·      Ralph Jones has been promoted to battalion chief within the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District.

·      Truckee Town Council is having a budget workshop regarding capital improvement projects on April 17 from 4-8pm at the airport.

·      Tahoe Rim Trail Association has a new website.

·      Pato Banto and the Now Generation, along with guests Clear Conscience and Two Peace will be at the Blu Nightclub in Stateline on April 29. Doors open at 9pm. Must be at least 21 to attend. Tickets are $15 plus fees.

·      Donald Carano, an influential figure in the development of the gaming and resort industry in Northern Nevada, and Ty Cobb, a key figure in foreign affairs and national security during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were named distinguished Nevadans by the Nevada System of Higher Education board of regents.

El Dorado County’s former human resources director and one-time interim chief administrative officer will be in court April 17 defending her practices when she was an Alpine County employee.

Pamela Knorr

Robert Levy, former Alpine County undersheriff, has filed a lawsuit against Pamela Knorr, three supervisors and Alpine County in federal court in Sacramento. Knorr was CAO at the time of the alleged harassment. (Knorr is currently employed as Butte County’s human resources director.)

The 19-page lawsuit states, “In the aftermath of county and Knorr harassing, attacking, and demoting plaintiff, these defendants assigned certain of plaintiff’s job duties – including certain law enforcement tasks as well as tasks related to plaintiff’s years-long work on county communications projects – to individuals who possessed inferior job qualifications and experience, and who were significantly younger than plaintiff. As a direct, foreseeable, and proximate result of defendants’ discriminatory actions, plaintiff has suffered and continues to suffer substantial losses in earnings and related employment benefits, and has suffered and continues to suffer extreme emotional distress, humiliation, damage to his professional reputation, and diminished employment advancement opportunities in his chosen profession, all to his damage in an amount to be proven at trial.”

Knorr filed her own lawsuit against Alpine County, the sheriff, auditor-controller, and members of the Board of Supervisors while employed there. Alpine County and Knorr settled that dispute for $10,000.

Knorr on April 11, 2013, filed a claim against the county alleging harassment that dated to April 2012 – three months prior to signing the long-term contract. Her last day with Alpine was Aug. 2, 2013. She was paid $80,145.50 on Aug. 7, 2013, and another $80,145.50, on July 1, 2014, as severance per the contract.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

Traffic is flowing on Echo Summit after snow cascaded down April 16. Photo/Kathryn Reed

What started as an easy trek from the South Shore over Echo Summit changed mid-morning when a snowslide occurred.

About halfway up the summit snow came tumbling down on Highway 50, causing backups in both directions.

The slide, which covered all lanes, was at least 4-feet deep. It was reported at 10:15am. Just before noon Aprl 16 traffic was flowing in both directions.

Traffic, though, was backed up beyond Pioneer Trail on Highway 50, along North Upper Truckee Road, and a short ways down Pioneer Trail.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Kirk Johnson, New York Times

BURNS, Ore. — A year ago, this corner of rural Oregon became center stage in the drawn-out drama over public lands when armed militia leaders seized a national wildlife refuge, arguing that the government had too much control of land in the West.

Now that President Trump is in office, people here and in other parts of the 11 states where 47 percent of the landmass is publicly owned are watching to see what he will do on everything related to public lands, from coal mining and cattle grazing to national monuments and parks. In Burns, some ranchers and others are feeling emboldened, hopeful that regulatory rollbacks by the federal government will return lands to private use and shore up a long-struggling economy.

But the change in administration has also spawned a countermovement of conservatives and corporate executives who are speaking up alongside environmentalists in defense of public lands and now worry about losing access to hunting grounds and customers who prize national parks and wildlife.

In Idaho, for example, a deal to put thousands of acres into private ownership — exactly the sort of transaction that the militia leader brothers, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, had espoused in seizing the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — was met with fierce opposition, by no less than a group of conservative outdoorsmen.

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Tahoe Women’s Community Fund’s second annual Grants Gala will be May 18 from 6-9pm at Tahoe Beach Retreat in South Lake Tahoe.

In addition to the 2017 grant winners being announced, the 2016 grantees will return to share how they spent the TWCF’s giving funds. This year $29,000 in grants are being handed out; bringing the two-year total to more than $50,000.

