Lake Tahoe Summer Track & Field Camp is July 16-20 at South Tahoe Middle School.

It’s open to ages 8-14 or third- to eighth-graders.

For more information or to register, go online.

Caltrans will be working on Highway 50 in the Shingle Springs area between April 20 and May 14, which will cause traffic delays.

Crews will be building a $1.6 million wildlife under crossing between Greenstone Road and El Dorado Road.

Expect delays to range from 20 to 50 minutes.

Motorists can expect lane closures:

Westbound on Highway 50 from 7pm to 9am, Friday through Sunday, April 20–30.

Eastbound on Highway 50 from 6pm to 8am, Saturday through Monday, May 5–14.

This schedule is subject to change without notification due to weather conditions and contractor discretion.

• Sears in Zephyr Cove is closing April 13.

• Lori Gaskin, former dean of instruction at Lake Tahoe Community College and current president of West Valley College in Saratoga, is one of four finalists for the president-superintendent position at Santa Barbara City College.

• CalBear – the Calstar bear – is back. Order one online today for $10, plus shipping and handling.

• Fireside Pizza Co. in Olympic Valley recently raised $1,000 for the C.R. Johnson Healing Center.

• Bryan DeLugo, who had been vice president of casino operations at Red Hawk Casino, has replaced Tracy Mimno as general manager.

• Here is Caltrans’ weekly roadwork schedule for the Sierra and for El Dorado-Tahoe.

Tahoe Legends 10K/5K Run is June 16 at 8am starting in the Lake Tahoe Community College parking area.

The 5 kilometer and 10 kilometer runs snake through rolling hills, forests and meadows on single track trails and bike paths. Competitors start at LTCC and finish on the track at the South Tahoe Community Sports Complex.

The Tahoe Legends Challenge also pits local fitness clubs in head to head competition for the Fast and Fit Trophy.

Go online to register.

By Star Parker

What are the ramifications if the Supreme Court finds the individual mandate provision of Obamacare unconstitutional? This is the provision that requires individuals to purchase government defined health insurance or pay a fine.

I hope it will serve as a wake up call to a nation that I believe is still sleeping through a crisis.

Star Parker

Liberal and open ended interpretation of the Constitution, to the point of rendering it practically meaningless, opened the door to steady growth of the federal government and its inexorable encroachment in our lives over the last half century. The problems we are having today all originate here.

Even if Obamacare is repealed, we still have a major problem in healthcare. Costs keep escalating because there is no real, functioning marketplace in healthcare. Ninety percent of healthcare expenditures are made by third parties – government, employers, insurance companies. All due to direct or indirect government controls.

Our growing burden of taxes and government debt – what now is breaking European countries and about to break us – all stem from the growth of government programs that open ended interpretation of the constitution enabled.

Our private economy, where freedom and the creative spirit are still allowed to operate, is going great.

A miracle is taking place in energy with new domestic production of oil and gas made possible by new drilling technologies.

Oil imports as a percentage of our overall domestic oil consumption has dropped almost 25 percent just since 2005. In North Dakota, where much of this new oil production is happening, production has increased from 10,000 barrels a day in 2003 to 400,000 barrels a day.

Natural gas production has increased 26 percent since 2005. This is producing prices in the United States for natural gas that are the lowest in the world. As result, according to University of Michigan economist Mark Perry, firms that use natural gas, like chemical and fertilizer businesses, are actively talking about returning to the United States.

New technologies abound, with more and more gadgets appearing all the time at lower and lower prices.

Computer equipment that cost $1,000 in 1997 today would sell for about $65, Perry calculated.

So why are we turning more and more of our lives over to the most unproductive, least efficient part of our country – government?

Just over the last four years, government spending has increased to take 25 percent of the American economy from 20 percent.

The result is the most sluggish economic recovery since the great depression. It is a sign of the depressed spirit of the American people that it is actually viewed as good news that unemployment is now 8.3 percent. This is almost two and half points higher than the average unemployment rate in our country from 1948 to 2010.

But while we suffer, Washington parties.

While the national unemployment rate is 8.3 percent, it’s 5.5 percent in Washington, D.C.

