It's a draw in League vs. TRPA on Shorezone Plan

So who won? Both the League to Save Lake Tahoe and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency have hailed a Feb. 29 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding TRPA's Shorezone Plan, a comprehensive document which governs lakeshore development, including the number of piers and buoys allowed on the lake.
The decision by the three-judge appellate court overturned part of federal Judge Lawrence Karlton's earlier decision, modified other portions of the decision, approved part of Karlton's decision and sent the matter back to Karlton's court for further review at some point in the future.
(Go here for a news release from the TRPA regarding the decision and here for a release from the League to Save Lake Tahoe.)

In preparing it's Shorezone Plan, TRPA included both legal and illegal buoys — numbering 4,454 — in setting the baseline for determining the number of additional buoys — 1,862 — to be allowed on the lake. "Those (illegal) buoys were there and we wanted to clearly understand the reality on the ground," before moving forward with an analysis of the environmental impacts of more buoys, said Kristi Boosman, TRPA spokeswoman.
The League sued, contending the TRPA needed to do a separate analysis of the impact of the illegal buoys. The illegal buoys generate additional boat trips and the impacts of those need to be analyzed, not just lumped in with the legal buoys to create the baseline, said Carl Young, Program Director for the League.
Without studying the impacts of those additional boat trips, "TRPA's environmental analysis was insufficient," according to Young, since only additional buoys and not the illegal buoys — or even the legal buoys — were considered.
Since additional boat trips are generated by these illegal buoys "there needs to be a quantification of their boat pollution impacts," Young said.
"Generally speaking, an hour long boat trip creates hundreds more times pollution than a similar trip by a Subaru," because the boat must plow through dense water, according to Young. This in turn results in "significant" air and water emissions which were not analyzed, Young said.
The court ruled that TRPA could include illegal buoys in its baseline, but must provide more justification. In contrast, Karlton completely threw out the buoy portion of TRPA's plan.
The court's decision provided TRPA with guidance in preparing its documentation, but did not completely invalidate its earlier analysis, said Boosman. Since the matter has been tied up in court for two years, TRPA has been unable to implement other measures contained in the plan, which would have resulted in environmental improvements, she said. "(The decision) also offers another opportunity to invite all parties to the table to finally come to an agreement on a shorezone solution....TRPA would like to open the door to moving forward on the possible settlement of a shorezone policy and resolving this last half-decade of uncertainty to the benefit of Lake Tahoe," wrote Boosman in an email to the Mountain News.
The original shorezone policy was over 22 years in the making, noted Boosman, and included negotiations with the League, lakefront property owners and the Sierra Club.
Part of the plan includes bringing some illegal buoys into compliance: those which were previously permitted, those which were permitted by another agency, and those in existence before 1972.
Why the League did not sue to require an environmental analysis of both legal and illegal buoys is an "interesting question," said Young."Nothing was studied as part of the baseline, either legal or illegal buoys," he said. The League was trying to be "reasonable" by excluding those buoys which were clearly permitted in its lawsuit.
The ruling awarded legal costs to TRPA, something usually given to the winner in a case. Young said this does not mean TRPA won the case, as TRPA frames the issue. "The court said (TRPA) can do this, but with caveats."