Placer County decides whether to approve the project next week.
Lake Tahoe — the oldest lake in North America and the second deepest — receives special protections from complex environmental laws that date back to 1969, when the states of California and Nevada, along with Congress, passed the Tahoe Regional Planning Compact. The compact created a land-use regulatory agency to set environmental standards for the region, steer growth and development and rein in the urbanization and sprawl that was destroying the lake.
Ever since, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) has had the final word on what can be built: how big it can be and how to mitigate its impacts on Lake Tahoe.
And yet, due to a technicality, those laws don’t apply to one of the biggest development projects ever proposed in Tahoe.
The TRPA’s jurisdiction lies within the boundaries of an invisible line that traces the rim of the Tahoe Basin. Four miles outside of that boundary, the proposed Village at Palisades Tahoe sits just beyond the reach of Tahoe’s environmental laws.
The 93.3-acre project promises to transform Olympic Valley — and by extension, Truckee and north Lake Tahoe — into a year-round destination for tourists, with 850 condo and hotel units, 1,493 bedrooms and 297,733 square feet of commercial space. It would add hundreds more cars to roads in the Tahoe Basin on a daily basis — make that thousands of cars on the busiest days of the year. In all, the development would take 25 years to build.
“This project wouldn’t get past square one if it were proposed inside of the basin,” said Tom Mooers, executive director of Sierra Watch, a watchdog environmental organization that has led a community movement to fight the Palisades development for more than a decade.
Skiers flock to Palisades Tahoe ski resort in Olympic Valley, Calif., on March 4, 2024, as a blizzard warning is issued for California’s Sierra Nevada.
Next week, at a meeting on Nov. 19 at the North Tahoe Event Center in Kings Beach, the Placer County Board of Supervisors is set to decide whether to approve the proposed development at Palisades Tahoe, for the second time.
“Olympic Valley’s future is at a crossroads,” wrote Dee Byrne, the former president of Palisades Tahoe, in a recent op-ed the ski resort shared with SFGATE. “… This decision will have a monumental impact not only on the future of Olympic Valley and Palisades Tahoe but also on North Lake Tahoe and Placer County as a whole.”
An invisible line
The boundary of the TRPA’s jurisdiction is based on the watershed, yet parts of the line make unnatural zigzags, like when the line takes a sudden right-angle turn before it crosses Highway 89, just before River Ranch Lodge & Restaurant.
While most of the ski resort is just on the other side of the boundary, the southernmost slopes in Ward Canyon at Alpine Meadows are in the Tahoe Basin. In 2022, when Palisades Tahoe opened its gondola connecting Olympic Valley to Alpine Meadows, it linked the ski resort to the Tahoe Basin.