OMG is part serious running, part casual walking and part crazy costume party.

The inaugural OMG (Old Meyers Grade) Fun Run will be May 22 from 10am-noon.

Register online for on of three categories – youth, costume-walking or competitive. Cost is $25 for adults and $10 for children under 12. Those who register before the race will receive an OMG T-shirt. Registration the day of the event is $30/$15; from 7:30-9:30am at the Grade.

Old Meyers Grade is located 0.1 miles up South Upper Truckee Road. The course gate-to-gate round trip is 2.6 miles

Prizes go to the first person to reach the top of the grade and for the most laps in each division. Participants who complete at least three laps will have their names posted online. There will be refreshments and music.

The OMG Fun Run is presented by the Meyers Community Foundation. Proceeds support and promote creative and sustainable projects, and community-enhancing events in Meyers.

An El Dorado County man amy be spending a year in prison for failing to serve a 60-day sentence.

A jury on April 26 found Cesar Caballero, 46, of Diamond Springs guilty.

According to court documents, on Aug. 30, 2011, Caballero was convicted of obstruction of mail for submitting change of address forms to the U.S. Postal Service for the purpose of diverting mail addressed to the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians to himself. Caballero appealed, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed his conviction on two of the three counts. He was resentencedJune 29, 2015, to 60 days behind bars.

He was ordered to surrender to begin serving his sentence by Sept. 8, 2015, but never showed up.

Caballero was then arrested Feb. 28.

Caballero is scheduled to be sentenced May 17. He faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison, a $100,000 fine, and a one-year term of supervised release.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Lake Tahoe News

Even though the number of permanent residents is declining in North Lake Tahoe, second home ownership and tourism is increasing.

Placer County Deputy Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Merchant gave supervisors an update this week on services, programs, and projects delivered to citizens in the eastern part of the county. Part of the presentation highlighted the growing economic divide.

North Lake Tahoe area property taxes saw a 9 percent increase since last fiscal year. This is being attributed to the growth in second homes.

The hotel tax is also on the rise, in large part because tourism is growing. The North Lake Tahoe region had 822,000 visitors in 2002, while 10 years later that number had grown to 1,037,000.

The transient occupancy revenue was more than $12 million in 2014-15. Sixty percent of that goes back into the community to provide marketing services, increased transit services and visitor related capital projects such as bike trails and beach maintenance.

Merchant told the electeds that in the last 10 years more than $32 million in TOT funding has leveraged $235 million in private, local, state and federal funding sources to enable Placer County to complete nearly 100 Tahoe area projects such as the Kings Beach Commercial Core Improvement Project, Tahoe City Transit Center, Commons Beach Restoration and bike trail expansion and improvement.

While tourists are spending money, not all locals are doing well. This is evidenced by the number of people applying to the CalFresh (aka food stamps) program. The number of applications more than doubled over a five-year period in eastern Placer County with 2,020 applications in 2010 growing to 4,430 applications in 2015. That number is expected to grow this year.

“The increase in permanent residents needing social services is very concerning,” Supervisor Jennifer Montgomery. “We need to understand how to address this in eastern Placer County and understand how it relates to a lack of affordable housing and economic opportunities.”

By Dale Kasler, Sacramento Bee

CalPERS’ former chief executive, sitting in jail for allegedly committing battery against a former girlfriend, is expected to have his sentencing postponed a week for his role in the pension fund’s bribery scandal.

Fred Buenrostro was scheduled to be sentenced May 18 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco after pleading guilty to accepting bribes from a Lake Tahoe investment banker. But with Buenrostro expected to be in Sacramento County’s main jail until May 22, prosecutors and defense attorneys have agreed to postpone the federal sentencing to May 24. The proposed delay awaits a judge’s approval.

Read the whole story

·       Zephyr Cove Tennis Club is giving players more reasons to join the club. Deanne Larsell, a USPTA pro, will be teaching cardio tennis on Tuesdays from 8-9am starting May 3. She will also be teaching coed 3.5-4.0 clinics on Tuesdays from 9:30-11am. For more info, email poplarsell@gmail.com.

·      Sugar Pine Foundation is having plantings on April 29 in Truckee, May 1 in Tahoma and May 5 in South Lake Tahoe. More info is online.

·       Caltrans is hosting an open house on May 4 about the proposed Highway 50 safety project in Camino. The meeting will take place from 5:30 to 7:30pm at Camino Elementary School, 3060 Snows Road, with a brief presentation scheduled for 6pm.