Tickets are $35 online. A limited number will be sold.

By Todd Prince, Las Vegas Review-Journal

Caesars Entertainment Corp. Chief Executive Officer Mark Frissora received 25 percent less in total compensation last year as no stock options were awarded.

Frissora received $9.5 million last year compared with $12.8 million for 2015, according to SEC filings posted on Wednesday. The 2015 compensation package was boosted by $5 million in option awards.

Caesars is the parent company of Harrah’s and Harveys at Stateline.

Read the whole story

By Kathryn Reed

“Drink Tahoe tap.” It’s the mantra Madonna Dunbar wants everyone to embrace. She’s so passionate about it that she got the phrase trademarked.

Dunbar is the executive director of the Tahoe Water Suppliers Association. This is a 12-member group, with all but South Tahoe Public Utility District getting its water directly from the lake. The other members are: Cave Rock Water System, Edgewood Water Company, Glenbrook Water Cooperative, Incline Village General Improvement District, Kingsbury General Improvement District, North Tahoe Public Utility District, Round Hill General Improvement District, Skyland Water Company, Tahoe City Public Utility District, Zephyr Water Utility, and Lakeside Park Association. The EPA oversees the water association.

Dunbar gave a talk last week at Lake Tahoe Community College about all things water at the invitation of the American Association of University Women.

“We advocate for protecting Tahoe as a drinking source,” Dunbar said. That is one reason the group is not supportive of the Tahoe Keys wanting to use herbicides to rid its canals of invasive weeds.

Messages about Tahoe’s tap water are becoming the norm around water fountains. Photo/LTN

Adding chemicals, even ones approved by the EPA, to Lake Tahoe’s water is not something they can support. In-take pipes for the various water agencies are 1,000 to 3,000 feet from the shoreline. That lake water services 20,838 connections and 34,179 full-time residents.

“We are trying to find money to do anything but herbicides,” Dunbar said.

What the water association does strongly back is the boating program that mandates inspections of watercraft in order to keep more invasive species from inhabiting Lake Tahoe.

Six members of TWSA have the rare “filtration exemption” status from the Environmental Protection Agency. This means the water is not filtered; Lake Tahoe is that pure.

There are only 60 of these permits throughout the Unites States. Dunbar said most are in remote areas, like Hetch Hetchy, and usually don’t allow recreation on the water body.

A noticeable difference between lake and groundwater is that the latter will have a mineral taste.

She cited the Porter Cologne Act as being the “single biggest thing to protect Tahoe as a clean drinking water source.” Two aspects of the bill include the ban of septic tanks and the requirement that wastewater be pumped out of the basin.

One thing Dunbar shakes her head at is bottled water.

“Forty to 50 percent of packaged water is filtered tap water that is sold at 1,000 times the price,” Dunbar said. To meet the suggested eight glasses of water a day it would cost 49 cents a year with tap water and $1,400 with bottled water, she said.

Those bottles take a lot of petroleum to make, most aren’t recycled and there is little regulation with bottled water. Dunbar said tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled.

She likes that Truckee is considering banning water that comes in containers less than a gallon, which is something San Francisco already did.

Education about the quality of Tahoe’s water is critical, she said, to get people to realize bottled water is a waste in so many regards.

By Larry Weitzman

For the last few weeks Gov. Jerry Brown has been spending our money traveling around the state campaigning for the passage of taxing ourselves even more; that we should raise our gasoline, diesel and vehicle registration fees over 40 percent so we can fix our decaying roads and infrastructure. This new tax would raise an additional $50 billion to $60 billion in revenue over 10 years for that purpose.

If Californians don’t raise taxes on themselves, this crisis will destroy California. Never forget the Democratic mantra as said by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (when he was Obama’s chief of staff) as he stuck a steak knife into a wooden carving board: “Never let a good crisis go to waste, whether real or imagined.”

Larry Weitzman

So here we have Brown parading around the state saying that if we don’t pass this tax, California will effectively fall into the ocean. He promises that this new tax will amend the state Constitution that will require that all the tax money raised will be spent on the roads and transportation.

