South Lake Tahoe City Council to Discuss Hot Topics

South Lake Tahoe City Council to meet April 23 to discuss important topics from minimum wage increase to allocating funds.

The upcoming meeting on Tuesday will be at 5:30 P.M. at City Hall, 1901 Lisa Maloff Way, and they are also streamed live on Channel 21 and the city’s website . They are run by the City Council, and members of the public are invited to join and voice their opinions.

They usually meet twice a month, but this is the only one for April.

One of the hot topics on the list is to establish a local minimum wage , which has been on the minds of many locals as we transition from winter to summer.

The Tahoe Daily Tribune posted an article on Saturday written by Scott Robbins that describes the difficulty of earning a living wage in Tahoe, specifically in the tourism industry that the area relies so heavily on.

“An equitable community is one in which all who work here, can afford the opportunity to live here…Today, in the City of South Lake Tahoe, this is not true, and the City Council bears the responsibility to fix it,” wrote Robbins.

Currently, the minimum wage in California is $16 an hour.

This issue goes hand in hand with another, affordable housing. Robbins goes on to describe some of the hurdles set by local organizations.

“...a coalition of the Tahoe’s special interests, consisting of the Chambers of Commerce, the Hotel Lodging Association, the Realtors Association, and the Tahoe Keys Homeowners Association (calling themselves, absurdly, “Keep Community First”), who have already opposed every effort to increase funding for affordable housing, are now opposing even a discussion on increasing wages.”

Another topic that will be discussed in the meeting is a quarterly update on the affordable housing waitlist .

South Lake Tahoe has eight affordable housing complexes with 344 available units and 1,108 people on the waitlist. These numbers are an obvious indicator of the housing issues.

The council doesn’t clearly outline what they are doing in response to this issue. They only state that the statistical insight can help determine the effectiveness of the city and community efforts to increase affordable housing.

In total there are 19 issues that the council hopes to address.

Others include Drainage Easement Acquisition at 3740 Blackwood Road for the Upper Bijou Park Creek, parking restrictions in the Heavenly Valley neighborhoods, and Authorization to Accept and Appropriate the $800,000 California Tahoe Conservancy Planning Grant for the Dennis Machida Memorial Greenway Trail Phase.

You can see the outline for the meeting here , and make your voice heard tomorrow at 5:30.