·       St. Theresa Catholic Church is hosting a document shredding day on May 28 from 10am-2pm in the parking lot of the South Lake Tahoe church. Donations will go to the Religious Education Department.

·       There will be a forum for Incline Village General Improvement District board candidates on May 24, 6:30-9pm at the Tahoe Environmental Science Center.

A grass-roots effort is under way to bring a dog park to Truckee.

Tahoe Vista, Tahoe City and South Lake Tahoe have parks for canines.

People like the parks because it’s an opportunity for the animals to socialize, run without going on a long walk or hike, and it’s in a confined space.

Resident Nova Lance-Seghi is spearheading the idea, with the hopes Truckee-Donner Recreation & Park District will build the facility. Locations are being scouted and costs analyzed.

South Lake’s park opened in 2008 at a cost $35,000. The nearly 1 acre is in Bijou Community Park. It’s sectioned off for big and small dogs, with the big guys having a bit more space to run.

For those interested in a Truckee dog park, there is an online petition to generate support.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Kathryn Reed

A pretty lake and casinos. That combo is no longer enough. That is why Lake Tahoe needs to up its game if it’s going to keep attracting tourists.

That was an overriding message delivered this week by those in the industry.

Lynn Carpenter, vice president of marketing for Visit California – the state tourism agency, said her people are focused on showing the California experience. It’s sharing the California lifestyle, a place where visitors can have an emotional connection to wherever they are visiting.

California has lost a segment of the tourism market in the last few years. It used to be that 52 percent of travelers came to the state; it’s now 45 percent.

One thing helping the overall state effort is that the marketing budget has grown from $6 million in 2006 to $150 million today. Promotional material includes television ads, online pieces, written propaganda, and offices in foreign countries. There is information on the state website that can also be used by local tourism agencies as well as individual businesses.

Marketing material from Visit California. Photo/LTN

Carpenter along with Carl Ribaudo of South Lake Tahoe based SMG Consulting spoke April 26 at the annual tourism conference put on by Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority and Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s not just the thing you have in your destination. It’s about how interesting you are and the connections that people make,” Ribaudo said.

The whole point is that the product is different than the experience. Old school is to have focused on the product. Memories have always been what people take away from a vacation. Tapping into that in a deeper way is what the experts say needs to happen.

“We talk about lifestyle. They want to live like a Californian,” Carpenter explained.

The marketing zeroes in on the outdoors, culinary, entertainment, culture and luxury.

This was the first winter for Catch the Winter Wave — outdoor fun in California  in winter. Crews will be in Mammoth next week filming snowboarding sensation Chloe Kim at her home resort. That footage will be used for next year’s campaign.

“We love talking about the snow product when we’re overseas,” Carpenter said. This is because so many foreigners equate the state with just beaches and Disneyland.

Family travel is also big, capturing 42 percent of the market. That is one reason the state has come up with a second video targeting kids. It will be called Welcome to Kidifornia. Carpenter wouldn’t divulge any specifics.

Tourism is big business in the Golden State, accounting for $121 billion in revenues in 2015 and more than 1 million jobs.

Visit California divides the state into 12 regions, with Tahoe being in the High Sierra. In 2014, $2.6 billion in direct spending is attributed to tourism in this region, there were 28,000 jobs, and local tax dollars totaled $98 million.

Statewide, Canada, China, United Kingdom, Australia and Japan account for the most international visitors. For the South Shore, it’s Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and China. The High Sierra is the only region where Germans are the No. 1 visitor. This is attributed to their love of the outdoors.

Ribaudo is a believer that arts and culture need to be a larger component of what the South Shore offers because those are things people connect to. He wonders why all the art created at the three-day SnowGlobe music festival isn’t out in the community.

He also doesn’t believe the area tells its history in a compelling manner, if at all.

“We need to make every part of the South Shore interesting,” he said. “It’s the little things that matter.” This includes right down to the bike racks. For what is supposed to be bike friendly town it’s hard to know cyclists are welcome if they have no place to park.

He showed pictures of other locales that are doing things better – like Oceanside with its abundance of bike racks, public art in obscure towns, and funky restaurants that are destinations unto themselves.

“What will keep people coming here is if we are real and authentic,” Ribaudo said.

By Joe Mathews

I want nothing from California governments—except whatever I need right now.

So why, in this Internet age, doesn’t my state offer a one-stop shop where I can renew my driver’s license, register to vote, research state records, pay my taxes, and buy passes to a state park?

