To the community,

The Kiwanis Club of Tahoe Sierra is a service organization that dedicates its members to supporting charities and events which benefit the community, especially children. Every month the Kiwanis Club selects a different community program or organization to support, and for the month of January the club has sponsored a Bread & Broth Adopt a Day of Nourishment for the last eight years.

For 2018, the Kiwanis Club hosted the Jan. 8 Monday dinner at St. Theresa Grace Hall.  Representing the Kiwanis Club were veteran AAD sponsor crew volunteers Pat Frega, Penny Fairfield, Robert Fleischer and new Kiwanis Club member Richard Burgess. As a first time volunteer at B&B, Burgess enjoyed the experience of being a part of feeding those in need. 

“I enjoy giving back to the community through the Kiwanis Tahoe Sierra Club,” he said.  “Thanks to St. Theresa’s B&B for having us help, charity is a virtue that is very rewarding.” 

For B&B volunteers, partnering with the Kiwanis Club is a lot of fun because the members are always so helpful and they enjoy their time giving to others. Working together to bring food and fellowship to those experiencing hunger, the Kiwanis Club of Tahoe Sierra and B&B jointly provided a much needed service to the needy of our community.

Carol Gerard, Bread & Broth

By Jerry Nickelsburg

In 1797 Thomas Paine, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, proposed that a “citizen dividend” be paid to each American and funded by a tax on land. Paine’s proposal—now dubbed Universal Basic Income (UBI) or guaranteed minimum income—is, some 220 years later, coming to California. 

Specifically, it is coming to Stockton, a city that declared bankruptcy just five short years ago. Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, armed with a $1 million grant funded in part by the tech industry luminaries, is about to engage 100 or so of his constituents in the first municipal-run experiment of UBI in this part of the world.

UBI is not a new idea. Writing on it stretches back to at least 1516, when Thomas More discussed it in “Utopia” as an alternative to poverty and to petty theft, a crime that sent many hungry people to the gallows. The idea also has had modern proponents, from conservative economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, to liberal economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin. Martin Luther King Jr. argued in 1967 that a guaranteed income was a moral imperative for a capitalistic society. Modern entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, following Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Player Piano,” advocate UBI as a way to protect the workers who lose their jobs to robots.

But for all of the discussion through the years, including serious consideration during a welfare overhaul under President Richard Nixon, there remains no solid empirical evidence on the impact of “money for nothing.” This is important because UBI discussions have hit the serious policy sphere. The idea made the ballot (and lost) in Switzerland in 2016, entered into the 2017 French presidential election, and is now part of the platform of the left-right PAN/PRD coalition, which has a good chance of winning the upcoming 2018 Mexico presidential election. 

All of which might make the experiment in Stockton quite important. In this San Joaquin River town, where the median income is substantially below that of other California places, the UBI transfer will go to some low-income folks who can certainly use the added $500 per month.

The idea of this and other small experiments now under way is to gather evidence on how people respond to UBI. The trouble is that this approach – which mirrors an earlier study in Finland – is doomed to failure because it cannot reproduce the surprising economic realities of how UBI would work in practice. Thus, it won’t really reckon with the arguments surrounding it.

The case against universal basic income was made recently in the “National Review” by Oren Cass, a former advisor to Mitt Romney. Cass states that UBI “would make work optional,” “create an underclass dependent on government handouts,” and therefore “erode the foundational institutions of family and society.”

Is he right that free money would end the incentive to work? The answer lies in the psychology of work. In his 2015 book “Why We Work,” Swarthmore College’s Barry Schwartz shows there are other compensations for work—including social interaction with co-workers, the feeling of doing something worthwhile, and the sense of being part of a greater enterprise. Schwartz argues that people don’t just work for money; often money is not even the principal reason they head out into rush hour each day.

To be sure, there is stultifying work that people do for money and nothing else. But most work in the 21st century, when technology has taken over mundane tasks, is not this. Today, it is the absence of work that angers and frustrates people, as the 2016 presidential vote illustrates.

This points to another problem with Cass’s analysis: his prediction that UBI would create an American underclass leading to social breakdown. UBI can’t create such an underclass, because one already exists—you see it in the torn fabric of American society emanating from the ongoing transformation of the U.S. economy. In their 2014 book “Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family,” University of Minnesota Professor June Carbone and George Washington University Professor Naomi Cahn documented the breakdown of the family among lower-income individuals. In their analysis, the rising inequality in the United States—and the decline of opportunity for those who 50 years ago might have found work in a factory—has resulted in a dramatic deterioration of family, values, marriage and relationships. 