According to demographer Joel Kotkin, 2.7 percent population growth in Washington, D.C., in 2011 was the highest in the nation.

He reports that the economy in the national capital region expanded 14 percent since 2007.

Over the last decade, 50,000 new jobs in the federal government bureaucracy were created, along with an increase in local federal spending of 166 percent.

No wonder in a survey just released by Gallup, residents of Washington, D.C., expressed the highest level of confidence in the U.S. economy in the nation.

Isn’t it time to turn this around? Why are Americans still tolerating this?

If we are going to get the nation back on track, we’ve got to get our resources out of Washington and back into the private sector where they can be used creatively and productively. This is how to create jobs.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501(c)3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It”.

By Carlos Alcalá, Sacramento Bee

As a rule, Superior Court judge elections are, well, sober as a judge.

Incumbents frequently return to the bench without facing a substantial challenge at the polls.

The race for Office 7 in El Dorado Superior Court is different, with two challengers – Joseph Hoffman and Stephen W. Valentine – taking on incumbent Judge Warren Stracener.

None of the candidates will directly criticize his opponents on the record, but it appears clear the challengers consider Stracener vulnerable.

Stracener was appointed in late 2010 as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prepared to leave office.

He worked in the Department of Personnel Administration for two decades and had a role in the furlough fights under Schwarzenegger. That has marked him as something of an outsider, he said.

“People assume because you’ve been appointed by someone from Sacramento, you must be lock step with those values,” he said.

Read the whole story

By Kathryn Reed

What can’t Tahoe Production House do?

So far, it can do everything anyone has asked. TPH can do simple things like converting a VHS into a DVD. It can also be a full service production house that writes scripts, shoots them, edits them and delivers the final product.

Most production houses – like the ones in Los Angeles – are broken into specialties. Brandi Ledbetter Brown, owner of TPH, wanted to develop a one-stop shop to meet the needs of clients so they didn’t have to go all over the place.

Brandi Ledbetter Brown is putting Tahoe on the map with her production house. Photos/Kathryn Reed

Her five-year plan involves companies from outside the Lake Tahoe Basin coming here to have their commercials shot or other video or recording needs met.

In the back the roll-up door allows a car or large boat to come into the studio via the loading dock. That kind of accessibility allows for a diverse clientele.

While some may question why South Lake Tahoe needs such a sophisticated enterprise, others are saying why did it take so long.

With 2,300-square-feet of space, the non-descript storefront on Highway 50 near Tahoe Keys Boulevard belies what lies inside. Equipment is state-of-the-art. A small blue box – the encoder – allows live productions so the studio can be turned into a radio or television studio.

The encoder is what led Chris Minnis, who produces the bodybuilding Tahoe Show, to hire TPH. Already in the can are the 30-second commercial and sponsorship piece for Tahoe Show. What the encoder will allow is for the August event to be broadcast on the Internet. This in turn will be a revenue stream for Minnis.

A massive server in the control room will allow the Tahoe Show to sell digital downloads.

“We can rent space on the server for video hosting,” Brown says of the cloud-based server that has 16 terabytes of online storage.

This is the brains of the studio.

While TPH is all about cutting edge technology, it’s also about creativity and having fun.

Walking in it’s more like being invited into Brown’s living room. Comfy furniture, a big TV and a foosball table makes one forget this is a business.

But this is part of the business. The television can be used to preview client’s work, conduct a virtual meeting, have a CD release party or some other venture someone envisions.

On the other side of the building Candy McCart is adjusting the lights before photographing Dave Corti for the cover shot of his golfing book.

Brown talks to McCart about the soft box lights. The patch panel allows McCart to adjust the built-in lights without having to go into the control room.

She is renting the studio space by the hour, with the bulk of the equipment her own. McCart picked TPH because no place else in the basin or Reno has what TPH has.

On Saturday, the TPH gang was working with a guy backed by Sony who needed a green screen for a shot for his music video.

Tim Whaley is down the hall. Jokingly, he is referred to as Brown’s work husband.

