By Joanne Marchetta

As we celebrate Earth Day this April, let’s remember how important environmental stewardship is to the health of Lake Tahoe, and how important our individual actions are.

Over the last two decades, public, private, and nonprofit partners have made significant progress conserving and restoring Lake Tahoe’s environment through the Environmental Improvement Program.

Joanne Marchetta

What started in 1997 as an idea for better collaboration among agencies working on restoration projects, in the year of the first presidential summit at Lake Tahoe, has grown into one of the nation’s most ambitious and successful environmental restoration programs.

Over the last 20 years, Environmental Improvement Program partners have completed more than 500 projects. Those projects have built or improved 153 miles of bike and pedestrian paths and upgraded transit facilities to provide transportation options and improve air quality. They have upgraded 750 miles of roadway to reduce stormwater pollution and protect Lake Tahoe’s water clarity, restored 17,278 acres of wildlife habitat, opened 3,195 feet of shoreline for public access, and treated 69,554 acres of forest to reduce hazardous fuels and wildfire risk. They have treated 47 acres of the lake to remove invasive clams and plants, and keep invasive species from spreading and damaging Lake Tahoe’s environment and the recreation opportunities it supports.

It’s not only the public projects that make a difference for the lake and our communities. It’s also what all of us can do as private citizens that can add up to change for the better.

Over the last few years, we have all seen pictures of discouraging amounts of trash on Lake Tahoe’s sandy beaches after the July 4 holiday. Fortunately, our communities have no shortage of dedicated people willing to volunteer their time to clean up messes that others have left behind.

Every year, TRPA presents Lake Spirit Awards to people who show a tireless dedication to protecting the lake and its environment. Past award winners have cleaned up litter, built and maintained bike trails, created programs to educate students about Lake Tahoe’s environment, and created composting programs for schools.

We can’t lose sight of the incredible impact that individuals can have at Lake Tahoe. The Environmental Improvement Program encourages some easy ways that each of us can help protect the lake.

Don’t litter, and pick up trash: Cigarette butts, paper, and plastic can all be picked up by wind or water and carried into the lake.

Bike, walk, or catch the bus: Less driving means less air pollution and less traffic congestion.

Pick up after your pet: Dog waste can be harmful to other dogs, wildlife, and water quality. Many trails at Tahoe have stations offering free biodegradable bags for pet waste. Please pick up after your dog and dispose of its waste properly.

Choose native plants for your yard: Gardening with native plants means less water, fertilizers, and pesticides.

Install and maintain best management practices: Installing measures on your property to stop erosion and infiltrate stormwater helps improve Lake Tahoe’s famous water clarity.

Get defensive: Create defensible space and properly maintain the vegetation around your home to significantly reduce wildfire risk.

Replace old woodstoves: Newer EPA-certified woodstoves use half the wood to generate the same amount of heat as an old stove, so you’ll save money and reduce air pollution. The EPA estimates that removing one old woodstove is equivalent to taking five old diesel buses off the road. Plus, there are rebates available to help cover the cost of replacement.

Become a Tahoe Keeper: Learn how to inspect and clean your canoe, kayak, or paddleboard to help stop the spread of aquatic invasive species.

Volunteer: There are many ways to get involved. Help with beach cleanups, report aquatic invasive species infestations, and help monitor storm water pollution.

These are just a few of the things each of us can do to help protect Lake Tahoe. Other ideas, as well as catchy campaign signs and messages to help spread awareness about the importance of environmental stewardship at Lake Tahoe, are available through the Take Care campaign. You, too, can help us spread the word.

Millions of people travel to Lake Tahoe each year to enjoy its unparalleled outdoor recreation opportunities. Everyone’s actions have an impact, and each of us plays an important part in leaving this beautiful place that we all love in better shape than we found it for future generations to enjoy. No one individual or agency can protect Lake Tahoe on their own. That takes all of us working together.

Joanne Marchetta is executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

By Bonnie Turnbull

As you read this on an electronic device, think of it this way. Every fourth word you read, is powered by solar energy.

On Tuesday, our community pledged to 100 percent clean energy.

On Wednesday, Liberty Utilities celebrated the completion of the 50 MW Luning Solar Energy Center. 

