Open letter to the South Lake Tahoe community:

It was a great honor to serve as a member of the Lake Tahoe Unified School District (LTUSD) Board of Trustees for the last four years. As previously reported, I am stepping aside to focus on my career and raising my beautiful baby girl. I said many times while I was on the Board that every family in the District was my family, and every child in the District was my responsibility. Now that I have a child of my own, I think the parents of LTUSD will understand when I say that I need to focus on my own family for the time being. But before I go I wanted to say thank you to this community for the opportunity to serve you, as well as offer some thoughts on the current state of civil discourse in our community and nation.

During the past four years I was in the trenches with an incredibly dedicated group of public servants who wanted nothing more than to oversee our District to ensure the health, safety, and academic success of all of our students. It was a great honor to work with all of them. Being on the other side of the Brown Act and sitting in those closed session meetings, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the public servants in this town are in it for the right reasons.

These are people who just want to do the right thing and help this community. Yet they are met almost daily with a constant barrage of criticism, insults, mistrust, and derision from some members of this community who see it as their duty, not to exercise their constitutional right as citizens to hold our elected leaders to account, but rather to engage in a self-righteous crusade to tear down and destroy anyone who steps forward into a leadership role. While this group of people apparently lacks the courage to run for office themselves, they take great pleasure in actively working to dig up dirt, spread rumors and lies, make personal attacks, and most harmfully, engage in the spreading of cynicism and fear about the democratic process on the local level. This isn’t healthy citizen participation in government, this is calculated sabotage of the process by people who find representative government inconvenient to their ultimate goals. They scorn compromise and so seek to annihilate the very system of government that we the people built.

Having been an elected official and now a private citizen, I feel I can ask this question with total honesty: in our current climate, who in their right mind would want to run for local office? Who finds it exciting to receive 50 emails a day attacking their character, threatening their family, and impugning their reputation? Who takes joy in being cornered in grocery stores and receiving lectures from strangers to the point where it's no longer an option to leave the house? All these attacks do is discourage good people from engaging in politics. By making politics a dirty word, we have all but ensured that only the corrupt and power-first minded will seek it out, making our cynicism a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This has to end. I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a community this divided. Though we surely aren’t the only small town with its share of political infighting, having lived in a couple I can assure you our brand of disagreement is among the nastiest. We have got to start assuming the best intentions in one another. While a healthy skepticism of politicians is good, when distrust in government becomes so extreme that local health mandates are ignored during a global pandemic, then that skepticism has officially become dangerous. We should be encouraging our young people to pursue public service as an honorable profession, not telling them that all politicians are liars. That is the only way to make sure our elected leaders are in fact good people. Public service is the great passion of my life. It is a worthy and honorable pursuit, and someday I will run for office again.

As a staunch believer in democracy and the constitution, I would never suggest that we blindly follow our leaders, quite the opposite in fact. It is our responsibility as citizens to question our leaders. But nowhere is it written that everyone who runs for office is someone to be distrusted. It is likewise not demanded of us as lay people to question experts in their own fields. When we become so cynical that we refuse to believe anyone in a position of authority, then we get people arguing, without scientific evidence, that 5G cell towers cause cancer; that masks don’t work to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or that COVID-19 is no worse than the seasonal flu; that vaccines cause autism; or that a President who never held the majority in the popular vote or in popular public opinion is entitled to win an election he clearly lost because the other side “isn’t truly American.” These aren’t harmless differences of opinion, these are dangerous outright lies that are eroding the fabric of our society. Objective truth exists. We need to start trusting our experts again instead of conspiracy theories, however much the conspiracy fits our world view.

We all live in Tahoe, because we love it here. We all want the best for our community. We all believe in protecting our natural resources. We all want to help our citizens in need. We simply differ on the best ways to get there and that’s ok. We can work together to achieve these aims, and yet many choose not to. If we continue to value division over unity, and the argument over the compromise, we simply will not make it as a community. Our sustainability is not guaranteed. Professional talent will go elsewhere. Young families will decide to pack it up. We are at a tipping point right now, but not over the direction of our economy or the protection of our resources, but over how we treat each other. The choice is ours.

Troy Matthews
Citizen