South Lake Tahoe and Tahoe Arts Alliance are partnering for the second art gallery reception on Oct. 23 from 6-8pm at City Hall.

The Tahoe Arts Alliance connects artists, businesses and organizations on the South Shore. The city’s lobby at the airport serves as a blank canvas to display local artists. The art will be rotated throughout the year. All art will be available for purchase.

The City Art Gallery reception will include a meet and greet with displaying artists and city officials.

By Jason Blevins, Denver Post

Vail Resorts. American Skiing Co. Aspen Skiing Co. Boyne USA. Triple Peaks. Intrawest. Peak Resorts.

North America’s largest ski resort operators have historically directed more creative effort into marketing and business plans than picking a company name —  with the exception, arguably, of Utah’s Powdr Corp. Resort companies tend to be more imaginative in picking their stock market ticker symbol, such as MTN, SKIS and SNOW.

Don’t expect that to change as the newest giant in the resort world — the partnership between private equity firm KSL Capital Partners and Jim Crown, the owner of Aspen Skiing Co., which this year has acquired 13 ski areas — ponders a name.

“We are going to have a name soon so we can stop calling it ‘NewCo,’” said David Perry, the former Aspen Skiing exec who is captaining what is now the continent’s second-largest resort operator. “If we wait any longer, we are going to have to call it ‘OldCo.’”

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Publisher’s note: This is one of a series of stories about Lake Tahoe area athletes who hope to compete in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea.

By Kathryn Reed

PARK CITY, Utah – Age is not spoiling the free spirit known as Jamie Anderson. She still marches to her own drummer. She is just as unconventional on the snow as she is off.

While her laid back, crystal loving, essential oil using, holistic lifestyle may be more apropos in someplace like Santa Cruz, she is 100 percent homegrown Lake Tahoe.

At 27 she is a veteran in the world of snowboarding competition, having been the youngest woman to win an X Games gold in 2007.

Jamie Anderson knows the competition will be stiffer at the 2018 Olympics. Photo/Kathryn Reed

She acknowledges there is another generation eager to dethrone her. They are practicing tricks on dry ground, something she scoffs at. Anderson is old school. The sport is supposed to be all about the snow and being one with it.

Cheating is what those air bags used to be considered. Now they are mainstream.

“It takes away from the fear factor,” Anderson said. “It’s changing the sport; it’s progressing faster.”

An air bag has been set up at the Olympic training facility in Park City. The idea is to try tricks with a controlled landing – an inflated contraption that takes the pain out of falling. Anderson tried it a couple times last summer but has not been won over by it. She remembers going to the mountain and building jumps or finding natural ones. That’s how she still likes to ride, even when she’s at her home resort at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

Anderson tries to get back to Tahoe when she can, but it’s hard with her travel-competition schedule. She’ll be in town this month specifically to work out with her trainer Eufay Wood who owns the Stateline gym Club 100.

“He knows that I don’t like a lot of intense work,” Anderson said smiling. Maybe so, but Wood’s reputation is all about being intense and getting his clients in incredible shape. “I’ve been so bad at training this year,” she admitted.

Anderson intends to be in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February to defend her slopestyle gold medal.

“Qualifying will be the hardest process,” Anderson said. She acknowledged once she gets to South Korea, half of her teammates won’t be there. There are a series of qualifying competitions, with one having taken place last season, which she won.

Anderson was in Park City in September for the Team USA media summit along with more than 100 other athletes hoping to compete in February’s Winter Olympics.

She admits there are more responsibilities with her elevated stature in the snowboarding world. Sponsors take time, her charity takes times, it’s no longer just about snowboarding. But the young competition, well, she knows their No. 1 focus is the sport.

Anderson acknowledged she’s not sure if her gold medal run in 2014 would be good enough to get her into the finals in South Korea. Things have changed that much.

But she has a leg up on some of her competition by having already visited South Korea in a test run last season.

“South Korea is like nowhere else I’ve been to,” Anderson said. The food, the culture, the people, the hot springs – she loved it all. The mountains reminded her of the East Coast of the United States.

For the first time in a Winter Olympics there will be a big air competition, which has been in the X Games for years. This means Anderson will be vying for two medals. Big air focuses on one trick, while slopestyle is a series of tricks.