He’s in the Mac edit suite working on a promo for the South Lake Tahoe Wedding & Honeymoon Association. It’s about showing people what a wedding in the area could be like, as opposed to the traditional method of telling them. The short footage Lake Tahoe News sees is edgy, innovative and captivating.

“He is old school and says, ‘This is how we do it in LA.’ And I say, ‘This is how we do it on an iPhone’,” Brown says of their business relationship. She says they complement each other well.

Whaley is the technical half, Brown the people person.

She has a slew of independent contractors working for her – from sound engineers to photographers to grips.

Since the start of the school year she has been going to South Tahoe High School to help students working in the new digital arts academy.

Brown is very much a local. Her family has long roots here. She graduated from Incline High School, then went to Loyola Marymount University where in 2006 she earned a bachelor’s in TV and film production.

Her start in the business was on the other side of the camera – being part of Cinderella pageants and 16 years in Harrah’s Lake Tahoe’s “Ebenezer Scrooge” production.

Brown spent every Saturday for her four years in high school doing a five-minute spot for the now defunct KMTN-TV.

It was at a summer film academy during her junior year where she discovered what she wanted to be when she grew up.

“That’s when my love and passion for production of things came into play,” Brown said. “I started looking at schools and realized I could go to school and do this for a living.”

After college she spent a few months back at KMTN before working for RSN for four years.

Last year she started figuring out a way to create a production house in Tahoe – where she and her husband want to make their home. Now it’s a reality, with 2012 being the first full year Tahoe Production House is mixing up the sounds and images people want to create.

ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder (Click on images to enlarge.)

Sierra Cosmetic Laser in Truckee is hosting a Cleanse Informational Night on April 12 from 5:30-7pm.

Haven Ritchie, a doctor of internal medicine, will discuss the correct way to carry out a cleanse. She will also cover misinformation about cleanses and provide advice regarding the pitfalls of unsafe cleansing methods.

For more information, call (530) 587.0198.

By Kathryn Reed

For the second week in a row Kirkwood Mountain Resort ski patrollers were tested. Saturday skiers had to evacuate Cornice chairlift because it derailed.

No one was injured in the afternoon incident that took nearly two hours for everyone to rappel from the lift to the slope.

Resort spokesman Michael Dalzell said no one was injured when the lift, which goes to the top of the mountain, came to an abrupt stop at 1:30pm April 7.

Last Sunday it was an inbound avalanche that caused the entire resort to close for the day.

Dalzell said crews on Saturday night were still inspecting the cable.

“We’re not likely to spin the chairlift (Sunday),” Dalzell told Lake Tahoe News.

Ski patrol simultaneously worked both ends of the chairlift to bring people down. Dalzell said everyone was calm during the evacuation.

He did not know what the highest point was for someone to rappel down, but this is an advanced lift that in places is at least 50 feet off the ground in places. Dalzell also didn’t know how many people had to be evacuated.

The cause of the derailment was the air bag from the terrain park being launched by a gust of wind into the cable of Chair 6. The air bag is something people can jump into as they learn tricks in the park. This is the first season it has been used at the resort.

El Dorado County has funds available as low-interest rate loans for home repairs to income-qualified homeowners in the unincorporated areas of the county. Funding is provided through the State Community Development Block Grant Program and the county’s Housing Rehabilitation Revolving Loan Funds.

These Housing Rehabilitation loans must be used to correct health and safety issues and to meet code compliance standards. Program loan funds may be used to repair or replace roofs, foundations, plumbing, electrical, heating/air conditioning systems, termite damage and more. The home must be located in an unincorporated area of the county.

To qualify, the household income must fall at or below 80 percent of the area median, based on household size. Current annual maximum household income limits are: one person, $42,650; two persons, $48,750; three persons, $54,850; four persons, $60,900; five persons, $65,800; six persons, $70,650; seven persons, $75,550; eight persons, $80,400.

This program is designed to provide financing for homeowners who would not qualify for other types of financing due to limited income. Interest rates are as low as 3 percent for a 15-year loan of up to $40,000.

For more information about this program, call (530) 642.4863. Loans are available to eligible homeowners on a first-come, first-served basis until funds are exhausted.