Other researchers have made similar findings. Princeton professor Ann Case and Nobel Laureate in economics Angus Deaton, who documented the breakdown in their study of mortality rates by class, race and age, described the falling life expectancy among lower income Americans as “deaths of despair.” The opioid crisis in America is a stark symbol of just how torn the social at fabric already is.

Which raises the question: Under UBI, how much worse could it get? I suspect the answer is “not much if at all.” Clearly, the current array of social insurance programs has not constituted a solution. But social programs do provide a way that we can validate the economics of UBI and understand what it might and might not do.

Unemployment insurance and workfare programs are designed to get recipients back into the workforce, and thus they have an expiration date. Other social assistance programs, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability insurance, do not have time limitations. Because all of these programs are for those without incomes, they limit the amount one can earn and still qualify for benefits. If one is on disability, for example, there is a limited amount of part-time work and income that is allowed before the disability payments are taken away. The same is true with Social Security for those under full retirement age as well as for those on unemployment insurance.  This provides a huge disincentive for work.

It’s instructive to compare how the current incentives against work might change under UBI. Consider today’s system first. Suppose our Stocktonian is earning $18,000 per year. Under the new tax structure with the standard deduction, the marginal tax rate for the Stocktonian would be 10 percent and the tax bill $600. So when working, her net income would be $17,400.

Compare this to payments if the Stocktonian were on disability. In this case, her income would be $11,000. Consequently, the incentive to work is only $6,400 (i.e. the difference between $17,400 and $11,000), or $123 per week, not much when you consider commuting costs, work clothes and the time spent at the job.

How would this be different under a UBI of $10,000? First, the Stocktonian would not be on disability since under UBI that program would not exist. Second, the UBI income would not be taxed and therefore would not go away if she took a job. Thus, the guaranteed payment of $10,000 would lift her take-home income to $27,400. The incremental incentive to take the job now jumps from $6,400 to $17,400, an almost threefold increase.

In this way, UBI increases the incentive to work relative to the current system. This would be true for all of the welfare and social assistance programs that it would replace. Consequently, there would be more work, more GDP, and more taxes to fund the program than before.

There would also be social advantages. Those who re-enter the work force will have higher self-esteem, be more attractive as marriage partners, and have a greater stake in society. And UBI would allow for elimination of today’s elaborate system of checks on eligibility for social insurance, producing a cost saving in program administration that could be applied to funding UBI. 

UBI offers another advantage: Today’s system requires that you prove you are unable to work or unable to find work. It is a system in which individuals have to downgrade and disparage themselves. Ask any psychologist whether or not this contributes to depression and low self-esteem (and addiction). 

Of course, critics of UBI are right that there will be some individuals who game the system to satisfy their desire to do nothing of value. But by incentivizing work, there will be fewer of such people than there are today. (At least some indolent folks will always be with us if we want to be a society that takes care of our least fortunate.)

Is there a silver lining? Yes, UBI opens up new possibilities for the ambitious. Under the current system, an individual with a great idea for a new product or service who also happens to be a single parent, or have other important family responsibilities, is not apt to strike out on her own to explore that idea, create a new company, and innovate. Such an individual cannot afford the risk.  With UBI she can. This means more new businesses, more innovations, higher aggregate productivity and a faster-growing economy. After all, small businesses generate 64 percent of new private sector jobs in the United States.

The biggest obstacles facing UBI involve politics (the instant revulsion to “money for nothing,” as the Dire Straits song put it) – and the lack of data that the current UBI experiments are supposed to give us. So let’s drive The 99 to Stockton and ask why this UBI experiment won’t tell us much. 

The experiment is doomed for two reasons. First, it is temporary. The recipients know that the money will only last two years, and that will incentivize them differently than a true UBI. Second, it is $500 a month, and even though Stockton has one of the lowest costs of living in California, this is still not much money. Recipients are going to view it as a windfall and not as part of their expected income. As with all UBI experiments to date, the temporary nature of this study pollutes the outcome. “Can I start a small business and live on $500-a-month knowing that it will go away in two years?” our Stocktonian asks. The likely answer is, “Maybe, but what I’ll do if my business goes bust?”  