For now, Anderson calls Tahoe (she was raised in Meyers, where she was home schooled) and Whistler home. Her boyfriend, also a professional snowboarder, hails from Canada.

Anderson prefers to master her sport on the snow, not on an air bag like this one in Park City. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Anderson has never forgotten where she came from. She didn’t come from a family of privilege. She understands the costs involved to be an elite athlete. That is one of the reasons why in 2013 she started the Jamie Anderson Foundation as a way to help youngsters pursue their dreams.

In South Lake Tahoe, Anderson was instrumental in getting the sculpture that will be part of Champions Plaza to not resemble three men. The artist, while clamoring that it was gender neutral, revised it. It should be unveiled this year. Anderson will be one of the inaugural inductees.

“I’d like to do a skate park in Meyers. I’d love to do more in the community,” Anderson told Lake Tahoe News. “A Tahoe skate park is my next project.” Well, maybe right after the Olympics.

By Joe Mathews

I’m so disappointed in myself.

I should be 100 percent supportive of establishing California’s own single-payer health system, which means that one entity—the government—pays for everyone’s healthcare. After all, the best Californians are for it.

Joe Mathews

California’s next governor, Gavin Newsom, has made single-payer central to his campaign. America’s next president, California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, is running on it.

So why do doubts keep springing to my diseased mind?

Maybe I resent beautiful, camera-ready people like Newsom and Harris. But good if homelier progressives—in unions, nonprofits, and the Democratic Party — also have made single-payer their No. 1 political litmus test. Any officeholder who doesn’t support it faces recall and Twitter bullying.

I confess that, in dark moments, I wonder whether single-payer is just a weapon for some political interests to use against their opponents. But how can I think such a thing when President-in-Waiting Harris recently assured us—as she co-sponsored legislation that protects you from health insurance by making it illegal for your employer to provide it—that single payer is “a nonpartisan issue”?

Upon hearing that, I asked myself: Haven’t Americans been fighting in partisan ways over healthcare for 100 years? But no, Harris is right: a century is a blip in the vastness of space-time.

Now, I admit that I can get crazy and wonder how practical single-payer is, and whether it might be wiser to build on the existing system. I also think about the one-third of all Californians, and half of children, on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, which means the government pays for their care. Many of the people in this smaller version of single-payer struggle to get care because there aren’t enough doctors and institutions that will serve them.

Then I start thinking about money—money! I’m so ashamed! – and ask: Why doesn’t the single-payer legislation in California and in Congress explain how you pay for single-payer? Then I read these estimates that suggest that a single-payer healthcare system in California alone would cost $400 billion, which is two-and-a-half times the size of the state General Fund.

And that gives me an anxiety attack, since raising taxes requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, which can be hard to get. And then I worry—I’m not proud of this—about my kids’ schools. The two big pieces of the state budget are education and health care, so when you see a big run-up in spending on health, the schools get hit, and teachers get laid off and instruction time gets cut.

But then I get a hold of myself, and listen to Bernie Sanders (who like all Vermonters knows California deeply), and I stop worrying.

Because California’s schools already do remarkably well with some of the lowest state funding levels in the country. So why would it matter if they’re cut further? Since everyone will be so much healthier under single-payer, the teachers will be able to teach more kids in less time, and the children will learn faster!

And, after listening to single-payer advocates, I’m sure that this single-payer healthcare will pay for itself; in fact, it will save money, because all the money we spend on insurance and pharmaceuticals will just be replaced by new taxes, and the resulting efficiencies will create some savings. (Don’t sweat the details). And while there may be startup costs, this is California, with an economy the size of France’s. We’ve got plenty of money. If the taxes don’t come through at first, we’ll have a Kickstarter campaign. Or crowdsource it. Or make Mexico pay for it.

Since having those realizations, I’ve been totally behind single-payer—with the exception of one bad bender of doubts. My trigger for that episode was the housing crisis.

I was reading a UCLA report about how far behind we are in meeting Californians’ needs for housing they can afford. And then I saw the news that, spurred by rising homelessness, Los Angeles and San Diego counties now have Hepatitis outbreaks that constitute public emergencies.

So I couldn’t stop my mind from thinking: How can these fancy people running our state be talking about some pie-in-the-sky single-payer when they’re failing to provide Californians with the most basic piece of the healthy life—shelter?

