy is helping families locate their loved ones who have drowned. Photo/Bruce’s Legacy

By Kathryn Reed

Being in the business of recovering dead bodies is stressful and rewarding.

The past few days have been extremely satisfying for Keith Cormican and his girlfriend Beth Darst.

On Saturday they recovered the body of Pham Dan Vu Thanh just north of Emerald Bay. He had gone kayaking by himself on June 8 from D.L. Bliss State Park and was never heard from again. Two days earlier they found the body of a Carson City boy who had drowned near Truckee.

Cormican, through his nonprofit Bruce’s Legacy, travels the United States with his 22-foot Hewescraft boat in search of people who are presumed to have drowned. His equipment is top of the line, but could be bought by any agency. And some have. But not all know how to use the sonar or have the manpower to scour a waterbody for the missing individual.

Cormican takes the time. He knows what it’s like to have a loved one who never surfaced.

“Bruce’s Legacy is in memory of my brother. He was a firefighter in our hometown in Wisconsin. He passed away in a recovery operation in a drowning back in 1995,” Cormican told Lake Tahoe News. “I’ve been involved with public safety diving for 25 years. I’ve seen the need for specialized equipment.”

Cormican started the nonprofit about four years ago. Mostly it is he and his girlfriend who are doing the work, sometimes with volunteers at the location.

“The El Dorado County sheriff’s detectives have just been fabulous to work with. You don’t always get that,” Cormican said. “They are a big reason we were so successful. Their cadaver dogs need to be credited as well.”

The dogs had pinged on a location near where Thanh’s body was found. That was critical because there had been no witnesses to whatever went wrong that day.

Thanh’s body was in 245 feet of water, more than 100 yards from shore, just north of Emerald Bay.

Keith Cormican and Beth Darst

Cormican and Darst are also the duo who found the body of UNR football player Marc Ma in July, about one year after he went missing on the West Shore.

On Aug. 23-24 the rescue team was at Stampede Reservoir near Truckee looking for 11-year-old Markos Vasquez of Carson City. He had been with a friend when their canoe capsized July 10. Neither was wearing a life jacket. The 14-year-old was pulled to safety, but his younger friend was not so lucky.

Not every mission is successful. The Aug. 26 recovery of Thanh’s body was the 19th for the Wisconsin duo.

It’s a labor of love, not something the couple make money from. They ask for their travel expenses to be paid for, like gas and lodging. The rest of their expenses are covered by donations.

After the Ma recovery their phone has been ringing more frequently. They can’t go everywhere. The next operation will be somewhere in California. They have multiple options.

But today, well, it’s a day off. They will be back out on their boat, only this time to enjoy Lake Tahoe.

Tools of the trade aboard the recovery boat. Photo/Bruce’s Legacy

They have come to appreciate Lake Tahoe.

Working on it, though, is a challenge.

“This area is so brutal. It drops off so horribly fast. There are boulders as big as a house down there,” Cormican said. “There are so many places they can fall and you cannot see them.”

They used a grid search based on the cadaver dog ping. They started at 7am Aug. 26. At 5pm Thanh’s body was located.

The one good thing about Lake Tahoe is the clarity. They were able to use an underwater camera to find the body.

Long days are the norm. Rivers are hardest. There is no exact time that they work a body of water. It’s a matter of going back and forth, and then having to call it quits.

“It’s horribly tough to tell someone’s family you can’t find them. That is the hardest thing we do,” Cormican said.

But this past week it was elation, of sorts. Recovery is a bittersweet ending. It means a proper burial, no wondering what really happened and the proverbial closure.

“It’s extremely rewarding to bring these family member home when they’ve been told there is nothing else they can do,” Cormican said.

By Siobhan McAndrew, Reno Gazette-Journal

UNR President Marc Johnson told the class of 2021 that the university is not an institution defined by the actions of just one student.

It was a message delivered at a welcome event for 3,800 freshmen ahead of the Monday start of the fall semester. It follows the national spotlight the university has found itself in after a UNR student was photographed at a white nationalist rally.

The photo of the 20-year-old history and political science student Peter Cytanovic — who was first identified as Cvjetanovic, the name he uses on social media accounts — went viral.

While the university defended Cytanovic’s right to remain a student in a press conference, student leaders say the response from UNR hasn’t been enough.

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By Kathryn Reed

The financial situation in El Dorado County continues to deteriorate.

The obligation to retirees via CalPERS keeps growing and contract negotiations with employees could be going better.

The county’s unfunded obligation to the California Public Employees Retirement System is more than $346 million. This is $64 million more than when the last actuarial report was done.

