By Sharon Noguchi, San Jose Mercury News

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget omits funding for Democrats’ top priority this year: expanding transitional kindergarten, the public school program to ready 4-year-olds for the rigors of elementary school.

With rosy revenue projections, Brown would focus education dollars on repaying money the state borrowed from school districts during the Great Recession and on shoring up the teachers’ pension system.

California’s spending on pre-kindergarten to 12th grade would jump 8.4 percent, from $70 billion this school year to $75.9 billion in 2014-15 — even as enrollment is expected to decline slightly, by 0.1 percent. Of that total, more than $45 billion would come from the state’s general fund, with federal revenues, local property taxes and Lottery proceeds contributing most of the rest.

Brown’s revised budget released Tuesday proposes accelerating the repayment schedule of $6.2 billion owed to schools, so that it all would be repaid by the end of the 2014-15 school year. The state had borrowed the money by deferring payments it owed school districts.

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The Wings of Freedom Tour honoring WWII veterans, including the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Nine O Nine WWII Heavy Bomber, Consolidated B-24 Liberator Witchcraft WWII Heavy Bomber and P-51 Mustang fighter, will arrive at Minden-Tahoe Airport at noon on June 2 and will be on display until noon June 4.

Ground tours and display hours are noo-5pm June 2; 9am-5pm June 3; and from 9am-noon June 4.

For an up-close view and tour through the aircraft the cost is $12 for adults and $6 for children under 12.

For information on flight experiences, call 800.568.8924.

The U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit will begin selling firewood permits at the South Shore office on May 19 and at the North Shore office on May 21.

Permits cost $20 per cord, with a two-cord minimum and a limit of 10 cords per household.

Permits have specific conditions and complete information is provided when the permit is issued. Maps to designated cutting areas are provided and must be in the permit holder’s possession along with the valid permit. The permit is for collection of “down-dead” wood up to a 30-inch maximum diameter in designated fuelwood areas within the Lake Tahoe Basin.

“Down-dead” means the tree is down on the ground and dead, rather than dead and standing. Cutting any standing tree, whether dead or green, is not allowed.

No off-road travel is allowed and permit holders must comply with all permit conditions.

The last day to purchase a permit is Nov. 14. The last day to cut wood is Nov. 16.

Ed Laine has been capturing Lake Tahoe for decades. Photo/Provided

By Kathryn Reed

An artist is what Ed Laine always wanted to be. But he didn’t expect it to involve a camera.

He had majored in art at the University of Oregon, with the idea he would be creating pottery as a living. But life isn’t always predictable. Collecting a hundred bucks a month making pottery wasn’t paying the bills so he had to find another line of work.

“The market wasn’t here yet. It would be today I think,” Laine told Lake Tahoe News. “I was striving to do more commercialized pottery.”

And thus he launched his career in advertising and photography, where he saw the South Shore grow, businesses come and go, and lived through the evolution of printmaking.

The 82-year-old moved to South Lake Tahoe in September 1957. Not long after that he went to work at the Tahoe Daily Tribune. His job title? “Everything,” he said.

“It was all lead and ink at that time,” Laine said of the printing process, which he also called “cumbersome”.

Everything was shot with film. It was processed in a darkroom on site. (The Tribune didn’t use digital cameras until 2003.)

Laine remembers the time he was told to go get pictures of a bear hanging out by the California Lodge at Heavenly. It was standing on its back legs munching on a head of lettuce not more than 40 feet away. He kept shooting and shooting.

When he got back to the lab there were no images.

“It was completely blank,” Laine recalled. “I had forgotten to pull the slides.”

Camera equipment was much more complicated back in the day.

When color photography came around all the aluminum plates on the press had to be removed and the color put on. This would double or triple the length of a press run. It’s why color photos used to be rare in publications and why color ads once cost more than black and white.

With a population of less than 5,000 at the time in South Lake Tahoe, it also meant there were not many businesses. Selling ads was hard. The good thing at the time is businesses didn’t have a ton of choices for reaching the consumer.

The biggest advertisers were Harrah’s, Harveys, Outdoorsman and Barney’s.

