Nevada and California lawmakers are pushing the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to update and improve key environmental thresholds.
Nevada senator Skip Daly, who chairs the Nevada Legislative Oversight Committee for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, is requesting an environmental update before the start of the legislative session in early February. The agency has informed us that it has been collaborating with the Nevada Legislative Oversight Committee on policy guidance over the past year.
“We completely appreciate how important Lake Tahoe’s environment and the health of its communities are to the people of the state of Nevada,” said Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Public Information Officer Jeff Cowen.
Nevada Senator Skip Daly’s letter, sent on October 16th, came after months of public testimony.
“TRPA uses a number of real-time monitoring and data sources in the basin to constantly stay on top of changing conditions and understand the impact of policies on both the communities and the environment,” said Cowen.
One criticism against the TRPA is that they haven’t conducted a formal basin-wide environmental impact statement since 2012.
“The 2012 regional update, the environmental impact statement, was a 20-year document. That document is not intended to be updated, so we’re always collecting data,” said Cowen.
We spoke to Sierra Club Toiyabe Vice Chair Tobe Tyler, who contends that TRPA is failing key environmental thresholds – by performing environmental checklists instead.
“We are very concerned about TRPA’s reviewing and approving over developments without looking at their environmental thresholds, which is what they were required to do, and many of the environmental thresholds are out of date,” said Tyler.
The California attorney general’s office is also pushing TRPA to meet and report reduction goals in one of their key environmental thresholds: reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
“They changed the standard in April 2021, and they have not reported on it since people don’t know what is going on. And here we’re going into 2025. Four years later, we have no reporting of how the VMT is doing,” said Tyler.
“There isn’t always a one-size-fits-all because everything in Tahoe is different so the way they would update VMT standards in California or how they would update a vehicle analysis in Nevada; those help feed into what we do but those aren’t necessarily the legal requirements that are applied to us,” said Cowen.
The Sierra Club and other critics are demanding that an independent organization conduct a regional environmental impact statement. They argue that scientists at the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency may be influenced by the agency’s goals, which could affect the objectivity of their data.