TRPA employs ‘fire, aim, ready’ approach to managing Tahoe, say critics

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which is failing, by its own admission , to meet the milestones of its plan to reduce automobile traffic, is spending $24 million in federal funds to add 1.7 miles of trail to the lake’s remote and undeveloped east shore, a move destined to bring more visitors to the area — primarily by car.

An initial three-mile stretch of trail connecting Incline Village and Sand Harbor, once considered an impossible feat, cost more than $40 million and opened five years ago.

“The narrow, two-lane Nevada State Route 28 is the only road around Lake Tahoe’s eastern shore and is critical for everything from emergency vehicles to tourists – on an average summer day over 2,000 people access this area for recreation,” Nevada’s U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, who helped secure the funding, said in news releases last month. “The lack of parking and connecting paths has created serious congestion and safety concerns.”

The two senators did not respond to the Nevada Current ’s questions about residents’ concerns that the trail’s construction would generate more visitors in more cars.

“The TRPA, the Tahoe Fund, and the Tahoe Chamber are all just making the transportation problem worse with their emphasis on economic vitality over the health of the lake,” says Sierra Club vice-chair Tobi Tyler “Spending a gazillion dollars on trails that are not commuter trails just leads to more traffic and degrading the lake.”

“When they talk about trails, they’re talking about laying asphalt. This is not just carving trails out of dirt,” says Tahoe resident Pamela Tsigdinos, who contends “transportation projects” are a euphemism in TRPA-speak for economic development.

“The biggest transportation issue facing the lake and the Tahoe basin is not a trail deficit,” she wrote in a recent column in the Reno Gazette-Journal, adding the “once-pristine shoreline now gets millions of visitors using the two-lane State Route 28 like a mall drop-off, backing up traffic and parking haphazardly wherever they can abandon their vehicles.”

The TRPA, she says, has failed to demonstrate how the area will handle demand for the newfound access to the lake. “It is going to drive more visitor traffic than Highway 28 can ever accommodate. It is a firefighter and evacuation nightmare.”

Las Vegan Fred Voltz, a former resident of Carson City, agrees.

“That TRPA and the feds would blow $24 million on a two-mile extension of bike and walking trails does nothing to reduce congestion to the immediate south and north of Sand Harbor State Park,” he says.

TRPA spokesman Jeff Cowen says the agency is building paid parking lots for an undisclosed number of cars and installing barriers that will prevent illegal roadside parking and its inherent risks. “The ultimate goal is to have parking reservation systems,” he said, which could result in fewer visitors for lack of a place to park.

A vocal critic of the TRPA, Tsigdinos says the idea that visitors without a parking reservation will be deterred from entering the basin is absurd. She contends TRPA has prioritized tourism over the quality of Tahoe’s blue waters, as well as the quality of life of the basin’s residents.

Parking lots contribute little to the view of the rugged east shore from high atop the Tahoe Rim trail, and the money, critics suggest, could have been better spent determining the basin’s carrying capacity – the number of people it can accommodate without hurting the environment, as well as the number that can be evacuated, if needed.

Funding gap

Lake Tahoe is surrounded by State Route 28, which is snarled, especially in the summer, by a mix of traffic from 55,000 residents and some 25 million visitors a year, according to studies commissioned by the TRPA.

“ One Tahoe ”, a study commissioned by the TRPA in 2020, says the “quality of the ‘Tahoe Experience’ is threatened by the almost exclusive use of the automobile for travel by both visitors and residents. Lack of funding keeps the community’s transportation vision from becoming reality.”

Tahoe’s federal transportation funding is based on residential population size, according to the TRPA’s 2020 Regional Transportation Plan. The more people who live in Tahoe, the more funding it receives, resulting in a misguided incentive to attract more residents, despite a lack of housing.

The TRPA’s comprehensive transportation plan is estimated to cost $3.4 billion over 25 years. The agency projects a revenue shortage of $1 billion. By next year, TRPA will need $97 million – $3 million for active transportation projects and $94 million for deferred operations and maintenance, according to its plans.

Local governments provide about 30% – the largest share – of Tahoe transportation funds and come from a variety of sources that vary by jurisdiction.

Nevada and California provide about a fifth of the TRPA’s funding, however, most state funding is reliant on gas tax revenue, which doesn’t go as far as it once did, thanks to inflation. Additionally, motorists are buying less gas, given improvements in fuel economy, and more electric vehicles.

TRPA’s strategies for filling the gap, such as a per mile charge to use roads and higher parking fees during peak times at popular locations, tie the agency’s fortunes to cars and lots of miles traveled.

The agency is also considering congestion pricing and charges for driving into certain areas.  “There are examples of this pricing strategy in London, Stockholm, and soon in New York City.” says TRPA’s transportation planning report.

