By Associated Press
State officials say a multistate online poker network allowing gamblers in Delaware and Nevada to play against one another is up and running.
Govs. Jack Markell of Delaware and Brian Sandoval of Nevada announced the start of the network on Wednesday.
The network is the result of an agreement that Markell and Sandoval signed in February 2014.
California State Parks and the California Tahoe Conservancy are hosting a public workshop on the potential reconstruction of the public pier at Kings Beach State Recreation Area.
The workshop is April 1 from 6:30-8pm in the North Tahoe Event Center (8318 N. Lake Boulevard, Kings Beach).
The upgrades are being considered to increase accessibility for pedestrians and boaters on the pier, as well as offer more recreation opportunities at Kings Beach SRA.
More information, including a comment form for those who cannot attend the workshop, go online.
Josette Lewis from the UC Davis World Food Center will be talking about Agriculture, Food & Nutrition from Local to Global on April 23. This date has changed, it had been scheduled for April 9.
Lewis is associate director of the World Food Center, which was launched in 2013.
What does it take to feed 9 billion people? How does our food system encourage California agriculture to remain globally competitive, while reducing poverty in low-income countries? How can we deliver healthier outcomes for malnourished communities in Asia and Africa, while reducing rising obesity rates around the world? A food system that meets growing global demand must lower our environmental footprint as well.
Delivering solutions that address the complexity of these trade-offs requires connecting partners from areas spanning scientific excellence, innovation, policy and industry.
The program will begin at 6pm, happy hour begins at 5:30 at the Tahoe Science Center, 291 Country Club Drive in Incline Village on the campus of Sierra Nevada College. Cost is $5.
For more information or directions call 775.881.7566, or go online. To register, go online.
By Lewis Griswold, Fresno Bee
PINEHURST — A massive die-off of pine trees in the southern Sierra Nevada caused by beetles attacking drought-stressed trees is turning forests brown and creating a fire tinderbox.
From El Portal in Mariposa County to Kernville in Kern County and beyond, stands of dead trees are striking fear in the hearts of mountain residents.
“You drive around and it’s all around us,” said Lee Duncan, who lives in Miramonte in Fresno County near Pinehurst. “It’s like a gasoline can everywhere.”
About the only hope in halting the die-off is for the drought to end, an unlikely occurrence this year as winter ended with perhaps the lowest Sierra snowpack on record.
As a fourth year of drought looms, mountain residents are stuck with the cost of removing dead trees next to their homes and loggers fault the U.S. Forest Service for not allowing them to thin forests. But forest managers say the tree die-off might help Mother Nature.
By Joe Mathews, Zocalo Public Square
One of the little joys of being Californian is the opportunity to taunt folks back East about their terrible winter weather. Hey, Boston, how does it feel to have been colonized by Eskimos?
But this winter, we seem to be overdoing it, sending out a blizzard of social media postings of palm trees and blue skies. It’s enough to make you wonder if all our taunting merely masks our fears about our own weather.
Horror film directors will tell you that nothing is more frightening than what you can’t see. By that logic, California has never had a scarier winter than this one. Where is all the snow that should be in the mountains? How could San Francisco possibly go all of January without any rainfall? And what happened to the February frosts on cars, lawns, and rooftops that gave Angelenos something to talk about over their morning lattes?
The paradox of the California climate is that, precisely because we seem to have so little weather, the weather is more important here than just about anywhere else. According to a new poll, 69 percent of us say the climate is their favorite thing about living in California (and we love the weather more than we love our families). Our regional economies, our lifestyles, and our culture all rely on predictably pleasant weather. And so we are profoundly sensitive to slight changes in the weather. We talk ceaselessly about the variations in microclimates within our regions, and many of us can offer instant analysis on what we consider to be the vast differences between 77, 80, and 83 degrees.
This hypersensitivity is one big reason why Californians have taken climate change more seriously than people in other states. The threat is not merely to our coastline (sea levels could rise nearly 2 feet by 2100) or our water supplies but to our very sense of ourselves. It is unsettling to see one of our shared home’s most fundamental and enduring advantages in flux.
A series of meetings are scheduled in the next month regarding the final environment impact report, environmental impact statement, and environmental assessment document for the proposed Highway 89/Fanny Bridge Community Revitalization Project.
