Opinion: Like a bad dream

Last Friday, the public was allowed its first glimpse of final environmental documents for Alterra Mountain Company’s proposed development at Palisades Tahoe. The release sets the project on a path for denial or approval by the Placer County Board of Supervisors this fall.

If this feels like déjà vu, it should. The proposal for the enormous Village at Palisades Tahoe—with 850 condo and hotel units, 1,493 bedrooms, and a 90,000-square-foot indoor recreation center—has been in this situation before. And disturbingly, it looks the same as it did in 2014, 2016, and 2023, including the added traffic, pollution, and negative impacts it represents for Lake Tahoe.

The League to Save Lake Tahoe is strongly opposed to the Village at Palisades Tahoe, just as we have been since 2012, because it will do the opposite of Keep Tahoe Blue. It will add 1,353 new car trips into the Tahoe Basin on an average day. Those trips add up to 12,406 vehicle miles travelled per day; that’s more than 10 times what would be allowed for a project inside the Basin. More traffic is not a good thing for the clarity and quality of the Lake’s waters where we love to swim and paddle. Alterra may try to convince you otherwise, but decades of research and Tahoe’s leading scientists say traffic is bad for the Lake.

Traffic pumps tailpipe emissions into the air and crushes Tahoe’s roads into fine dust and debris. When it rains or snow melts, stormwater transports these tiny pollution particles into the Lake, clouding its cobalt blue waters. Also, new scientific research points to car and truck tires as a source of microplastic pollution, which like stormwater, also finds its final resting place in Lake Tahoe.

Then there’s your sanity to consider. Tahoe is a place to relax, not to idle in glacially creeping traffic that regularly chokes the Highway 89 corridor between Tahoe City and Truckee. The project’s own environmental impact studies show that daily car trips on Olympic Valley Road will nearly double on the already busiest days in the summer and winter. Coping with long lines of cars during a vacation is a nuisance, but for local workers commuting to their jobs, parents taking their kids to practice, or first responders rushing a patient to the hospital, added traffic is much more serious.

The Tahoe Basin would undoubtedly feel added stress from the Village at Palisades Tahoe, but are there any promised benefits? Sure, but not enough to alleviate current traffic problems, let alone offset future decades of increased pressure from the project.

Like many of you in the Truckee-Tahoe community, we’re also frustrated that Alterra Mountain Company, whose tagline is “we are the mountains,” has repeatedly ignored the same local “mountain people” it claims to be. In 2016, the company was sued by local conservation nonprofit Sierra Watch and lost, forcing the company to revise the project’s environmental impact report (EIR). The Revised EIR from 2023 called for effectively the same plan. In response, over 2,600 comment letters saying “we don’t want it” were submitted. Yet, the Final Environmental Impact Report released last Friday calls for the same old project.

Tahoe is a special place and deserves special protections, which it has. But the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s jurisdiction to apply those protections ends at the Basin’s boundary, a mere four miles from Palisades Tahoe. A project the size of the Village at Palisades Tahoe could never be built in the Basin. It’s dishonest to claim that moving the development a 20-minute bike ride away erases all impacts to the Lake.

The League offered alternatives that could work: a reduced project size, or building in phases with adaptive management checkpoints along the way to ensure excessive impacts are mitigated. Based on the Final EIR, neither the County nor Alterra has any interest in such solutions.

On August 15th and 17th, Placer County and the Olympic Valley Municipal Advisory Council will hold public meetings on the Village at Palisades Tahoe project. Meeting information can be found here. The public can ask questions on the 15th and provide comments on the 17th. We encourage you to attend and share your voice.

The League will continue to do what is in the best interest of the Lake and the people who enjoy it. Sign up for our issue-specific newsletter to get updates in your inbox: keeptahoeblue.org/palisades.

Together, we will Keep Tahoe Blue.

Jesse Patterson, Chief Strategy Officer, League to Save Lake Tahoe (Keep Tahoe Blue)

Read the article in the Tahoe Daily Tribune and Sierra Sun.