Private Rights vs. Public Interest

The success story of planning and preservation at Lake Tahoe is a model for California and the nation in preventing helter-skelter commercial development from overwhelming places of exceptional natural beauty.

Except for the work of the California-Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the 205,000-acre Lake Tahoe basin would be on course to becoming a sprawling urban slum in the midst of the Sierra Nevada.

Gradually, the worst excesses of bad zoning and planning are being replaced. And the inevitable clouding of the crystal Tahoe waters, while not halted altogether, has at least been curbed.

But now a key regulatory tool of the agency is under attack. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today in a case that challenges the agency’s regulations for prohibiting development of lands contained in zones of critical environmental sensitivity. Those areas cover about 10% of the mountain-ringed basin.

Back in 1989, Bernadine Suitum of Sacramento sought to build a home on the lot that she and her late husband acquired in 1972 near Incline Village, Nev. The lot, about a mile from the lake shore, was classified by the agency as part of a “stream environment zone.” In such areas, it said, any development would contribute to the sort of runoff and pollution that has caused the lake to lose its world-famed clarity.

The agency could not condemn Suitum’s property outright without paying her full value for the land. But it could offer her a development credit, a sort of voucher that she could cash in with someone seeking a permit to build in another part of the lake basin.

Suitum didn’t want a development credit. She wanted to build on her property or be paid for it--her right, her lawyers argue, under the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment bars the taking of private property for public use without just compensation.

Some of the groups supporting Suitum say they are not challenging the concept of development rights, but only disputing the rules the Tahoe agency uses to employ them. However, the court could decide to rule whether development rights provide an acceptable form of compensation.

Thus, the case has the potential for setting a precedent for years to come on issues involving the conservation of the nation’s most sensitive natural areas. It is so critical to California that Gov. Pete Wilson and his Resources Agency have intervened on the side of the Tahoe agency, as have the U.S. solicitor general and the American Planning Assn., among others.

The pioneering work of Tahoe agency, after overcoming enormous legal and political obstacles, has become a model for other governmental conservation programs. Private rights must be protected, but they must also be balanced against the public interest in protecting unique natural areas against degredation. In this case, we believe, the scales should tip to the clear public interest.