Liberty celebrates its new solar plant on April 19. Photo/Bonnie Turnbull

Twenty-five percent of Liberty Utilities’ electricity—25 percent of the electricity that’s powering your home right now–comes from this clean energy produced three hours away.

Solar is becoming a large part of Liberty’s portfolio. Photo/Bonnie Turnbull

At night the solar panels are “parked” horizontally, but at sunrise 350 acres of panels tip toward the rising sun and follow its pathway across the sky.

Hydraulic pistons adjust banks of panels about every five minutes. Photo/Bonnie Turnbull

The Energy Center is on BLM land outside Luning near Hawthorne. You’ll find it on Google Earth at the junction of highways 95 and 361. The adjacent Table Mountain substation provides an immediate and cheap connection to the grid.

Nevada is becoming a leader in solar. Photo/Bonnie Turnbull

The center is about a mile long by about half a mile wide, but it almost disappears into the desert.

How much will this clean energy cost us?

For the next five years, customers will pay down the cost of construction, so the charge will be about 6 cents per kWh. Currently, electricity generated by natural gas costs about 4-5 cents per kWh. But with solar’s cheap operational expenses, our kilowatt hour costs will drop below those from natural gas for the next 25 years.

Travis Johnson, Liberty’s vice president for operations, talks about the solar project. Photo/Bonnie Turnbull

Many U.S. jobs were created during the construction. However, most parts were manufactured overseas—the panels in China and the power converters in Germany–in countries well-positioned to benefit from this energy transformation. 

With our commitment to clean energy, we help foster the economic climate here in the United States for more investment in the green energy sector.

Bonnie Turnbull is a resident of South Lake Tahoe and member of Tahoe Climate Change Action Network.

To the community,

The North Tahoe Public Utility District would like to thank all the attendees, donors, volunteers and participants that made this year’s Snowfest Pancake Breakfast and Dress Up Your Dog Contest a success. More than 240 people enjoyed time with family and friends before the Kings Beach SnowFest Parade and nearly $1,400 was raised to benefit the district’s Friends of the Park Fund. Friends of the Park provides additional financial support to the North Tahoe Regional Park and the Parks Department.

This year the district also adopted the Dress Up Your Dog Contest and we want to thank the six dogs and owners that participated. We had some great entries but those coming out on top were: Best in Show, Free Byrd in his hot rod chariot driven by owner Heather Kranz; Looks Most Like the Owner was Ozzy as a hot dog and his owner Logan Carter as ketchup; Best Costume was Indy as the Dalmadoodle for owners Paul and Laurie Mattioli. Thanks to Hot Diggity Dog and Cat for supporting the Dress Up Your Dog Contest and donating three overflowing baskets of dog toys, treats and gifts for prizes.

Each and every donation is an integral part of this community fundraiser. A huge thanks to our sponsors Old PO Restaurant, Stohlgren Brothers, Inc.; Coffee Connexion; Jason’s Beachside Grill; Habeger Produce; Las Panchitas; The Log Cabin; Bella Affair Catering; Safeway; PrintArt/Sierra Mail and North Shore Hardware. All of your donations contribute to put smiles on the faces of the children and adults that come to this event.

Finally, without our volunteers from the board of directors, Recreation and Parks commissioners, district employees, the middle school volunteers and Dress Up Your Dog judges and emcee, this event wouldn’t take place. We thank all of you and appreciate your efforts.

Pam Emmerich, NTPUD

By Lawrence R. Samuel

We know the story all too well: Baby boomers, that generation born between 1946 and 1964, experience a childhood heavily shaped by the cultural dynamics of the postwar era, and immerse themselves in the rebellion and hedonism to be had in abundance during the counterculture era. Let’s call that familiar tale Boomers 1.0, a version of boomers’ individual and collective lives defined by Cold War paranoia, idealism, and youthful joie de vivre. The sequel, Boomers 2.0, covers advanced young adulthood through early-stage middle age. This version of the generation’s collective life is dominated by aggressive careering and the hyper-raising of families.

