After Years of Discord, California and Nevada Agree on Tahoe Development

 SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Deep in the Sierra Nevada, 39 trillion gallons of crystalline water straddles the border between California and Nevada.

That water, Lake Tahoe, can be as smooth as glass, but the politics of land-use planning along the lake’s 72-mile shoreline are some of the most contentious and muddled in the country.

Lawmakers from the two states tend to have very different ideas about how to manage development around the lake, to say nothing of the more than 50 federal, state and local agencies with jurisdiction in the basin.

But last month, after nearly a decade of wrangling, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the bistate agency that regulates development, approved a new plan that will guide building there.

“The infrastructure around the lake was built in the 1950s and ’60s, and it’s failing the communities and it’s failing the lake,” said Todd Ferrara, deputy secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. “California and Nevada have this shared treasure, and the stakes are too high not to work together to protect it.”

The new regional plan encourages ripping down and rebuilding the area’s aging infrastructure, removing buildings from environmentally delicate areas near marshes, streams and rivers, and constructing denser urban centers. It also streamlines the permit process for construction projects in the basin, which gets three million visitors a year.

For many of basin’s 55,000 full-time residents, the fact that the agency’s governing board — made up of seven Nevadans and seven Californians — reached consensus came as a great relief.

“We’re very happy that a plan has finally been passed, because without concrete regulations, nobody wins and the lake suffers,” said Darcie Goodman Collins, executive director of the League to Save Lake Tahoe, an environmental advocacy group.

While the plan has broad support on both sides of the state line, some environmental groups say it will result in taller buildings and denser development, which could ultimately harm the ecosystem of the lake.

“This new plan is a plan for improving the tourist economy, not a plan for improving the environment,” said Laurel Ames, conservation co-chairwoman for the Tahoe Area Sierra Club, which is considering a lawsuit to halt it before it is carried out on Feb. 11.

But policy makers counter that replacing aging infrastructure would be a major step toward restoring the lake’s ecosystem and quintessential clarity.

“The idea is to get rid of this strip development that causes sediment to run off into the lake and rebuild,” said Lew Feldman, a lawyer who represents developers in the area.

Beginning in the 1950s, ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/california-and-nevada-update-tahoe-development-plan.html?_r=0 

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