Lake Stays Blue but Critics of Panel See Red

Some see it as the guardian of the lake. Others consider it a bureaucratic boogeyman. Most figure it is a bit of both, a strict disciplinarian prescribing bitter medicine with good intentions--to save Lake Tahoe’s deep-blue waters.

For three decades, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has ruled over most aspects of life in the vast alpine bowl cradling the lake. In the process, planners say, Tahoe’s shoreline has become one of the most tightly regulated places on the planet.

Recently, the agency won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. On April 23, the justices upheld the agency’s right to impose a three-year building ban in the early 1980s as it studied how best to keep Tahoe’s water from being clouded by increasing runoff from development.

But the decision was in many ways just another signpost along the long, bumpy road the agency has traveled as it leads the charge to stem human impact on the lake’s sapphire waters.

Guided by a 14-member board composed of representatives drawn equally from California and Nevada, the planning agency wades into debates of water quality and wildlife, noise and scenic views, forest health and fisheries.

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Agency Implements Limits on Growth

For years, it has maintained a strict limit on growth, allowing 300 new residential units a year around the lake’s 72 miles of shoreline. Lots can’t be subdivided. To simply expand a wood deck requires a drawn-out review. In scenic spots, the agency dictates everything from a home’s hue to the number of trees that mask it from view.

Controversy is a frequent companion, like the ruckus raised a few years ago when the agency banned two-stroke engines on power water skis and outboard motorboats, fingered as big polluters of the lake because they can leak unburned gas.

But often as not the planning agency gets down and dirty in the details. It helped produced a thick landscaping guide for the Tahoe basin. Residents are urged to avoid using fertilizer that can wash off lawns and into the lake. The agency even advises them to refrain from raking up pine needles, which trap sediment and pollutants.

“If people understand what’s at stake, they’ll do the reasonable thing,” said Juan Palma, the agency’s executive director.

But the small victories can’t eclipse the big problem. Some scientists fear there is no way to reverse the trend of clarity loss in the lake. The embrace of civilization, they say, is just too strong: Tahoe has more than 56,000 permanent residents and a population swelling to 200,000 on a big summer weekend.

Undeterred, the planning agency is marshaling a $908-million effort to retrofit storm drains, reintroduce lakefront wetlands, restore creeks to their natural banks and generally attempt to undo the plumbing system installed since growth began to explode in the region after World War II.

One of the biggest hurdles remains the myriad homes and businesses built before current practices took hold. Fixing such places typically means doing relatively easy things, such as siphoning rainwater from roofs and funneling it into a rock-filled drainage ditch.

But getting homeowners to comply is a big task. With a planning agency staff of just 70, the hope is that residents will take up the cause without regulatory prodding.

Out on the shoreline streets, the planning agency is notorious for its regulatory recalcitrance. Though agency staff see it as urban legend run amok, many homeowners bristle when talk turns to the agency.

They’ve heard countless horror stories about long waits for simple building permits, denials of innocuous projects and restrictions on private property rights that are taken for granted elsewhere.

“They’re a necessary evil. You need guidelines; otherwise everything would go to heck,” said Warren Bedwell, who owns a home on one of the man-made canals of Tahoe Keys, a 1960s waterfront development that helped hasten the creation of the regional planning agency.

But he sees a flip side. Bedwell has friends who couldn’t add backyard decks because of the agency. “It seems the pendulum has swung too far.”

The agency’s history has been tangled from the beginning. Formed in 1969 by a compact approved by Tahoe’s border states--the California-Nevada line splits the water--and ratified by Congress, the early years were dogged by controversy. Environmentalists said the agency was too developer-friendly, while property owners gasped over new restrictions. Trust was nonexistent even between the two states; California created a separate agency to guide development on its side of the border during the 1970s.

A revised compact in the early 1980s ushered in a period of even more intense wrangling. Gary Midkiff, a former executive director of the planning agency, says that when he joined in 1983, the staff “couldn’t agree a lot of days when to go to lunch.” A siege mentality ruled.

But slowly the agency began to develop a consensus approach to solving differences among the basin’s factions, even as scientific evidence of the lake’s decline continued to mount.

The last decade has been far more harmonious. All involved agree that the lake’s future is paramount.

Battles continue, of course, albeit at a more muffled pitch.

Environmentalists want to see already-tight building restrictions ratcheted down further, from the current 300 a year to as few as 100 annually.

“We still see the agency as essentially very pro-development,” said Rochelle Nason, executive director of the League to Save Lake Tahoe.

The business sector and property rights advocates, meanwhile, are pressing for the planning agency to ease its tough stance on development right on the shore or at other high-visibility locations.

Midkiff, these days a Tahoe building consultant, said the agency now “treats anything that’s man-made as bad.” That proves irksome for wealthy clients who sometimes spend $30 million on a shoreline property, only to be told that those breathtaking views stand to be sullied by trees.

Even so, homes in excess of 10,000 square feet have continued to sprout on the shoreline. Among the denizens are financier Michael Milken, Mike Love of the Beach Boys and heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune.

“We’re seeing nothing but these monster mega homes,” said Nason, who worries that the huge structures--and the floating piers, docks and storage buildings that go along with them--threaten to trample what remains of the lake’s rocky shoreline.

Affordable housing, meanwhile, is virtually nonexistent. Casino workers, bus boys, maids, gardeners and even mid-level professionals are forced to commute across the pass from more affordable Nevada towns such as Carson City and Minden.

Commercial building costs have skyrocketed with the agency’s restrictions, but that hasn’t halted a redevelopment boom in South Lake Tahoe, where a veritable alpine village of new hotels, restaurants and shops is rising on land once dominated by kitschy, 1950s-style commercial sprawl. It’s all linked to nearby Heavenly Valley ski resort by a $26-million aerial tramway.

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Increasing Demand for Mass Transit

On any weekend, cars crowd the roads. Auto exhaust dumps more than half the nitrogen that ends up in the lake. But efforts to boost mass transit--and get both locals and tourists out of cars--have lagged.

“We’re woefully behind,” said Ron McIntyre of the North Lake Tahoe Resort Assn. “We’re in the most sensitive spot in the world, but we’re lagging places like Aspen, Vail, Sun Valley.”

Though a plan is afoot to pool private hotel and casino shuttles with public buses, there still won’t be enough to provide the sort of frequent service needed to attract riders.

Palma and others hope to boost ridership more than 1 million a year with new technology. By the end of the year, they hope to install high-tech stops on the lake’s southern shore. Riders will get a computer update from a global positioning satellite keeping track of buses on the road.

This effort to save a lake is occurring on a shrinking stage. With more than three-quarters of the basin under federal ownership and tight growth caps in place, Tahoe is fast approaching capacity.

In all, only about 6,000 undeveloped parcels remain, and 2,000 of them are expected to be purchased by land trusts and declared off-limits. In the next five years, only about 150,000 square feet of new commercial development is expected to be allowed.

Palma, for one, sees a big debate coming: a push to return government land to private ownership.

“There’s going to be pressures to release public lands for development,” he said. “The question will be: When it hits, will the people have the will to withstand it?”