Lake Tahoe buoy, pier plan protested

A half-dozen critics unfurled protest signs outside a workshop last week at the agency’s office on the south shore.

“Lake Tahoe is a national treasure, and we should treat it as such,” Cory Ritchie of Stateline said Thursday. “We shouldn’t litter it with piers and turn it into Any Lake, USA.”

Laurel Ames said the demonstration was called because the Tahoe agency board’s decision on shore zone ordinances is expected as early as June.

At the workshop, representatives from various interest groups engaged in sometimes tense discussion with agency Executive Director John Singlaub regarding the eighth alternative proposed to update the shore zone ordinances.

The latest alternative would allow construction of up to 138 new piers and the placement of 1,862 new buoys on the lake.

The previous alternative would have allowed the same number of new buoys but the development of 340 new piers, according to Tahoe Regional Planning Agency documents.

After a question from Tahoe board member Jerry Waldie about the justification for allowing new pier development, Singlaub said the latest alternative was a “political decision” bartered between California and Nevada agencies following concerns from California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi.

In January 2007, Garamendi wrote a letter to the agency stating new structures along the shore zone would be detrimental to recreation and block public access.

Maximum distances buoys could be placed from shore, mitigation requirements for pier maintenance, and unanswered questions regarding the types of public access allowed on Tahoe’s California shore front were among the concerns expressed by Jan Brisco, executive director of the Tahoe Lakefront Owners’ Association.

Brisco described the Tahoe agency’s processes for pier maintenance in the newest alternative as “onerous.”