Each of these first two chapters of boomers’ lives (while allowing for other ethnic, gender and socio-economic determinants) forms a relatively straightforward narrative that, in many ways, was quite representative of previous generations of Americans.  Declaring independence from one’s parents and their respective values in an attempt to create something different actually goes back a couple of centuries in this country, as does the subsequent settling into the domesticity and maturity of midlife.

This is, however, where it gets interesting. Rather than embrace their parents’ model of seniority defined by retirement, baby boomers are now considering or pursuing many different options, a version of life I call Boomers 3.0. Instead of heading en masse to retirement communities much like “Del Boca Vista” (the fictional condominium complex in Florida of “Seinfeld” fame), 60-somethings are going back to school, starting new relationships, exploring their creativity, taking new spiritual paths, embarking on “encore” careers, forming new communities, fighting for causes in which they believe, giving their time and money away, and yes, bucket listing. For financial and other reasons, a good number are working and staying in their current homes as long as possible, seeing no compelling reason to do otherwise.

 Much is being made about how many baby boomers are financially unprepared for retirement, something all too true for a sizable segment of their generation. But boomers are collectively the richest generation in history and, even though a good number have already scaled back their careers, they are getting still richer. The (currently) strong stock market is making affluent boomers wealthier, with those additional financial resources being used to pursue alternative, sometimes very costly third acts.

Sixty-five million (of the original 76 million) boomer population are still alive and kicking. They range in age from 53 to 71, and each one is approaching or already engaged in his or her third act.  Some baby boomers, unwilling or unable to accept that their bodies and minds have gotten older, are clinging desperately to their remaining youth by investing in the wide array of “anti-aging” therapies to be found in the marketplace. But even most of these folks don’t take these alleged fountains of youth too seriously.

Still other boomers are admittedly lost when it comes to planning for their third act; they are not interested in the traditional model of retirement, but not at all clear which path they should take.  Interestingly, in my research I’ve found that it is the financially secure who are most likely to be directionless, a result perhaps of having too many options available.

What happened to the very pleasant idea of spending one’s third and final act of life enjoying what one had worked so hard and long for during the first and second acts? Why is there no longer a central narrative to Americans’ last quarter-century or so of life (roughly age 55 to 80, on average)—replaced by a postmodern jumble of stories going in all sorts of directions? Are baby boomers, as some observers have claimed, the first “ageless” generation in history, rejecting the rules of society as they famously did in their idealistic younger days? Is creating a new paradigm of aging their final hurrah, something perhaps greater in scope and longer-lasting than their countercultural dream of universal peace and love?

In retrospect, the baby boomers’ impulse to toss out the Greatest Generation’s interpretation of older age makes perfect sense and was entirely predictable. Boomers (the “Me Generation,” remember) were and remain resistant to social norms and expectations, their individualism and anti-authoritarian ways perhaps being their most enduring legacy. It would be easy to suggest that as boomers plunge headfirst into their 70s they are suffering from an acute case of Peter Pan syndrome, refusing to grow up even as their physical selves experience decline and as they more often forget exactly why they came into a room. The looming threat of becoming a victim of Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia is incentive enough to pretend that older age is something that only happens to other people.

Overall, however, I believe that baby boomers’ inclination to take on new challenges and “act young” later in life is a very good thing. Studies show that there is much truth to the cliché, however trite, that one’s age is “just a number” or a “state of mind,” and that one is “only as old as one feels.” (Don’t even get me started on the “70 is the new 50” adage, or other such silly twistings of chronology, not to mention basic biology.) But sitting down to dinner at an “early bird special” to save a couple bucks, or whiling away afternoons playing mahjong, are simply not boomers’ style. (To be fair, retirement communities are a lot more active than they used to be.) Boomers’ third acts of life may indeed be scattered, disjointed, and personally defined, but as a whole they offer an attractive alternative to the going-off-into-the-sunset model that was so popular in the latter half of the 20th century.

Finally, given the widespread ageism in our youth-obsessed society, it’s no surprise that baby boomers will do pretty much anything to avoid being branded as irrelevant and over the hill.  It’s also important to note that boomers’ insistence on trying to keep their jobs despite lucrative early retirement offers is actually in the best interests of the country. Millennials may wish boomers would get out of the way so they could take over their prestigious jobs and fat salaries, but millions of 60-somethings delaying Social Security and Medicare payouts is, for the moment at least, averting the economic and healthcare apocalypse (and “generational war” over resources) that many experts are predicting. 