But then I realized I was stuck in the past. Just because our systems for education and housing haven’t produced enough of either doesn’t mean that single-payer healthcare won’t produce enough healthcare.

Then it hit me: All my doubts about single-payer are a form of illness, and that illness is itself the best possible argument for single-payer.

Because, clearly, I’m sick in the head. And if there were a cure, I couldn’t afford it.

So bring on single-payer. It will fix me, and good.

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

By Mina Corpuz, Los Angeles Times
 
California will be the first state to require pet stores to sell rescue animals under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday.

Starting in 2019, pet stores will transition to selling dogs, cats and rabbits from shelters or adoption centers. Stores can be fined $500 for each animal for sale that is not a rescue. 

“This is a big win for our four-legged friends, of course,” said bill author Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, in a statement. 

South Lake Tahoe was ahead of the game when it banned theses sales several years ago.

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By Ryan Sabalow, Dale Kasler And Ellen Garrison, Sacramento Bee

The sun was shining, the temperatures were pleasant and, by all rights, the tasting room at Buena Vista Winery should have been packed Sunday.

Instead, California’s oldest winery was surrounded by a phalanx of exhausted, soot-covered firefighters. Wine barrels were dusted in ash, and the fountain in front of the 19th-century stone-and-mortar building was filled with muddy gray water. A nearby oak tree still smoldered, and the hillside was charred to within 20 feet of the winery.

“Doesn’t get much closer,” said Scott Fraser, a weary battalion chief from a Lake Tahoe-area strike team.

After a week of misery and death, Northern California’s devastating wildfires showed signs of easing off Sunday.

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By Dave Zook, Moonshine Ink

That Tahoe/Truckee kids have a good amount of sporting options would be an understatement. There are the traditional ball sports that most Americans grow up with. And then there are the sports unique to a mountain town, such as mountain bike leagues and skiing — alpine, big mountain, and Nordic, with multiple competitive disciplines each — which all also vie for time with the endless list of recreational outdoor activities.

And if that weren’t enough, within the arena of traditional sports there is the increasing role of club sports as an option outside of official school leagues. These associations are organized independently of schools, and are commonly seen in soccer, volleyball, basketball, and baseball. They are available to kids barely out of preschool, and can steer a kid’s athletic direction for life.

Clubs draw in parents and kids with the promise of high competition levels, top-tier coaching, and exposure to the eyes of college recruiters, but they also require heavy travel and time commitments, and substantial cost to participate. With the increasing appeal of club teams, is club sports’ influence changing the youth sports landscape as we know it?

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·      “The Life Aquatic” will be shown for free Oct 19 at 6:30pm in the TADA Viewing Room at South Tahoe High School. Discussion will follow. 

·      Liberty Utilities is planning an outage for parts of Meyers on Oct. 18 from 9am to 4pm to replace a pole in the Blitzen and Colusa area.

·      South Lake Tahoe’s Steve Kubby has signed an agreement for his firm Kubby Cryogenics to partner with International Endeavor Corporation. Kubby will become the CEO of IEC.

·      Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce is having a mixer Oct. 26 from 5-7:30pm at Lake Tahoe AleWorX in South Lake Tahoe.

·      Here is the Sierra roadwork schedule for the week from Caltrans.

Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care is having a fundraiser on Oct. 19 at the Lake House restaurant in South Lake Tahoe.

The animal rehab facility, which has been in operation for nearly 40 years, is on a campaign to raise money to sustain operational costs. Those expenses are expected to increase substantially when the new center opens on Al Tahoe Boulevard.

Money raised this week will go directly to operations to give native animals and birds a second chance.

The dinner is at 5:30pm. Tickets are limited. They are are $150 per person. They may be purchased online or by calling 530.577.2273.

South Lake Tahoe firefighters on mop-up detail in Sonoma County. Photo/SLTFD

By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
 
Block after block of tidy housing tracts reduced to heaps of ash. Death counts in the double digits. Homeowners numbly poking through the ruins of domestic life.

California has seen this before.

But the harrowing images of loss and destruction usually come out of the south.

“These kinds of fires and the losses are very uncharacteristic of that part of the world,” University of California fire specialist Max Moritz said of the firestorm that ignited in Northern California last week, killing dozens of people and torching thousands of homes.

Until last week, 13 of the 20 most destructive — and 16 of the 20 deadliest — wildfires in modern state history occurred in Southern California.

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