It’s not good when it takes a formal letter from a Nevada legislative committee chair to pry loose a required environmental update from the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA).
This letter, sent Oct. 16, followed months of public testimony at the state capitol and TRPA headquarters in Stateline, Nevada. Just days later, California’s Attorney General’s office also sent a letter advising TRPA’s Governing Board that the agency failed, again, to meet a reduction in one of its key environmental milestones: Vehicle Miles Traveled. The correspondence referenced several previous warning letters. California’s Department of Justice further noted TRPA’s latest environmental threshold pivot was a “confusing mix of apples and oranges.”
Meanwhile, this month the League to Save Lake Tahoe and Sierra Watch filed a lawsuit against a controversial massive development at Palisades Tahoe. Conservationists deem the project significantly detrimental to Lake Tahoe due to worsening traffic congestion, increased air pollution and degraded Lake Tahoe Basin water quality. TRPA stands to receive $2 million in mitigation fees should the project go forward.
A bi-state agency, TRPA has spent nearly $3 billion in federal, state and private funding over two decades – and recently secured $300 million from Congress. It has also raised greenwashing to an artform.
How we got here
TRPA first laid out Environmental Threshold Carrying Capacities in 1982 to help protect and evaluate Lake Tahoe in areas such as air and water quality, soil conservation, vegetation, noise, recreation, scenic resources, and fish and wildlife. Meant as straightforward metrics rooted in science to identify trends and inform policy, these thresholds are required by law in the Tahoe Regional Planning Compact. The Compact, first championed by then Governors Laxalt and Reagan, was adopted in 1980 by Nevada and California State Legislatures, ratified by the United States Congress, and approved by President Carter on December 19, 1980.
TRPA justified changes to environmental thresholds in 2007 due “to advances in scientific understanding.” It suggested a “need for development” and rolled threshold changes into a needlessly complex environmental improvement program (EIP). Today’s EIP dashboard defies clear threshold answers but there are colorful renderings and vague symbols. Ziplines, tube lifts and trails are listed as accomplishments.
The agency since appears to have developed antibodies to modern environmental science.
Conceived to protect Lake Tahoe and keep it from turning gray, TRPA moves further from its conservation roots with each systematic amendment to once strict development ordinances. TRPA has modified the Regional Plan’s Code of Ordinances 44 times since 2013 resulting in 375 code changes. These changes are not in service to the environment but to the agency’s highly prized public-private partnerships and programs. These have been packaged with a parade of clever marketing buzzwords: Pathway 2007, Community Enhancement Program, Lake Tahoe Basin Prosperity Plan, Partnering for Destination Stewardship at Lake Tahoe. Their latest: Cultivating Community.
Workarounds and false promises
TRPA’s campaign to obfuscate environmental realities took shape with Pathway 2007. This contentious endeavor aimed to make it easier for development projects to gain approval. In 2010 TRPA’s respected scientists got pink slips in no small part because their findings conflicted with agency leadership plans to push growth over conservation.
Pathway also enriched consultants by outsourcing TRPA’s environmental analysis. With internal guardrails gone, TRPA set about rewriting its rules for land use, which resulted in the 2012 Regional Plan Update and Tahoe’s last full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
Shortly thereafter conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, sued the agency. The lawsuit declared TRPA may not update the plan unless TRPA finds that the amended plan maintains the same environmental standards to protect the lake’s beauty and environment. Further, it contended TRPA’s new plan did not maintain the environmental protections in the original Regional Plan.
Article VII of the Compact requires TRPA to prepare and consider a detailed Environmental Impact Statement before approving or carrying out any project that may have a significant effect on the environment.
Sounds airtight? That was the intent, but over the past 25 years TRPA leadership and partners pursued an ambitious long-term strategy to engineer workarounds. TRPA has sponsored new 501 (c)(3) structures and Business Improvement Districts to tax visitors and residents alike – without a vote – to fund more tourism amenities. When its ordinance language gets in the way, TRPA cavalierly proposes and rubber stamps amendments.
If the agency’s tactics weren’t so environmentally harmful, you’d have to admire its brazen unilateral approach.
A prescient Tahoe Quarterly piece a decade ago quotes environmentalist Laurel Ames on the agency’s faulty logic: “TRPA never produced numbers demonstrating more clustered development will result in the critical mass necessary to fund a full-time public transportation network.”
The article notes that the idea of leveraging private dollars in an era of dwindling public funding might be sound theory, but Ames and others did not want Lake Tahoe to serve “as an experimental laboratory.”
“What happens if they try it out at Tahoe and make a mess of it?” Ames asks. “The Lake loses. It’s a big risk. There is too much ‘don’t worry, it will work’ in this plan.”
TRPA’s spokesman stated the intent of the Regional Plan update was to encourage private entities to leverage their own money to complete environmentally beneficial projects. “The plan focuses on restoration of sensitive lands by encouraging more redevelopment, more revitalization,” he added.
A dozen years later, large swaths of commercial land surrounding Lake Tahoe languish in blight. Since favoring development and tourism the Lake has succinctly been described as “sick.” Today, the agency relies on a simplistic “Initial Environmental Checklist” for substantial projects with no mention of threshold attainment. (Waldorf Astoria Crystal Bay’s troubled developer merely checked “no impact.”)
On south shore a court decreed – twice—that TRPA must set aside its approval to use herbicides in the Tahoe Keys following Tahoe Area Sierra Club legal action. Separately, the agency fails to use its basin-wide authority to tackle Lake Tahoe’s growing plastic debris despite leadership from Truckee and South Lake Tahoe banning the sale of single use plastics.
And those environmental thresholds TRPA promised to evaluate every four years? The last threshold attainment update was 2019.
No more lip service
During June’s TRPA governing board meeting, the League to Save Lake Tahoe’s policy director—in a chorus of voices calling for a more comprehensive, honest focus on modern environmental threats to Lake Tahoe—zeroed in on TRPA’s toothless EIP dashboard and compliance deficits.
Of TRPA’s $28 million budget, only $400,000 a year is spent on enforcement.
In six meetings this year Nevada’s legislative committee tasked with TRPA oversight failed to fully explore these issues. Finally asked directly why there hasn’t been an EIS since 2012 TRPA’s executive director implausibly responded: “there has not been a big action that has triggered a full environmental impact statement.” Pressed to provide environmental data before the 2025 legislative session, the agency head committed to an update for TRPA’s Dec. 18 governing board. The update isn’t on the meeting agenda.
If TRPA spent as much time attaining environmental thresholds as it does on partner programs, lobbying and weakening ordinances that create developer loopholes and workarounds we’d know the true health of Lake Tahoe. It’s time to end TRPA’s greenwashing and lip service to the environment.
The public is waiting.