Joe Mathews

Mine is not a new notion. To the contrary, the one-shop stop is one of the oldest ideas in California governance—a staple of candidate position papers and commission reports. In the last year, California worthies have suggested one-stop online shops for poor people to sign up for multiple public assistance programs at once, for businesses to handle all their permitting and licensing, and for California parents signing up for child care.

“Imagine if Californians had one personalized log-in account to manage all their business with the state, from updating address information and voter registration to paying taxes and applying for and managing benefits,” the Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency, suggested recently. “And they could do it all from a mobile device while taking the bus to soccer practice or at home after putting their children to bed for the night.”

These are sweet dreams, kids. But, like the Holy Grail, the effective California one-stop shop exists only in the realm of myth.

Why?

My one-stop answer: California has too many governments—literally thousands of them—and nearly every single one sees compliance with its separate standards and rules as a way to protect its very existence.

Indeed, our state governing system seems designed with the opposite of one-stop shopping as its guiding principle. California has more permitting agencies than most other states, all sorts of regional bodies, incentives for endless litigation, and the California Environmental Quality Act, which can kill almost any worthwhile project.

Hence, a paradox: Californians need one-stop shops to deal with the government because of the very inefficiencies that make creating one-stop shops nearly impossible here.

This paradox is also why the idea of the one-stop shop is so very useful. It’s an essential dodge for politicians and governments that have no real interest in doing the hard work of consolidating agencies and redesigning government to make it more efficient for taxpayers. Given the dysfunction these one-stop shops are proposed to mask, it’s hardly surprising that they never make it very far off the ground. When the state does launch a one-stop shop, it’s often incomplete (the California Business Portal provides good information but no single form to register your business) or makes so many mistakes that it produces new industries to help you navigate it (like the Covered California health insurance exchange).

The private sector has developed what are effectively one-stop shops—but those are rare and require a corporate dictator, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Uber’s Travis Kalanick, crazed enough to destroy old industries. The few governments around the world able to pull off the one-stop shop don’t have America’s system of divided government. Check out Great Britain’s miraculous GOV.UK, and dream of a California parliament.

For now, the best option available to those who want customer-friendly service in California is to hire consultants and lobbyists. The absence of a one-stop shop has been a boon to such influence peddlers, whose numbers keep growing.

Which gives me an idea. If California governments won’t give us a one-stop shop for the state, the least they can do is provide Californians with their own fixers. That’s right—concierges for all. With a ballot measure, we could make concierge service a constitutional right.

California government has experimented with concierge-style service before. Veterans of Pete Wilson’s administration talk about “Red Teams”—essentially, concierges for companies—they organized in the 1990s. But concierges-for-all would be much costlier, with most of the approximately 100,000 (my best estimate) concierges being private contractors rather than government employees (we couldn’t afford the pensions).

These concierges wouldn’t have to wear uniforms or golden-key badges like hotel concierges—unless they were into that sort of thing. But each California adult would be assigned a concierge; we’d each receive our concierge’s email and cell phone, and we could put him or her on speed dial like we do with the plumber or the dentist. These concierges would have to respond to our requests in 48 hours, and state and local officials would have to respond to their requests in 24 hours. Our concierges would have the power to secure permits and licenses, make appointments for us with any government official, or even schedule visits to our relatives who might be doing time in state prisons.

Call it a dream if you like, but it’s no less dreamy than a one-stop shop. Really, I want nothing from California government, except somebody whose job it is to get me whatever I need right now.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times

On the vacant, sun-blasted streets southwest of the Strip, Joe Cervantes sees an America on the decline.

For Cervantes, life in these sand-blown suburbs has come to look like much that has gone wrong with the rest of the country.

The way Cervantes sees it, the government is a high-stakes card game at which he and most Americans never get a seat. He voted for President Obama but has twice been disappointed. This election, the name he is betting on is emblazoned in gold on the Vegas skyline: Trump.

“The middle class is done in this country. I think we need an outsider like [Donald] Trump to come in and upset the establishment and make them help the middle class,” Cervantes says.

The GOP front-runner swept the February caucuses with a nearly 2-1 edge over the establishment candidate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, claiming all but two of Nevada’s counties.

Read the whole story

Choices for Children is hosting the 2nd annual Mother’s Day Diaper Drive from April 29-May 16.

Diaper donation boxes will be distributed throughout the community, including at the South Lake Tahoe Library, Boys and Girls Club, First Baptist Church, and South Lake Tahoe Recreation Center.

Diapers of any size and baby wipes are being collected to give to families in the community that are struggling to provide these basics for their children.

According to the agency, one in three 1 in 3 U.S. families has difficulty affording the cost of diapers.

For more info,  call 530.541.5848.