By Jeff McMahon, Forbes

Millions of Americans have been ingesting them for years—perchlorate, hexavalent chromium, volatile organic compounds—not because they’re safe, but because they are among 6,000 toxins the EPA has not gotten around to regulating in municipal drinking water systems.

But after a change in administrations and a scathing review by the General Accounting Office, the EPA has begun to develop regulations to remove these chemicals from tap and bottled water—and industry has begun efforts to delay or prevent their implementation.

While government and industry wrestle over regulations, here are the prime suspects and the best ways to remove them from your water without government help:

Earlier this year the EPA reversed a Bush administration decision to leave perchlorate unregulated and to pursue perchlorate first in a new push for stricter drinking water regulations.

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Often it’s the quick demolition route developers will take to get rid of one project to build another. Materials are thrown in the trash with no consideration for their reuse potential. This is not the case with Edgewood Companies and the sustainable deconstruction effort at 1209 Bonanza Ave., the site of the former C&M Lodge.

“In November, we first initiated a recycling program at the C & M Lodge site by donating all the furniture and fixtures to several regional nonprofit organizations. On June 22, we continued our recycling effort with the physical removal of buildings that resulted in a significant amount of salvageable material made available for recycling,” Brandon Hill, project manager for Edgewood Companies, said in a press release. “This is sustainable deconstruction versus pure demolition and landfill. In the end, we were able to recycle well over 50 percent of total material by weight.”

Edgewood Companies is in the process of permitting a neighborhood park at the Bonanza site. In a partnership with South Lake Tahoe, the company will donate 1 acre to the city for the new park.

Transparency is supposedly coming to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. At least that’s the goal of legislation signed Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

The legislation was sponsored by state Sen. Ted Gaines, R-Roseville, who represents the California side of Lake Tahoe.

SB593 requires each California member of the TRPA to comply with the requirements of the Political Reform Act and to file with the Fair Political Practices Commission a statement of economic interests.

“I was surprised to learn that there was no existing state law mandating these disclosure requirements. This opened the potential for California members of the TRPA to make decisions in which they had a conflict of interest and left the public with no way of knowing,” Gaines said in a statement. “Because of SB593, these members will now have to file the same conflict disclosure form required of every other elected and appointed official in the state. They will be held to the same high standards when it comes to disclosure and maintaining the public’s utmost trust.”

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Nathaniel Popper and E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times

Wall Street retreated back into panic mode amid growing worries about the economy, prompting leaders of major U.S. banks to take the rare step of assuring jittery investors that a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis was not about to happen.

The chief executives of the nation’s three biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. — are fighting speculation that they are in trouble and leading the nation back into recession.

Banking stocks have recently slumped to levels not seen since Wall Street’s meltdown three years ago, when the industry received a massive government bailout to avert collapse. They also led the market’s huge dive Wednesday, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 520 points.

During the stock market’s rout, a leading index of bank stocks dropped 7.1% — far outpacing the Dow’s 4.6% slide. Over the last month, banks performed worse than any other sector in the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index, dropping 22%.

“With the stock prices down so much and the memories of 2008 so fresh, there are probably a lot of people who could use some reassurance that we aren’t going to repeat that situation,” said Jim Sinegal, a bank analyst with Morningstar. “With the stock prices down, everyone is trying to address it all at once.”

Banking executives have scrambled in the last 24 hours to broadcast the message that their balance sheets are sound.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made a television appearance in California on Wednesday to talk about the health of his bank just hours before BofA CEO Brian Moynihan submitted to a telephone grilling from skeptical investors. And Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit earlier this week sent a voicemail to the bank’s employees asking them to tell customers the company was in good shape.

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By Steve Green, Las Vegas Sun

Casino operator Tropicana Entertainment Inc. of Las Vegas reported a second quarter loss Tuesday as business deteriorated at its properties in Atlantic City and Nevada.

The company, controlled by investor Carl Icahn, said it lost $2.7 million vs. a loss of $1.6 million in the year-ago quarter.

Net revenue of $145 million was down from $164 million.

Tropicana has two hotel-casinos in Laughlin in Southern Nevada and one, the River Palms, has seen business decline due to road construction on the main casino strip there.

