UNBELIEVABLE: 7 Dead Bodies Discovered In Lake Amid $300 million Lake Tahoe Project…

UNBELIEVABLE: 7 Dead Bodies Discovered In Lake Amid $300 million Lake Tahoe Project

Congress approved $300 million for Lake Tahoe. Here’s where the money is going.

In South Lake Tahoe, cars stream down Highway 50. The casinos loom over the state line. But midway through the town, thousands of new plants and willows provide habitat for birds and animals and filter snowmelt flowing into Lake Tahoe. A walking path loops around the wetlands. The Upper Truckee Marsh is a swath of greenery unlike anywhere else in the Tahoe Basin. It’s also the basin’s largest wetland restoration project. What happened at the Upper Truckee Marsh is a story repeated throughout Lake Tahoe’s history, again and again. In the 1950s and 1960s, developers dredged and filled the wetlands for a condominium project that was never completed. Where the river once meandered through plants and willows, an artificial channel was built to straighten the river and flushed sediment directly into the lake. The wetlands dried up. Now, after a substantial effort led by the California Tahoe Conservancy to reverse the mistakes of ill-planned development, the river has returned to its meandering path through the 250-acre marsh. The amount spent at the Upper Truckee Marsh comes to $13.6 million, to date. The money came from multiple federal and state agencies. But the keystone holding it all together was $1 million from the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act.

Those Lake Tahoe Restoration Act dollars are a “critical funding source that has enabled the Conservancy and our basin partners to make so much progress in protecting and restoring the lower nine miles of the Upper Truckee River corridor,” said Chris Carney, communications director for the California Tahoe Conservancy, in an email to SFGATE.

The work is never done. Upstream, the next phase of the Upper Truckee restoration entails the demolition of a 1970s-era Motel 6 to restore and preserve the surrounding meadow and wetlands, and the LTRA is coming in to support that work too, chipping in $500,000. Investing in Lake Tahoe’s environment for future generations Dollar figures don’t exactly come to mind when you’re walking through the wetlands or taking in the view of Lake Tahoe. And that’s exactly the point of successful restoration work – to keep the focus on the natural world. However, it takes a lot of money to execute environmental restoration projects this large. In Lake Tahoe, more than 800 such environmental improvement projects – a cost that adds up to $2.9 billion – have been completed since 1997, when President Bill Clinton made a landmark visit to Lake Tahoe.

On a July day in 1997, a helicopter carrying President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore landed on a field in Incline Village, disrupting a local lacrosse tournament, according to an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal. At that time, Lake Tahoe was losing its clarity at a rapid rate. That morning, the president and vice president went out onto the lake on a research boat with scientists from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, who spoke about the threats Tahoe was facing. By the end of his visit, Clinton had pledged $50 million to support the restoration and protection of Lake Tahoe. The cooperation of elected officials, government agencies, nonprofits and businesses to protect Lake Tahoe is “an outstanding model for the work we have to do to protect all kinds of national treasures,” Clinton said at the 1997 Lake Tahoe Forum.

Three years later, the federal government upped its commitment to Lake Tahoe. A bipartisan coalition led by Harry Reid, the late Nevada senator, pushed the original Lake Tahoe Restoration Act through Congress in 2000, authorizing $300 million of funding for the next decade. Then, in 2016, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California saw that the second iteration of the LTRA was approved in Congress, this time for $415 million. Since 2016, $121.8 million has been spent, supporting everything from thinning forests to fighting aquatic invasive species, projects that not only support the environment, but also create thousands of jobs. The LTRA has been one of the most significant sources of funding for the basin since it originally passed in 2000, funneling hundreds of millions of federal dollars to environmental work in Lake Tahoe. It is “an example of bipartisan collaboration in practice that not only protects an irreplaceable natural resource but also generates jobs for local communities,” said Julie Regan, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, at a September hearing before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Yet, the act nearly lapsed last month, which would have cut Tahoe off from the remaining $300 million allocated in 2016 and, in turn, would have affected a significant amount of work being done to protect local communities from wildfires and improve Tahoe’s water clarity.

As the expiration date on the LTRA loomed, a team of lawmakers from Nevada and California, along with representatives from government agencies, nonprofits and the Washoe Tribe, rallied in Washington, D.C., to advocate in Congress for the bill’s reauthorization. “That legislation is expiring at the end of this month,” Regan said at the hearing. “And with only 29% of the original authorization having been appropriated thus far, we’re simply asking for more time on the congressional clock.” Congress passed the Lake Tahoe Restoration Reauthorization Act at the end of September and on Tuesday, Oct. 1, President Biden signed the bill into law, assuring that hundreds of millions of dollars will continue to support the landscapewide environmental work in Lake Tahoe for the next 10 years

The passage of the bill was yet another chance for politicians to repeat the themes of cooperation and progress in Tahoe. “The collaboration occurring in the Tahoe Basin is truly a model of forest management for the rest of the nation,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman, from Arkansas. Westerman spoke from the floor of the House when the reauthorization of the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act was being debated. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, spoke next.