Continuing to find meaning and purpose in life is the real goal of Boomers 3.0—a less coherent story than version 1.0 or 2.0, but certainly an intriguing one that will have major social, economic, and political consequences over the next few decades.

Lawrence R. Samuel is the author of “Aging in America: A Cultural History” recently published by University of Pennsylvania Press.  His next book, “Boomers 3.0  Marketing to Baby Boomers in Their Third Act of Life,” will be published by Praeger this August.

By Jon Coupal, Orange County Register

If Gov. Jerry Brown and members of the California Legislature think that the backlash against the car and gas tax increases will subside any time soon, they are mistaken. The controversy continues to dominate both traditional and social media and, in fact, the more that taxpayers learn about these transportation tax hikes the angrier they get.

Our political elites are learning that taxes on cars and gasoline remain very unpopular because they fall disproportionately on the working Californians — which is where the majority of voters reside.

And the resentment might only grow when the taxes actually kick. Just wait until the bills from the DMV start showing up in the mail starting in January of next year and the gas tax increase starts even earlier in November of this year.

Read the whole story

To the community,

The hot, nutritious, full course meals served every Monday to any and all who come to St. Theresa Grace Hall are made possible by the efforts of many caring and dedicated individuals, businesses and organizations. From the stores and businesses who donate food, volunteers who pickup donated food, cooks who prepare the meals, volunteers who do meal setup, serving and cleaning to the donors and sponsors who pay for the costs associated with each meal, Bread & Broth is genuinely grateful.

Heavenly Mountain Resort is one of B&B’s generous sponsors and on April 10 hosted one of six annual Adopt A Day of Nourishment sponsorships. Money from the Vail Epic Promise grant funds Heavenly’s Adopts A Day, and Heavenly team members donate their personal time to volunteer alongside B&B volunteers at each of their sponsorship dinner.

Volunteering on behalf of Heavenly this month were Chris Echert, Angela Haen, Rebecca Hamm and Jack Pippin. Hamm and Pippin are returning volunteers at the B&B dinners, Echert and Haen enjoyed their first time experiencing the heartwarming feeling of helping others at a B&B dinner. These four sponsor volunteers and Heavenly Mountain Resort exemplify how individual and businesses can give back to the community through service to others.

For more B&B information, go online or join us on Facebook.

Carol Gerard, Bread & Broth

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 Joe Mathews

Dearest Nevada,

Marry me.

And not in a chapel off the Strip. I, California, want a real grown-up marriage with you, Nevada.

Joe Mathews

Look how much we already have in common. I’m the Golden State; you’re the Silver State. More than 90 percent of your people live within an hour of my eastern border. And, 1 in 5 Nevadans was born in California. That may not seem like many, but only 1 in 4 Nevadans was born in Nevada.

Together, the two of us are a place apart from today’s America. The  United States is increasingly mean, judgmental and isolationist. But you and I prefer entertaining to judging. We can’t get enough foreigners and tourists. We’re both tolerant of deviancy and sin (though I can get a little uptight about greenhouse gases).

All of which is why we’d both be better off as one merged state.

Right now, rich people and companies play us against each other, and we both end up poorer. Recently, you—feeling needy and desperate—gave $750 million in taxpayer money to the owner of pro football’s Oakland Raiders for a new stadium in Las Vegas. Building a football stadium is a terrible investment (a Stanford economist called it the worst stadium deal for a city he’d ever seen), and the money will come from a hotel tax that currently funds transportation and schools.

Before that, you gave billions in tax and other incentives to Tesla to locate a battery factory there. Deals like these leave both of us worse off—we lose a business, and you gain huge liabilities you can’t afford.

It’s similar to the problem of rich Californians avoiding income taxes by establishing nominal residence in Nevada, which doesn’t have them. You don’t get a cut of their income, and we lose money we need to educate our people.

Eliminating destructive economic competition between us is only part of what we could do for each other.