“Further, CalPERS has informed the county that seven years from now the required annual payments to CalPERS will be $22 million per year higher than they are now. Balancing the county’s budget and providing critical public safety and road maintenance services will become much tougher in the future because of our unfunded obligation to CalPERS,” Auditor-Controller Joe Harn told Lake Tahoe News.  

If the county were to withdraw from CalPERS, it would cost more than $1 billion to do so.

The county is not alone in its debt to the retirement agency. The problem is there is no plan to deal with it. It’s like the county’s leaders – elected and otherwise – are wishing the problem would go away.

Carla Hass, spokeswoman for the county, merely said staff is concerned and looking at options. The only option she pointed to is if there is any extra money at the end of the fiscal year, it will go to offset PERS increases.

Supervisor Shiva Frentzen, who is chair of the board, did not respond to Lake Tahoe News’ questions.

Harn this week sent the entire board a letter outlining the gravity of the situation, as he has done year-in-and-year-out. But the actions by the powers that be make it appear his words are falling on deaf ears.

“The county needs more tools and options that are not currently available to reduce these unaffordable and insurmountable unfunded obligations,” Harn said. “The Board of Supervisors should seek the assistance of California State Association of Counties, CalPERS and our representatives in the Legislature so that changes in state law and CalPERS policies will provide better options to enable us to reduce these unaffordable obligations. What we can do locally now is work to set aside significantly more funds in our reserves to help cover these costs in the future.”   

For some reason, when CalPERS told member agencies in 1999 that it was overfunded, everyone believed this to be true. Now, though, when CalPERS is issuing forecasts for further indebtedness for the next five years, many of these same agencies are not taking the threat seriously.

In 1999, in order to pay back public employee unions for massive campaign contributions then-Gov. Gray Davis and a super majority of the Legislature passed Senate Bill 400. This allowed the state, counties, cities and special districts in California to offer employees drastically enhanced retirement benefits retroactively.  

“CalPERS gave the county ridiculously low cost estimates in 1999. CalPERS projected that the retroactive application of dramatically enhanced retirement benefits would not increase the cost to the county for the next 11 years,” Harn said.

That projection could not have been further from reality.

El Dorado County supervisors ignored warnings from Harn at that time and instead offered employees dramatically enhanced retirement benefits on a retroactive basis.

The county has continued to add fuel to this financial catastrophe by giving exorbitant raises. It wasn’t that long ago employees received 15 percent raises. This in turn increases the county’s PERS obligation.

The county and Local 1 are in negotiations now. The union represents more than 900 employees.

“The county did a class and comp study last year that they want to base their proposals on, but they feel it will take them another year to 18 months to be ready. We want to negotiate a contract now, so it’s more of a process issue then an amount issue,” union rep Jere Copeland told Lake Tahoe News. “The only real issue is wages. Any decisions on job actions would be made after we declare impasse.”

The union is tired of waiting for the county to talk numbers. While a strike would be a ways off, impasse could be reached this fall.

The  county spokeswoman had this to say: “The negotiations are not public and are addressed in closed session with the Board of Supervisors. We continue to meet with Local No. 1 representatives in good faith and work toward an agreement that is satisfactory to both parties.”

By Jim Miller, Sacramento Bee

California secession efforts are plentiful this year, but tech billionaire Tim Draper wants to go old school: Just split the Golden State into three.

Draper spent more than $5 million in 2014 on an unsuccessful effort to qualify a ballot measure asking voters to divide California into six states. He never gave up on the idea, though.

His newest measure, filed this month, says the “political representation of California’s diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable.

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By Katy Murphy, Bay Area News Group

For the first time Californians would pay a tax on drinking water — 95 cents per month — under legislation aimed at fixing hundreds of public water systems with unsafe tap water.

Senate Bill 623, backed by a strange-bedfellows coalition of the agricultural lobby and environmental groups but opposed by water districts, would generate $2 billion over the next 15 years to clean up contaminated groundwater and improve faulty water systems and wells. The problem is most pervasive in rural areas with agricultural runoff.

Ironically, many Californians are more aware of the crisis in Flint — where state and local officials in 2015 told residents about lead contamination in the drinking water, after claiming it was safe to drink — than about the water problems in their home state, said the measure’s main author, Sen. Bill Monning, D-Monterey.

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By Paul Harasim, Las Vegas Review-Journal

A nonprofit created by heavy hitters from Nevada’s business and medical communities gave the state a D grade on its first report card on the state’s health-care system.

The report card was released Wednesday by the Nevada Medical Center, or NMC, and is intended to focus attention on improving access to quality health care in the state.