By the time Laine left the Tribune in 1967 he had married Del, who wrote columns for the paper about skiing, hiking, bowling, fishing, gossip and other activities.

Together they opened Laine Associates. It was an ad agency. But there were not enough advertisers to sustain the business so they took the photography aspect of the company and started Laine Photolabs.

Weddings were the principal component of the business. Some were shot at the top of the tram at Heavenly Mountain Resort others at Taylor Creek, and even more at one of the beaches around Tahoe.

“Mothers of the bride were the worst,” Laine said. He added, if they had sisters, it got even worse.

The equipment was heavy. Laine was using a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic that he had to lug around.

The one-hour photo business became a reality when they moved from South Lake to Round Hill in 1989.

Laine Photolabs had contracts with area schools and then moved into sports photography. The business closed in 2010. While Laine was active in the company up until the end, his daughter, Brooke, was running it by that time.

(The Laines have four children and 10 grandchildren.)

Through the years Laine also did other jobs relating to photography. He did quite a bit of work for South Tahoe Public Utility District.

“When they ran the piping over Luther Pass I was hired to photograph it day and night. I had to camp out there,” Laine said.

For about seven years he volunteered to photograph sections of the Tahoe Rim Trail for the nonprofit association. It involved lugging heavy camera gear into various locations.

For the Lake Tahoe Historical Society Laine did a substantial amount of photocopying of old pictures that were donated to the organization.

A retired police sergeant from Fresno started an institute in South Lake Tahoe for officers to learn how to photograph evidence. Laine was one of the instructors.

Laine has kept some of the old photo equipment, but it’s all boxed up now. He admits if he is going to shoot anything today, he has a small digital camera.

As for the pottery, he never picked it up again.

To the community,

We have two important items to share:

Despite our community’s concerns over public process, the agencies proceeded to hold a meeting [May14] with the Meyers Community Advisory Council (MCAC) without inviting the public.

In this meeting, it was stated that contrary to what our community has been told, we cannot truly limit new development maximums in our Meyers Plan because TRPA will not allow it.

We believe more public meetings – with proper notice and advertisement – are needed to address other plan issues. Also, we feel the agencies should follow through on their promises that we can truly decide our community’s own future.

(That’s the short version. For more details see below).

Otherwise, we were told the updated draft Area Plan will be released to the public next week to follow environmental review requirements. Also, we want to thank the California South Shore Chamber of Commerce for working hard to help our community and business owners. We also encourage other community members who agree to contact the agencies, Supervisor [Norma] Santiago, the newspapers, etc., and ask for a better, open public process for Meyers.

More details:

With less than a day’s notice, we learned of an MCAC meeting being held by TRPA and El Dorado County to discuss the updated Meyers Area Plan draft. Although apparently not open to the public, a handful of community members were able to attend and allowed to raise concerns and questions. (Note: the full MCAC was not in attendance).

As has been our concern all along, we pressed for more public engagement, more open, public meetings, and the chance for the full community to better understand, and work through, the remaining unresolved issues in the Meyers Plan – before it’s pushed forward to the legal/environmental processes (the farther along it gets, the more difficult it becomes to change it).

Most of you may recall Supervisor Santiago and others telling us that we get to decide our own plan. However – we learned [Wednesday] that this is not quite correct.

Although the Meyers Area Plan can include limits on larger future developments (such as commercial floor area, new hotel rooms called Tourist Accommodation Units [TAUs], etc.) in order to support small businesses, TRPA staff told us the Meyers community cannot include language in our Area Plan to truly limit new developments in Meyers because it is TRPA’s “Regional strategy” to allow the transfers and conversions of development (which allow new commercial, tourist, and other development in Meyers beyond the Area Plan’s stated caps).

Unfortunately, there are several regulations in TRPA’s Regional Plan that support the larger, corporate-type developments that it appears most of Meyers does not want, but that will affect us even though not mentioned in the Meyers Area Plan. We believe that the agencies should follow through on their promise and let the Meyers Community decide what type of new businesses and what kind of community we want for our future.

Sincerely,

Meyers residents and business owners

Highway 50 is scheduled to be closed in both directions from El Dorado Hills Boulevard/Latrobe Road to Bass Lake Road on May 18 for rock blasting work.