Since we can’t learn from such experiments, pursuing UBI as an economic and societal solution will require relying on economic theory, and on the empirical evidence that work is valuable, that people want to work, and that they will work, even in a factory, if the disincentives are removed. The only way to find out if Thomas Paine’s idea was the right one is to put it into actual practice.

Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist at UCLA Anderson School of Management, writes the Pacific Economist column.

To the community,

Are South Lake Tahoe’s neighborhoods for sale? Over the last few years our city has allowed out-of-town investors to turn houses into motels and developers to build large scale lodging properties in our residential neighborhoods.

The local residents now want a chance to decide if we want these motels in our neighborhoods. The petition being circulated will let local voters make that decision. That is how democracy works using the initiative process.

In the meantime, there is a lot of talk that big money from outside special interest groups will swoop down on our town with mega-bucks and influence the election. Just what we don’t need is flatlanders trying to buy our town and the lifestyle we earned by living here. It is a simple choice: let the voters decide.

Linda Goodman, Tahoe Neighborhoods Group

By David Page, Powder

One Tuesday morning in early March, the day before Vail Resorts Inc.’s scheduled earnings announcement for the second quarter of fiscal year 2017, I clicked in to my skis outside a 10th Mountain Division backcountry hut high in Colorado’s Sawatch Range, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level.

The first light of dawn was just bleeding into the sky. I was less than 20 miles as the crow flies from the site where Pete Siebert and Earl Eaton, back in March of 1957–60 years earlier almost to the day–first stood on skis atop the “no-name mountain” that would eventually become the centerpiece of an $8.5 billion global resort and hospitality empire. Eaton had come upon the terrain while prospecting for uranium. Siebert was a WWII ski trooper, nationally ranked slalom racer, and a ski patrolman at Aspen. “My God, Earl,” he famously said, looking across wide open powder fields (that would later be trademarked as Vail’s World-Famous Back Bowls and Blue Sky Basin), “we’ve climbed all the way to heaven.”

My plan for the day was to ski down to the car and drive to Broomfield for a congenial visit to Vail’s LEED-certified corporate headquarters. Ideally, I’d sit down for a quick chat and maybe even a beer with CEO Rob Katz, recently hailed in the local press as “the most powerful man in the ski industry.” He’d been on Vail’s board of directors since 1996 and lead director since 2003. Since taking the helm as Chief Executive in 2006, he’d pissed plenty of people off–moving the company offices from the mountains to the suburban Front Range (to cut costs); pulling Vail out of (and nearly breaking) the marketing-slash-trade association Colorado Ski Country USA; mocking climate change in the national media; underpaying employees; and leading the charge to purchase and homogenize major North American ski resorts. He’d also successfully brought Vail Resorts through a devastating recession; navigated an unprecedented spree of ski resort acquisitions; helped push legislation through Congress (the Ski Area Recreational Opportunity Enhancement Act) to allow for greatly expanded summer use of public lands under existing ski area permits; began a protracted battle with homeowners at Beaver Creek over a proposed roller coaster; pioneered the popular Epic Pass program; and overseen–despite less than one percent growth in skier numbers over the past two decades–one of the most impressive, sustained stock growth curves on Wall Street in recent history.

Read the whole story

By Randy Moore

Natural disasters can occur at any given time and in any given area. The size, duration and damages are usually unpredictable. The devastation, destruction and cost of California wildfires are increasing annually.

In 2017, more than 1,500 wildfires burned over 640,000 acres on National Forest System lands in California, including the Thomas Fire which is now the largest in California history. Although the fire is fully contained, the surrounding communities are presently dealing with debris flows caused by a now charred and barren landscape that no longer has the protection of trees, grass and other vegetation for a stable ground. To date, 17 people have died, several others are still missing, and more than 100 homes have been destroyed as a result of these mudslides.

Randy Moore

Additionally, in early October, a series of wind-driven wildfires burned more than 200,000 acres across Northern California. The fires destroyed thousands of structures and killed 44 people. Although the fires did not occur on Forest Service lands, the agency worked closely with state and local cooperators on fire suppression efforts.

