The Father Daughter Sweetheart Dance is Feb. 10 from 7-9:30pm at Harveys in Stateline.

This is an evening for fathers and daughters to dance and visit with friends.

Refreshments will be served and a photo keepsake is available for an additional fee.

Tickets are $20 a couple and $8 for each additional daughter.

Tickets are on sale now and this event sells out every year.

Stop by Kahle Community Center to get your tickets or call (775) 586.7271 for more information.

The U.S. Forest Service is planning to take advantage of the unusually dry winter conditions to resume prescribed burning in several locations in the Eldorado National Forest.

Between Jan. 10-18 fire management crews are preparing to burn three miles of National Forest Lands located off the Mormon Emigrant Trail. Approximately, 1,100 acres may be burned with a low intensity fire in the vicinity of Brown Rock and Meiss Road.

Fire crews may also manage prescribed fires near Georgetown in the vicinity of Darling Ridge on Jan. 17 or Jan. 18, if weather and air conditions are right.

Smoke from the Mormon Emigrant Trail burn should be visible for quite a distance from the fire.

On Feb. 4, Bona Fide Books will host a reception for Kit Night and her collection “New Work, Old Friends, Live Jazz” at Bona Fide HQ in Meyers from 5:30-7:30pm.

The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments and entertainment will be provided.

Night is an oil painter living in South Lake Tahoe.

Night’s work will be on display at Bona Fide Books Feb. 2-29.

Bona Fide HQ is located at 1069 Magua St., No. 4, behind the Getaway Café in Meyers.

For more information, contact Kim Wyatt at editor@bonafidebooks.com or go online.

Placer County Public Works Department has been awarded a $30,000 grant to improve its high-tech tools for analyzing traffic safety on county roads.

The grant from the state Office of Traffic Safety will allow Public Works to develop computer software that will identify segments of rural roads with high concentrations of traffic collisions more precisely than is possible now.

The issue is a high priority because approximately 50 percent of the 3,152 collisions on county-maintained roads from 2007-09 occurred along stretches of roadway away from intersections. During that period, 82 percent of collisions with fatalities and 64 percent that involved severe injuries took place on roadway segments outside of intersections.

The county maintains more than 1,000 miles of roads, including many rural roadways with long distances between intersections.

Since 2009, Public Works has used a computer-based Traffic Accident Analysis Program to review county-maintained roadways and intersections and identify stretches with high concentrations of traffic collisions. The program stores, analyzes and reports traffic-collision data similar to the reporting system used by Caltrans.

The grant will allow the county to address a key problem with the current program: the software analyzes the number of collisions on roadway segments, lengths of road between intersections, to draw comparisons, regardless of how long each segment is. Thus, two segments are treated identically by the software if they have the same number of collisions even if one segment is significantly longer than the other.

That problem is particularly pronounced on rural areas, where distances between intersections vary substantially.

By Jane Braxton Little, Sacramento Bee

GREENVILLE – Four years after the Moonlight fire roared through 65,000 acres of forest near this Plumas County town, the damage continues to sear the rural community.

A local logger is challenging the U.S. Forest Service about logs removed from the burned area.

How this dispute is resolved could affect the economic future of this timber-dependent town, and local leaders are waiting on the outcome of a meeting today between the logger and the agency’s regional forester to try to resolve the issue.

Randy Pew, owner of the logging company that bought the charred timber, has criticized the Forest Service for “grossly erroneous estimates” of the quantity and quality of the material he harvested to sell to a local sawmill.

The agency overestimated the volume of marketable logs by as much as 90 percent, Pew said.

In August, he filed a claim with the Forest Service for partial damages totaling $375,725. He plans to file another one claiming damages of an additional $1 million or more, he said.

“Their estimates were off by thousands of truckloads of logs,” said Pew. He was recognized by the Forest Resources Association as national outstanding logger of 2001.

Forest Service officials in California have rejected Pew’s claim, citing loggers’ responsibility to make their own estimates of the material available before submitting bids to buy it.

Read the whole story

The swimming pool at the South Lake Tahoe Recreation Center has been repaired and is open for swimming.

Call (530) 542.6056 for more information.

The art of Reno artist Mark Hammon is on display at the North Tahoe Event Center in Kings Beach until March.

Hammon’s photography is the culmination of his love and appreciation of nature and the world around him, his visual acuity, and a strong interest in technology.

He shoots locally and throughout the Western United States. Although his passion is fine art nature and landscape photography, he has also works in commercial and stock photography.

Hammon’s work has been published in several notable publications and shown in an assortment of galleries and exhibitions in the Reno-Tahoe area. Even though he is primarily self-taught, he has had the opportunity to share his knowledge by teaching beginning and intermediate photographers in a variety of venues.

• Using a plane to get to a ski destination? Read this story to find out what people have to say about different airports – including Tahoe-Reno.

• George Alm walked out of KRLT in Stateline with a day’s notice and landed at KTHO radio in South Lake Tahoe as sales manager.

• The Mark Twain Cultural Center in Incline closed at the end of last year.

• Savings found on GetSkiTickets.com for Kirkwood Mountain Resort start at 35 percent off the ticket window rate.

• Here is Caltrans’ Sierra roadwork schedule for this week.

Nancy Hussman’s tale about how she and her husband helped an injured man until authorities arrived is the winning selection for today’s Random Acts of Kindness award.

Winners are picked randomly each day. To be in the running, just write a comment below about a Random Act of Kindness you witnessed, or were part of by either being the recipient or the giver of the act.

Throughout January Lake Tahoe News is promoting Random Acts of Kindness. It doesn’t have to be something major. Kindness comes in many forms.

Area businesses are donating the rewards. Nancy will be receiving a gift certificate to Sprouts.

For more details about Random Acts of Kindness and the few rules associated with it, check out this story.

Snowball is a very sweet 4-year-old shorthair cat with beautiful blue eyes. She has lived with other cats and children, and would make a great addition to just about any home.

Snowball is spayed, microchipped, and vaccinated. She is at the El Dorado County Animal Services shelter in Meyers, along with many other dogs and cats who are waiting for their new homes.

Call (530) 573.7925 for directions, hours, and other information on adopting a pet.

For spay-neuter assistance for South Tahoe residents, go online.

— Karen Kuentz