Tropicana said that citywide, Laughlin casino revenue fell 7.3 percent in the quarter vs. 2010’s second quarter because of the construction, “continuing poor economic conditions and reduced consumer discretionary spending.’’

The company’s property in Stateline, the MontBleu Casino Resort & Spa, has similarly been hurt by the slow economy.

Overall, the Nevada properties generated net revenue of $29.3 million, down 6.6 percent.

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The board that oversees recreation Measure S on Wednesday voted on all the necessary motions to go back to the voters.

Measure R would revise the 11-year-old Measure S to allow for more bike trails to be given funding for maintenance and more money for ball fields.

The boundaries for the people paying the $18 a year fee are those who live within the Lake Tahoe Unified School District.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

A woman who knows the Eldorado National Forest well has been tapped to be the forest supervisor for that region.

Kathy Hardy replaces Ramiro Villalvazo who left in June for a position in the Forest Service’s Regional Office in Vallejo.

Hardy’s start date has not been determined.

Kathy Hardy

She was Placerville District Ranger in Camino from 1999 to 2006.

Hardy brings a broad natural and cultural resource leadership background to the Forest Supervisor position. Hardy has been the Central California District Manager with the Bureau of Land Management since April 2009, providing oversight to offices in Bakersfield, Bishop, El Dorado Hills, Hollister and Ukiah. Previously, she was the deputy forest supervisor on the Stanislaus National Forest from October 2006 through April 2009.

Hardy and her husband Bruce Ungari live in El Dorado Hills. They enjoy outdoor activities including camping, skiing, rafting and fishing.

By Denny Walsh, Sacramento Bee

The state’s Herculean effort to wipe the northern pike out of Lake Davis in Plumas County wreaked havoc on the economy in and around Portola, but the city and owners and operators of businesses and property may not proceed in court against the state as a class, an appellate court has ruled.

The character and interests of the proposed plaintiffs are far too varied to allow them to press a single lawsuit as a class, a three-justice panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento decided.

The justices struck down class certification granted by Plumas Superior Court Judge Janet Hilde. Their ruling means the plaintiffs will have to sue the state individually.

In 1997 and 2007, the California Fish and Game Department dumped thousands of gallons of rotenone – a naturally occurring poison deadly to gilled creatures – into the scenic mountain reservoir and its tributaries to rid them of the invasive, voracious fish.

After the 1997 poisoning, which was unsuccessful, the Legislature determined the area’s residents had suffered economic harm and appropriated more than $9.1 million to compensate them.

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By Juan Lopez, Reno Gazette-Journal

When Hot August Nights was first gaining a footing in Northern Nevada, Scott Magruder thought, “Well, this will only last for a couple of years.”

Little planning went into dealing with the influx of vintage cars those first years, said Magruder, spokesman for the Nevada Department of Transportation.

“Then we had all those cars backed up on Mount Rose and were overheating, (so) we started putting it in our (construction) contracts that we would do most of the work behind the barricade, but there would be no ramp or lane closures during Hot August Nights.”

Since older cars are more susceptible than newer vehicles to overheat in traffic, Magruder said, the traffic-reducing decision was made then to discontinue any highway construction work while Hot August Nights, now 25 years old, was in town. A majority of the work on highway construction projects was shut down Friday and will resume Monday after Hot August Nights concludes to lessen lane closures and highway congestion.

And traffic-reducing measures could not come at a better time, said Sgt. Jim Stegmaier with the Reno Police Department Traffic Division. Stegmaier, who has been on the force for 23 years, said he has “never seen construction work get this bad in this area.”

“It’s horrible,” he said. “Obviously, we have some big construction projects that are going on. These projects are creating tons of jobs, but at the same time, the timing is really bad with Hot August Nights coming into town. I’ve never seen it this bad before.”

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By Jeff Delong, Reno Gazette-Journal

Inspectors discovered a powerboat encrusted with quagga mussels during a routine roadside inspection Sunday, officials report.

Thirty-seven quagga mussels were found on the boat, which was repeatedly decontaminated before being released from the inspection station at Spooner Summit, said Pete Brumis, public outreach specialist with the Tahoe Resource Conservation District.

It was determined the vessel had been recently operated in Lake Mead, which is heavily infested with mussels.

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