The Pacific Southwest Region has spent over $500 million preventing or suppressing wildfires over the last year. Funding for suppression efforts performed by the Forest Service comes from the overall agency’s budget based on a 10-year rolling average—a model that is simply unsustainable, given the last several years of unprecedented fire seasons. When wildfire suppression funding is insufficient, the Forest Service is forced to shift money away from other investments designed to build healthy, resilient forests and communities. We must find a permanent solution that restores the balance between fire prevention, fire suppression and resource restoration. 

As mentioned above, many residents in California have suffered significant harm and loss from recent fires and mudslides. We see and empathize with those affected, and are working to reduce the potential for future loss by performing hazardous fuel reduction treatments. In fiscal year 2017 alone, we performed fuels reduction treatments on over 310,000 acres of Forest Service lands across the state, but there is more to be done. To date, 80 million acres of National Forest System lands are currently at moderate to high risk of insects, disease or fire. Of these, 10 million acres are located in California.  Essentially, the more acres we treat, the healthier our forests become, contributing to safer and more resilient communities. The science, data and monitoring shows that hazardous fuel treatments and thinning positively affects fire behavior and lowers the catastrophic risk of fire damage. A fire funding fix will allow the USDA Forest Service to invest more in this critical work.

We are appreciative of the ongoing work of USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue and Congress who have acknowledged the funding issue and are working hard to help resolve these challenges.

Fortunately, there is bipartisan support from key leaders in Congress toward legislation to reform the way wildfire suppression is currently funded. Finding a permanent solution to fix the fire funding problem will go a long way in sustaining the health, diversity and productivity of our nation’s forests and grasslands for current and future generations.

Randy Moore is the regional forester for the Pacific Southwest Region, which includes the Lake Tahoe Basin. 

By Joe Mathews

California is so big that you don’t need to be a mouse to hide here. You can be a giant elephant—or a huge corporation—and still escape notice.

For example, here’s a trivia question that stumps even Californians who know the state well: What’s the second-richest company in California after Apple?

“Google?” Wrong.

The answer: McKesson.

Joe Mathews

Never heard of it? You’re not alone. McKesson is “a massive corporation hiding in plain sight,” Fortune wrote recently. Its headquarters hides in a conspicuous place—at Post and Market streets in San Francisco. That a company can be both so big and so unknown shows how the tech sector has warped Californians’ sense of what matters in business.  

McKesson is not only California’s second-largest company, with nearly $200 billion in annual revenues, but also the fifth-largest company in America. A massive healthcare middleman, McKesson distributes pharmaceuticals and other supplies from manufacturers to doctors and hospitals.

This is an unsexy, low-margin business—which is one reason why, despite its massive revenues and reach, McKesson’s market cap of $32 billion badly lags Apple ($772 billion) and Facebook ($542 billion). And while other California giants dominate the headlines, McKesson almost never makes state news.

When I called McKesson to explain I was writing a column about the company, the polite executive who called back seemed genuinely puzzled about my interest. On recent visits to McKesson Plaza, the space outside the headquarters, I encountered two sets of protestors—one opposing Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has offices in the building, and the other supporting higher wages for janitors who work there. Not one protestor, however, knew anything about McKesson, the company.

This is unsurprising. McKesson is so ubiquitous, it hasn’t put the great efforts into branding that startups do. McKesson also happens to be one of the country’s oldest companies—a longevity worth studying in a state that worships high-flying startups.

McKesson began in 1833, when an entrepreneur named John McKesson opened a drug import and wholesale business in Manhattan, which went on to pioneer the development of gelatin-coated pills in the 1870s. By the early 1900s, it had created a nationwide distribution network that moved medicines and other products, from chemicals to liquor.

McKesson became a California company through its 1967 merger with Foremost, a food-centric conglomerate co-founded by retailer J.C. Penney. By 1970, the firm had set up its San Francisco headquarters.

In 1984, the company was renamed McKesson Corporation, and for two decades it acquired businesses that distributed health-related products, while jettisoning food and chemical companies that were part of the conglomerate.

That devotion to health care, in an aging country with rising health spending, has paid off. A company that had less than $20 billion in annual revenues two decades ago is now pushing $200 billion. The company has burrowed itself into every corner of healthcare, but the heart of the operation remains its distribution centers, a system that rivals Amazon’s in scope and in revenues. The company’s slogan is: “It’s not just a package, it’s a patient.”