The Tahoe Transportation District and Federal Highway Administration-Central Federal Lands Highway Division are proposing improvements to resolve the existing traffic congestion at Y in Tahoe City and address the long-term structural integrity of Fanny Bridge.
The project site extends approximately 0.7 miles on Highway 28 and 0.6 miles on Highway 89.
The environmental document is online.
The meetings are:
· Tahoe Transportation District, March 27, 9:30am at the Granlibakken, 725 Granlibakken Road, Tahoe City.
· Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Advisory Planning Commission, April 8, 9:30am at TRPA, 128 Market St., Stateline.
· Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Governing Board, April 23, 9:30am at the North Tahoe Conference Center, 8318 N. Lake Blvd., Kings Beach.
• The annual South Shore tourism forum is April 21 from 3:30-5:30pm at Lake Tahoe Resort Hotel in South Lake Tahoe. This forum will explore how Tahoe can set itself up as a leading recreation destination.
• On April 22 at 5pm there will be a workshop about South Lake Tahoe’s single room occupancy ordinance. It will be at the Senior Center, 3050 Lake Tahoe Blvd.
• Earth Day will be celebrated April 25 from 10am-3pm at Bijou Community Park in South Lake Tahoe. Earth Day recognizes, celebrates, and promotes the region’s unique beauty, while educating the public about local environmental issues. Learn about ways to counteract global climate change through recycling and composting, alternative energy, water conservation, sustainability, and reducing one’s ecological footprint.
• Tahoe Donner received a Best of Weddings 2015 award by the Knot, a multi-media company headquartered in New York City that publishes content for couples planning weddings.
• Learn how to re-humanize the workplace with StartHuman. This workshop is designed to help people ditch workplace drama, achieve new levels of engagement and ultimately restore relationships between employees and employers. It is April 14 from 5-7pm in Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce’s conference room. For more info, go online.
By Jenna McLaughlin, Mother Jones
In 2014, the 300 million visitors to U.S. national parks may have noticed the potholes in the roads, the magnificent vistas obscured by dense brush, dirty visitors’ centers in need of basic repairs, trails that were not maintained, and overgrown campgrounds. Why? Blame Congress, which has routinely purchased new federal lands over the last 20 years while neglecting to fund the maintenance of existing national parks. National parks and historic sites need almost $12 billion in upkeep — or about four times the National Parks Service’s annual budget. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans proposed a budget that would slash spending by $5.5 trillion in 10 years.
So why the backlog? The NPS claims that stingy funding from Congress has forced park employees to make tough decisions about which repairs to perform and which to put off. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and many conservationists place most of the blame on the government, which has bought up new land instead of spending money maintaining the sites it already administers.
“We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to acquire additional federal lands, but none of that funding is applied to the maintenance backlog,” she wrote in a 2013 op-ed in the Hill.
With an annual budget of $3 billion, the NPS is responsible for managing and maintaining 75,780 sites across the country — including such tourist destinations as the Grand Canyon, San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Ellis Island, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone — and many of the nation’s most iconic NPS-administered landmarks are fast falling into disrepair.
This person is being sought in connection with using a stolen credit card. Photo/Provided
A credit card stolen from a trailhead off Upper Kingsbury Grade was used at the Walmart in Gardnerville.
A reward is being offered for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator. Call Douglas County Sheriff’s Department at 775.782.5126 or Douglas County Secret Witness at 775.782.7463.
The victim had parked her vehicle off Andria Drive in Stateline on March 5. When she came back from hiking she found her window smashed and contents of her purse stolen. The credit card was used later that afternoon.
— Lake Tahoe News staff report
The U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit is evaluating rivers that may be eligible for inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic River system and will host a webinar March 31 from 4-5pm to explain the process.
The webinar will include a brief presentation of the overall evaluation process, the procedure used to inventory the rivers in the Lake Tahoe Basin, and the “outstanding remarkable values” that would be used to determine eligibility. A question and answer period will follow the presentation.
To access the webinar, Microsoft Office Live Meeting must be installed on your computer.
To access the webinar, go online. Use 888.844.9904 to connect to the audio portion of the webinar. When prompted, type in the participant code: 8683968.
The draft Wild and Scenic Rivers Study is available online. Comments are due April 10; submitted via email to comments-pacificsouthwest-ltbmu@fs.fed.us, using the subject: Wild and Scenic. For more information on the study and how to comment, contact Mike LeFevre at 530.543.2840 or email mlefevre@fs.fed.us.