That raises a huge question which is the crux of this entire tax increase. Is Brown saying that the gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, vehicle sales taxes and other vehicle related revenues which were supposed to be spent on maintaining the roads haven’t been and that the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars collected in the past have not been spent as such? Haven’t you been governor for almost 16 years and now your admitting that you lied to the people of this state about the use of their gas tax money?

Brown is guilty as charged. Even in this new proposed legislation there is a provision to pay back from the new taxes money to the transportation fund (billions of dollars) that the governor and his democratic cohorts have stolen from our previously collected transportation funds. And this new law makes spending a constitutional requirement. After admitting stealing the money, now they want us to trust them to follow the law. That’s a good one, a politician promising to follow the law.

Before there are any new additional gasoline, diesel and vehicle registration taxes and fees the people of the state of California should demand a complete accounting of where all the prior billions of dollars in gas, diesel and vehicle taxes and fees have been spent? The answer would be shocking, even to democratic voters.

Another important question is how is this $50 billion to $60 billion going to be spent? My calculations are that less than 40 percent will be to fix the roads and related infrastructure. Brown will use billions for his high-speed rail to nowhere and billions will be spent on other pet public transportations ideas and studies. They will use the money to expand the bureaucracy which will only exacerbate the real reason for this tax increase, to save the failing California state retirement system which at a realistic discount rate of about three percent has a current unfunded liability of approximately $1 trillion. That’s right, instead of the state drowning from the winter rains which keep on coming, California will actually drown because of CalPERS.

And it’s certainly not a revenue problem. Our current general fund budget is about $123 billion, up by $43 billion over the last nine years, a 50 percent increase in state revenues. That exceeds the rate of inflation by over 400 percent! And they still want more?

Gray Davis got recalled for his attempt to raise vehicle registration fees by 300 percent, Schwarzenegger destroyed his governorship when he added 11 cents to the gas tax for the high-speed rail initiative, a project referred to by Bloomberg News as a fiasco. California already has the highest personal income tax rate of 13.3 percent and one of the highest corporate tax rates in the country of 8.84 percent (the current federal rates on top of those are 39.6 percent personal and 35 percent corporate). Maybe Brown should raise the California corporate rate also to the highest in the country (12 percent)? That way California can have all of our state taxes be the highest in the country. Why stop just at gasoline taxes?

It is time for an accounting and to hold these scoundrels accountable. If they want more of our money, let them get a real job and earn it. Maybe with their $100,000 salaries that legislators earn plus those highly paid in the bureaucracy they could do fill a few potholes themselves. All these politicians know currently is to raise taxes and then redistribute the money to their special interest groups so they can get re-elected. If they can’t fix the roads out of a $123 billion general fund budget, maybe we can find some electeds who will.

This legislation, SB1 and AB1, passed both houses of our Legislature on a straight party line vote with a two-thirds majority with only one Republican defector, Sen. Anthony Cannella of Modesto, who was promised $500 million for his district. His principles got bought. These bills will not affect the rich and upper middle class but will burden the average family. It is the Democrats who have now proved themselves as the party of the rich.

Assemblyman Vince Fong wrote AB496 a no new tax plan that will accomplish the job of fixing our roads by simply makings all transportation taxes collected to be used for their intended purpose. Simply amazing. And it also demonstrates that current revenues are sufficient to fix the roads. No new taxes were or are required.

Larry Weitzman is a resident of Rescue.

By Donna de la Cruz, New York Times

Sit still. It’s the mantra of every classroom.

But that is changing as evidence builds that taking brief activity breaks during the day helps children learn and be more attentive in class, and a growing number of programs designed to promote movement are being adopted in schools.

“We need to recognize that children are movement-based,” said Brian Gatens, the superintendent of schools in Emerson, N.J. “In schools, we sometimes are pushing against human nature in asking them to sit still and be quiet all the time.”had daily physical education, did better in school.

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By Ben Bergman, KQED

Thanks to a historically wet winter, Central Valley farmers south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta got some long-awaited good news this week from federal water managers. For the first time in more than a decade, they will receive their full allotment of groundwater from the Central Valley Project.

It’s a remarkable turnaround from last year, when farmers got only a 5 percent allotment, or even earlier this year, when they got 65 percent.

But don’t expect more water to trickle down to lower prices in your local produce aisle.

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