Of course, McKesson is not just a logistics company. It’s also a technology company that uses advanced health data and analytics with to making all kinds of healthcare systems—from those that get you prescriptions, to those that allow you to pay your bill—more efficient.

When McKesson draws critical notice, it’s usually because something has gone wrong in American health, which means the ubiquitous McKesson bears some piece of the blame.

The most recent example involves the opioid crisis. While the lion’s share of criticism has gone to drug manufactures, doctors and pharmacists, McKesson and other distributors have faced scrutiny from media and the government for not effectively tracking and responding to suspiciously high orders of opioids to certain parts of the country. (In 2017, McKesson agreed to pay a $150 million civil fine related to how it handled suspicious orders.)

But in today’s California, McKesson is perhaps mostly noteworthy among our richest companies for sins it has not committed.

McKesson does not keep us glued to screens, and thus ignoring our loved ones. It does not spread hate through social media. It has not collaborated in the government’s mass surveillance. Its CEO does not announce each year that he’s going to visit all 50 states, learn Mandarin or eat only meat that he kills. And it did not help the Russians steal the 2016 presidential election.

McKesson also hasn’t whined constantly about the California business climate, or publicly threatened to leave the state, or forced San Francisco to give it massive tax breaks, as Twitter and Zendesk did.

There’s something to be said for a California-based business that is old, boring, and predictably corporate in this, our era of disruption.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

By Traci Mann and A. Janet Tomiyama 

Diets do not work.

The scientific evidence is clear as can be that cutting calories simply doesn’t lead to long-term weight loss or health gains.

We suspect most dieters have realized this by now too. And yet, here they are again, setting the same weight loss goal this year that they set last year.

The only people who don’t seem to appreciate this are people who have never dieted. It’s particularly hard for them to believe because it doesn’t square with their own eating experiences.

Take Nicky, for instance. She eats sensibly much of the time, with some junk food here and there, but it doesn’t really seem to affect her weight. She’s not a dieter. She is Naturally Thin Nicky, and it’s not surprising that she believes what she sees with her own eyes and feels in her own body. Nevertheless, Nicky has it wrong.

We are researchers who have been studying why diets fail for a long time. We have seen that diet failure is the norm. We have also studied the stigma that heavy people face, and witnessed the blame game that happens when dieters can’t keep the weight off. From a scientific perspective, we understand that dieting sets up an unfair fight. But many Nickys we’ve encountered – on the street, in the audience when we give talks, and even fellow scientists – get confused when we say dieting doesn’t work, because it doesn’t square with their own observations.

An unfair fight

Nicky thinks she’s thin because of the way she eats, but actually, genetics play a huge role in making her thin. Nicky gets all the credit though, because people see the way she eats and they can’t see her genes.

Many heavy people wouldn’t be lean like Nicky even if they ate the same foods in the same quantities. Their bodies are able to run on fewer calories than Nicky’s, which sounds like a good thing (and would be great if you found yourself in a famine).

However, it actually means that after eating the same foods and using that energy to run the systems of their body, they have more calories left over to store as fat than Nicky does. So to actually lose weight, they have to eat less food than Nicky. And then, once they’ve been dieting a while, their metabolism changes so that they need to eat even less than that to keep losing weight.

It’s not just Nicky’s genetically given metabolism that makes her think dieting must work. Nicky, as a non-dieter, finds it really easy to ignore that bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on her co-worker’s desk. But for dieters, it’s like those Kisses are jumping up and down saying “Eat me!” Dieting causes neurological changes that make you more likely to notice food than before dieting, and once you notice it, these changes make it hard to stop thinking about it. Nicky might forget those chocolates are there, but dieters won’t.

In fact, dieters like them even more than before. This is because other diet-induced neurological changes make food not only taste better, but also cause food to give a bigger rush of the reward hormone dopamine. That’s the same hormone that is released when addicts use their drug of choice. Nicky doesn’t get that kind of rush from food.

And besides, Nicky is full from lunch. Here again, dieters face an uphill battle because dieting has also changed their hormones. Their levels of the so-called satiety hormone leptin go down, which means that now it takes even more food than before to make them feel full. They felt hungry on their diets all along, but now feel even hungrier than before. Even Nicky’s regular non-diet lunch wouldn’t make dieters full at this point.

Where’s your willpower?