Look at you. Your economy has been lagging the country because it’s far too reliant on tourism and real estate. But my extraordinarily diverse economy, which has been outperforming the rest of the country, could help support yours. You desperately need a better-educated populace; if you married me, your kids could more easily go to my terrific public university systems.

In return, you’d bring me more of the young people that you’ve been better at attracting than me. Perhaps you could share your secret of how to build enough housing for young families. You also could inspire me to exercise the old pro-business libertarian ethos that helped me thrive, but has sagged in recent decades.

Politically, I see you as a natural ally in my biggest fight: against the president of the United States. Trump, more of an Atlantic City guy than a Vegas guy, wants to turn you into a nuclear dump by reviving the Yucca Mountain proposal for storing nuclear waste. As for California, the president has called my elections massive frauds, and threatened to defund the entire state if I don’t sign onto his dumbest and most xenophobic policies.

Trump fans with ties to the Russia have encouraged the #Calexit movement to separate me from the U.S. And Trump’s buddy Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit movement, is now working in California on a proposal to split me into pieces. Divide and conquer is what Trump wants. That’s why you and I have to unite and fight back.

I can feel your hesitation. You may fear there’d be an imbalance in a marriage—I have 40 million people, and you have less than 3 million. But don’t worry; I’ll take care of you. You’ll find that you have the same great deal as the rest of inland California. You’ll be subsidized by all the taxes paid by California’s rich coastal people, while retaining the right to make fun of those same rich people’s many excesses.

Remember: we’ve already done great things together—Burning Man (you host, I send my people), cleaning up Lake Tahoe, reviving Britney Spears’ career. Las Vegas and Los Angeles—two entertainment capitals—are more deeply intertwined than any two American cities across state lines. Vegas is the leading source of new out-of-state residents of L.A. (It’s no accident that the great L.A. movie of this era, “La La Land,” turns on two Nevada-California drives—Emma Stone’s return to her suburban Clark County home, and Ryan Gosling’s decision to pick her up there, and drive her back to L.A. for an audition.)

And I hate to go negative, but do you really have other options? Utah is an attractive neighbor, I’m sure, but she won’t marry you unless you convert.

And if our marriage doesn’t work? No worries. You and I are both no-fault divorce states. So we’d just go back to being friends.

All my love,

California

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

To the community,

Lake Valley Volunteer Firefighter’s Association held its 55th annual Fire Fighters Ball on March 10. The Ball was given a new theme this year as the firefighters hosted a sold out elegant event at the Edgewood Tahoe, which included fine dining, a presentation by Lake Valley Honor Guard, auctioning of firefighters skills such as yard cleanup, car detailing to name a few, an ongoing silent auction packed with dozens of items that were so generously donated to Lake Valley by our community and live music and dancing.

The evening also included a presentation in which the benevolent Lisa Maloff was honored and thanked for her generous donation of $150,000 to the Firefighter’s Association. The donation along with proceeds of the evening will be used to construct a new on-site fire and rescue training building in order to enhance firefighting and rescue skills and bring the highest level of “all risk care” that Lake Valley prides itself on. The new building will benefit neighboring agencies as well by giving the option of joint trainings between the departments. The old building being deemed unsafe after over 30 years of use had to be demolished.

Lake Valley Fire Department would like to personally thank Edgewood Tahoe for the use of the beautiful facility for this event and to all the many businesses and private parties that so generously donated prizes for the silent auction, and grand prize giveaways. It is a pleasure and honor to serve this community.

Chris Heng, Lake Valley firefighter

By Andrew Josuweit, Forbes

When Adam Reres was in high school, he decided to take a different route than many of his peers. Rather than go straight to the four-year school of his dreams, he decided to start his education at a community college.

“My decision to go to community college was mainly based on cost,” said Reres. “Community college was about one-third of the tuition of a four-year school. And with all of the core requirements accounted for, it was my gateway into a four-year program without wasting money on unnecessary credits.”

Community colleges offer an affordable alternative to four-year schools; Reres’ approach saved him thousands of dollars. While some people view them as a less glamorous option, there’s no doubt that community colleges offer tremendous value – $20,000 or more in savings for many students.

Read the whole story