Larry Matheis, the NMC’s CEO, said the report card will help state leaders focus on the gaps that must be filled to improve Nevada’s medical standing. Currently, he said, the state’s medical system “resembles a series of isolated communities … due to the lack of collaboration among medical professionals and the dearth of thought given to enhancing our community’s reputation.”

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By Louis Hansen, Bay Area News Group

A pilot project is making an electric vehicle road trip in Northern California a little cheaper, easier and with a little less range anxiety.

A fast-charging network, known as Drive the ARC, is bringing more than 50 new electric stations installed at about 25 sites from Monterey to Lake Tahoe.

The network — free to EV drivers with a smart phone app and a common charger, is an international, public-private collaboration aimed at supporting the spread of zero emission vehicles. Many sites are open, and the network is slated for completion this fall.

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By Chris Kudialis, Las Vegas Sun

In three of the first four states to start legal recreational pot sales, an increasing number of consumers are choosing bud over Budweiser.

That conclusion comes from a study by New York-based investment and research firm Cowen and Co. In Colorado, Oregon and Washington, domestic beer sales for Budweiser, Coors and Miller were down 4.4 percent from January 2015 to the end of 2016, while purchases of craft beer fell 2.4 percent. No data was available for Alaska.

How the beginning of recreational marijuana sales in Nevada affects local alcohol sales remains to be seen, as the program began just eight weeks ago.

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Canals in the Tahoe Keys are plagued by blue-green algae. Photo/Kathryn Reed

By Kathryn Reed

A toxic algae bloom is covering a large swath of the Tahoe Keys, prompting a warning to people to be wary of the water.

Officials with the Tahoe Keys have known about the blue-green algae since Aug. 11. Warnings, though, did not start until Aug. 23.

For such a big problem, the caution signs are very tiny.

“It’s in different locations in the west lagoons,” Kirk Wooldridge, general manager for the Tahoe Keys Property Management Association, told Lake Tahoe News. “It’s in various degrees in different areas. It depends on sunlight, current and depth.”

Some warning signs are in Spanish, but most are just in English. Photo/Kathryn Reed

On Wednesday the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board encouraged signs be posted alerting people to the danger. Driving by it is near impossible to see them, but out with a dog is a different story.

“The level tested at Tahoe Keys did not show a high danger level. It was at the much lower caution level,” Doug Smith with Lahontan told Lake Tahoe News.

There are three levels of danger for cyanobacteria, which is better known as blue-green algae. The toxicity in the canals of this South Lake Tahoe neighborhood are at the lowest level.

Still, the “caution warning” includes: humans and dogs should not come in contact with the algae or scum on the shoreline, neither people nor pets should drink the water, fish caught in the area should be cleaned with tap/bottle water before cooking, no shellfish should be eaten from these waters, and the water should not be used for cooking.

More dangerous toxic levels can cause eye irritation, skin rashes, mouth ulcers, vomiting, diarrhea, and flu-like symptoms. Two dogs in Napa County died this summer after drinking water from a pond with the algae.

“Blue-green algae naturally occur everywhere in the environment. We don’t know the exact reason why certain areas have blooms,” Smith said.

Outbreaks have been occurring throughout California this year.

Contact with the water of a large swath of the Tahoe Keys lagoons could be dangerous because of the algae bloom. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Why it goes away also isn’t known.

The plan is to continue field tests. If those have indicators that the level of toxicity is rising, it will be sent to the lab for definitive proof.

This is not something the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency or El Dorado County Environmental Health regulate.

“TRPA is aware of this concerning development and working closely with the Lahontan Water Board, who has jurisdiction on this matter, to monitor the situation and make sure that appropriate steps are taken to protect public health, safety, and the environment,” Tom Lotshaw with TRPA told Lake Tahoe News.

Copper sulfate is a proven herbicide that kills the algae. Applications have worked in other jurisdictions under Lahontan’s oversight. An emergency provision in Lahontan’s Lake Tahoe Basin Plan would allow the use, but the danger level would have to increase substantially for that option to be on the table.

It is not known if the algae can be spread by watercraft, but boat travel has not been halted. It could be that if it were to get into Lake Tahoe, it would die because of the colder water temperature.

The Keys put up a boom on a canal linking the regular homeowners with the Lighthouse Shores gated community. According to Wooldridge, it didn’t do any good. The algae went under the boom.

He did not know how deep the muck goes.

The waterway at Venice and Alpine drives looks like a holding pond for a toxic chemical plant with the eerie green color and swirls along the shore.