On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is scheduled to attend the annual Tahoe Summit.

This year’s theme – “Investing in transit, trails, and technology for the future.”

Cowen says while officials will likely “celebrate” the receipt of recent federal grants, the focus is expected to be on the reauthorization of the Tahoe Restoration Act, which has passed the Senate and is awaiting House action.

Voltz suggests elected officials at the Tahoe Summit “love to showboat how they shovel tons of federal money to TRPA. It looks so good at election time,” he says, adding TRPA has “chronically blown this largesse” on studies, highly paid bureaucrats and PR events, “without doing the serious work of actually protecting the lake and its surrounding communities from overdevelopment and excessive vacation home rentals.”

Meeting its metrics

The TRPA oversees water quality, housing, commercial development, and public safety in Tahoe. But critics and the agency’s own data suggest the agency is failing its mission on several fronts:

• Lake Tahoe’s famous water clarity declined from a visibility level of 105 feet in 1967 to 70 feet in 1999, according to the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act , passed by Congress in 2000. The Act estimated that without remediation, the lake would “lose its famous clarity in only 30 years.”  UC Davis reports an average water clarity of 68.2 feet in 2023, deteriorating to 53.5 feet during the summer.
• Housing, much of which has been converted to vacation rentals, is scarce and too expensive to house service industry employees who work in the basin. In December, the TRPA approved an amendment that seeks to increase density in Tahoe’s town centers to augment workforce housing. Residents fear the projects, like others designated as workforce housing, will ultimately be converted to luxury developments.
• A search of Airbnb.com returns “more than 1,000” vacation rental properties in Incline Village. The TRPA has placed no restrictions on the conversion of thousands of housing units lost to the short-term rental market.
• The agency is struggling to meet benchmarks of its goal, set in 2021, to achieve a 6.8% reduction in its vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita from 2018 to 2045. “Total VMT increased in 2017 and 2019, but fell in 2020 (likely due in part to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic),” says a TRPA report. Cowen of the TRPA says Tahoe, unlike the rest of the state, saw decreases in its traffic count and VMTs in 2022.

But of most concern, say residents, is the TRPA’s reluctance, despite its own findings and tragic examples in its own backyard, to meaningfully address what critics fear is a Lahaina-like nightmare in the making – a wildfire that leaves residents and tourists without an escape.

“Concern over the potential for a catastrophic wildfire in the Tahoe Basin is heightened by our travel patterns and current limited transportation infrastructure,” says the agency’s One Tahoe report. “Moving emergency equipment and personnel into the Basin while simultaneously trying to evacuate large numbers of people traveling by vehicle out of the Basin will be extremely challenging.”

New roads are not an option. The Tahoe Regional Planning Compact bans their construction as a matter of policy.

TRPA spokesman Cowen says evacuation planning “has not been a role that TRPA has ever had before,” adding the agency provides “support through funding, planning large-scale fuel reduction projects, and facilitating coordination between different jurisdictions.”

Since 1999, TRPA has been the area’s Metropolitan Planning Organization. The federal designation r equires that the agency “must carry out a continuing, comprehensive, and coordinated planning process that considers all transportation modes, provides a forum for public input, and supports social and economic vitality.”

“TRPA doesn’t want to be bothered with evacuation planning, transportation planning, wildlife-proof trash containment or any policies that would impede the tourism industry, which Tahoe depends upon to survive since there really is nothing else providing a tax base,” says Voltz.

At a TRPA meeting in March, Doug Flaherty of Tahoe Clean Air noted the agency’s transportation plan lacks a wildfire evacuation stress test, “a cumulative roadway by roadway” evaluation of how residents and tourists would fare during an evacuation, including the elderly, disabled, and others who lack vehicles. Of the 86 individuals who died in the Paradise fire, 72 were senior citizens.

“The TRPA can’t keep enticing people up here with increased development and million-dollar bike trails and then not take some of the responsibility for evacuation planning,” says Tyler of the Tahoe Area Sierra Club.

“As a partner on the 21-agency Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, we provide support through funding, planning large-scale fuel reduction projects, and facilitating coordination between different jurisdictions,” Cowen says. “That is currently the role that the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team also feels TRPA should follow for evacuation planning.”

The 21 agencies currently struggle to communicate during a disaster, according to TRPA reports.

A $1.7 million grant will be used to “upgrade the region’s communications infrastructure to ensure that transportation and utility entities, fire service, law enforcement, environmental organizations and community-based groups can benefit from an integrated, efficient, safe evacuation during emergencies,” says an April news release .

“Everyone talks about getting visitors into Tahoe,” says Tsigdinos. “No one talks about getting them out.”

This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: TRPA employs ‘fire, aim, ready’ approach to managing Tahoe, say critics