The closure is scheduled from 6-8am Sunday. In addition, motorists should expect the Latrobe Road/El Dorado Hills Boulevard eastbound on-ramp to Highway 50 and Bass Lake Road westbound on-ramp to Highway 50 closed from midnight to 8am Sunday.

During the closure, traffic will be routed onto Serrano Parkway. Motorists traveling east from El Dorado Hills will detour onto El Dorado Hills Boulevard to Serrano Parkway to Bass Lake Road. Motorists traveling west from Cameron Park will take Bass Lake Road to Serrano Parkway to El Dorado Hills Boulevard.

The work is part of a $57 million El Dorado County project to build a new Highway 50 interchange at Silva Valley Parkway.

To the community,

For the price of for lattes or four beers or three glasses of wine a year, voters can keep our library open five days a week.

Many of us are fortunate enough to have home computers and Internet, which means that we can download audio books and ebooks for no cost with our library cards. There are many students and others who are not as fortunate. Keeping computers and Internet available for those who don’t have home access is important. Good schools, a library, and beauty improve a community. Beauty we have, the library we could lose. This community uses our library every day: 1,700 people visit our library every week, 130,000 items are borrowed every year and 14,000 locals have library cards.

Rather than buy a best seller that we’ll read only once, we can borrow from the library, at no cost. Current newspapers, magazines, & a great collection of DVDs are available. Even my dog appreciates the free audio books as I take her for longer walks when I’m listening to a story.

About 25 years ago our library lost much of its budget and the hours were reduced to two days a week. There’s a very real chance that this could happen again. Please vote yes on Measure L to keep our library open at its current level.

Diana Hamilton, South Lake Tahoe

By Sherrilyn Ifill, MSNBC

May 17 marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the constitutional moment that compelled our country to reckon with its history and confront the unfulfilled promise of equality first articulated in our founding documents.

Brown literally changed America. It was a mid-20th century course correction that ushered in a modern America that must grapple honestly with the promise of equality and opportunity for all its citizens.

At its core, Brown marks the beginning of the end of legal apartheid in this country. This would be enough to celebrate. But Brown is also a powerful example of how change can happen and the important role that law plays in shaping the very character of our country.

Within 15 years of the Court’s decision in Brown, segregation had been declared illegal in almost every aspect of American life, from the school house to swimming pools, golf courses to public transportation and housing. These changes were not brought about by lawyers alone. The broad civil rights movement that began the year after Brown reflected a powerful demand for full citizenship for blacks throughout the South. But Brown also deployed our nation’s most coveted assets – our Constitution and the rule of law – to articulate and enforce the principle of equality.

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By Charlie Brennan, Boulder Camera

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against one of three men charged in a February 2013 triple murder that claimed the life of three men, the Sonoma County district attorney announced.

Investigators allege that Mark Cappello, 47, of Central City, Colo., was the triggerman in a marijuana deal gone awry. Cappello is charged with first-degree murder.

Todd Klarkowski, 43, of Boulder, Colo., was shot and killed execution-style along with Raleigh Butler, 24, of North Lake Tahoe, and Richard Lewin, 46, of Huntington, N.Y., in the Sonoma County home of Butler’s mother, who was out of state at the time.

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A Carson City man was arrested Friday morning in connection to a bank robbery in Kings Beach.

Brent Muir, 55, allegedly walked into the Plumas Bank about 8:30am May 16 with a handgun and left with an undisclosed amount of cash.

The suspect fled in a tan 2008 Chevrolet Impala headed toward Sand Harbor, where he was spotted by federal law enforcement. Nevada Highway Patrol officers then tried to stop him. Douglas and Carson City sheriff’s deputies then joined the chase.

Muir led officers through parts of south Carson City before he stopped his vehicle at the corner of California Street and Industrial Park Drive just south of Fairview Drive. He then fled on foot.

A Douglas deputy caught up to him. NHP booked Muir on felony eluding, reckless driving, and driving with no valid driver’s license charges.

Officers said a weapon and suspected money was found inside the vehicle.

Charges stemming from the robbery are pending further investigation from the FBI and Placer County Sheriff’s Office.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report