Letter: Rejuvenation or decline for South Lake Tahoe?

As a partner in a lodging business and former Mayor, I was impressed that City Councilmember Tamara Wallace showed courage and laid out her concerns about taxes. I found her way of looking at where we are as a tourism destination matched my own. I agree with her philosophy of how we should handle this downturn in business. She pointed out that those wanting to tax us into oblivion with a Vacancy Tax initiative, TOT tax, and raising the minimum wage, don’t understand how to save our town at this crucial juncture. Simply put, they are using the wrong solution model to solve the wrong problem. She points out that the voters have already voted in $7 million more per year into the city budget. Enough is enough.

I looked up Richard Butler’s piece on the Tourism Area Life Cycle. Any long-time local can see that we as a community are at the end stage where we either choose to rejuvenate our tourism economy or allow it to decline.

Some of the local gurus were quoted as saying that this downturn in our local economy evidenced by dozens of business closures is just part of a normal process. I disagree. This has been nothing close to normal.

First, I believe our economic canoe is heading for the waterfall because of TRPA, rules and regulations that have hampered and frozen our ability to grow our economy including the ability to build affordable housing. TRPA arbitrarily set the allowable sound decibels for airplanes below what any modern plane could do, which stopped over 300,000 people a year from using our airport. I doubt the Flight Deck restaurant would have had to close had the air buses been able to bring customers here instead of Reno.

Second, I believe that the heavy smoke that choked us physically as well as economically for weeks, combined with the Caldor Fire that had us all evacuated with many not returning was devastating. Then the pandemic caused us to be afraid of our own shadows and making rules like closing all the Forest Service beaches caused overcrowding, especially by those fleeing the big cities. It greatly limited the customers that could be in our restaurants, lodgings, and many others. Then we endured last year's record snowfall. This was all layered on top of our losing about 1,000 vacation home rentals and. as a result, hundreds of jobs.

Third, there was the anti-tourism message and greatly misleading quotes and apparently doctored photos on social media and in our regional TV stations. An overzealous Councilman Mr. Robbins has caused lodging cancellations in the hundreds. His anti-tourism message is based on him declaring that we have had over tourism. In his defense, he hasn’t lived here long enough to remember enough seasons to know what he’s talking about. He’s not the only person who has railed against over-tourism. We seem to have a lot of big city recent arrivals like Scott working from home, getting their paychecks from out-of-town non-tourism sources who somehow think they know darn near everything. They came here and now want to shut the door behind them. But Mr. Robbins can do more harm than others because of his irresponsible use of his council position. He is on record saying he wants tourism to decline by at least 10 percent. What he does not understand is that it already has.

It reminds me of the phrase, “Are you going to believe what you see or what I'm telling you that you see?” What we actually see is sky-high prices for food, gas, sewer, water, electricity, natural gas, and everything else. What we see is absolutely no plan for a different economy.

What we know is that choosing decline with excessive taxation is not a rational choice. So, let’s choose rejuvenation and start by not signing the vacancy tax petition, urging the council to reject the TOT tax increase and job-killing minimum wage increase.

Let’s stop over-taxation.

Let’s rejuvenate our economy and save our locals’ jobs.

- Tom Davis, Former Mayor