People see Nicky and are impressed with her great self-control, or willpower. But should it really be considered self-control to avoid eating a food when you aren’t hungry? Is it self-control when you avoid eating a food because you don’t notice it, like it or receive a rush of reward from it?

Anyone could resist the food under those circumstances. And even though Nicky doesn’t really need willpower in this situation, if she did need it, it would function quite well because she’s not dieting. On top of everything else, dieting disrupts cognition, especially executive function, which is the process that helps with self-control. So dieters have less willpower right when they need more willpower. And non-dieters have plenty, even though they don’t need any.

And of course, even if Nicky were to eat those tempting foods, her metabolism would burn up more of those calories than a dieter’s metabolism.

So Nicky is mistakenly being given credit for succeeding at a job that is not only easy for her, but easier than the job dieters face.

The cruel irony is that after someone has been dieting for some time, changes happen that make it hard to succeed at dieting in the long run. It is physically possible, and a small minority of dieters do manage to keep weight off for several years. But not without a demoralizing and all-encompassing battle with their physiology the entire time.

A woman shopping in the produce department of a grocery store. People who are overweight often must learn to like healthy foods. UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, CC BY-SA
It’s easy to see why dieters usually regain the weight they lose on their New Year’s resolution diet, and we have the following suggestions for when that happens: If you are a Nicky, remember the self-denial these dieters have subjected themselves to and how little they were eating while you treated yourself to decadent desserts. Be impressed with their efforts, and grateful that you don’t have to attempt it.

If you are a dieter, remind yourself that you aren’t weak, but that you were in an unfair fight that very few win. Change your focus to improving your health with exercise (which doesn’t require weight loss), and resolve to choose a different New Year’s resolution next year.

Traci Mann is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and A. Janet Tomiyama is an associate professor of psychology at UCLA.

To the community,

As a young boy, Jeremy Woodford would attend Bread & Broth’s dinners with his family at Grace Hall. Now, many years later, Jeremy is paying it forward by hosting three B&B dinners so others can also benefit from the same nourishing meals that helped him when he and his family were experiencing difficult times.

Woodford sponsored his first of three Adopt A Day of Nourishments on Jan. 1. He, along with his partner Melissa Brittain, and Melissa’s parents, Craig and Barbara Brittain, showed up at 3pm to roll up their sleeves, put on B&B aprons and work alongside the B&B volunteers setting up the dessert and drink table and bagging give away bags filled with breads and pastries, fruits, vegetables and dairy products.

It was Melissa Brittain’s first visit to a B&B dinner and she found the experience to be a very positive one.  

“It was a great evening with great food,” she said.  “Look forward to volunteering again.”

In addition to helping with the dinner’s setup, Woodford and his sponsor team served the dinner guests and helped with the meal’s cleanup. B&B would like to extend a very special thank you to Woodford and his hardworking team that come prepared to make sure that others would not go hungry that night.

Carol Gerard, Bread & Broth

Publisher’s note: This letter was sent to the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors and copied to Lake Tahoe News.

Hi Supervisors Sue Novasel and Mike Rinalli,

I understand that you are considering a 45-day moratorium on issuing new vacation home rental permits. I support such a moratorium or prefer an even longer one so that the county can improve its existing ordinances and provide increased inspections and compliance assurance/enforcement.

Lauri Kemper

I am a 33-year resident and homeowner in El Dorado County/Lake Tahoe Basin and only recently have become increasingly taxed to perform surveillance and regular scolding of vacation renters in my neighborhood to comply with the current laws on trespassing, noise, trash, and parking. I have also called the sheriff. The disruptions and trespasses harm my ability to enjoy the peace and tranquility of my property and neighborhood.

I urge you to work with county staff to improve your ordinances to make it easier for the county to take enforcement actions. At the same time, increase fees to fund inspections and surveillance to ensure compliance with the law.

I understand an increasing number of applications for vacation rentals is being received and processed by the county likely due to a fear of a moratorium or other financial fears. I think a moratorium allows time to develop a more sustainable approach that includes incentives to property owners to provide long term rentals since it has become difficult for newcomers with great jobs to find housing in the Tahoe basin.

Please support a moratorium and work to improve the quality of the lives of the county’s permanent residents. Please let me know your position in this matter.

Thank you for considering a moratorium and a stricter ordinance along with resources for compliance assurance.

Sincerely,

Lauri Kemper, Meyers