TRPA Executive Director Julie Regan recently testified on Capitol Hill in support of proposed federal legislation to “modernize” the Santini-Burton Act of 1980 — a law originally designed to permanently remove environmentally sensitive lands in the Tahoe Basin from development pressure.
Instead of emphasizing permanent protection, official messaging now focuses on “unlocking funds” and enabling federal agencies to “manage” these lands more flexibly. In federal land policy, management is not synonymous with preservation. It can include land exchanges, leasing arrangements, infrastructure siting, rights-of-way, and other discretionary uses already embedded in federal law.
At the same time, the modernization framework leaves a critical gap, providing no explicit, enforceable guarantee that these lands will remain permanently protected from future discretionary change.
The result is a striking inversion of Santini-Burton’s original vision. Lands once acquired to prevent overdevelopment risk are being redefined as tools to help manage it. Open space that quietly protects communities may be treated as underutilized inventory, subject to discretionary land-use decisions.
Ms. Regan’s recent column reads like a celebration of conservation success, invoking distinctly nonmodern tropes to promote the hackneyed narrative—stewardship, shared responsibility, and the importance of public lands to Tahoe’s identity. Even the title, “Tahoe Is Not Tahoe Without Public Lands,” relies on emotional framing that sounds reassuring while saying little about what the proposed modernization effort would actually change in how these lands are to be managed and governed.
“Guided by modern science,” Regan writes, “Team Tahoe partners are investing millions in transformative projects.”
That rhetorical move matters. Language that anchors a policy debate in identity rather than specifics obscures the real issue before the public: not whether public lands matter — few would dispute that — but how the legal framework governing those lands may be changing.
And that change is profound because it proceeds stealthily, gradually normalizing a shift in the language of preservation, restoration and modernization, as if it were a fait accompli.
When Congress enacted the Santini-Burton Act in 1980, its purpose was unmistakable: permanently remove environmentally sensitive parcels from the development pipeline. It functioned as a defensive land-banking tool designed to shield the Tahoe Basin from precisely the development pressures that were already threatening this fragile watershed.
The current “modernization” push shifts that purpose in a fundamental way—shifting away from land acquisition to prevent development toward management flexibility; from permanently protected open space to publicly owned and managed land; and from open lots serving as safety buffers to inventory and assets to be monetized.
More density. More tourism and recreation infrastructure. More federal agency discretion to manage growth pressures as they deem fit.
Under the modernized Santini-Burton, public ownership alone does not guarantee permanent protection — and nowhere in the modernization narrative is there an explicit commitment that these lands will remain permanently protected from discretionary, development-enabling uses.
This omission signals a clear philosophical pivot, from conservation land banking to treating public lands as flexible management assets subject to administrative discretion by the usual agencies and partner/stakeholders.
Even more concerning is what is entirely absent from the discussion: evacuation risk.
The Tahoe Basin is one of the most evacuation-constrained wildfire environments in the United States. Limited highway corridors, geographic bottlenecks, and surging visitation levels create well-documented life-safety vulnerabilities around the Lake.
Lots acquired through Santini-Burton decades ago—3500 parcels totaling 13,000 to 16,000 acres—now function in practice as critical safety buffers in the Basin— providing defensible space, emergency staging capacity, and protection against the cascading risks of high-density land use. Yet the modernization framework offers no clear, enforceable guarantee that these safety buffer lands will remain permanently protected.
However, evacuation capacity is not mentioned at all in the modernization narrative.
Not once.
Instead, the messaging focuses on accommodating “growing recreational demand” and adapting to “changing conditions” — language that historically signals strategies to absorb more visitation, not limit it.
In practical terms, this positions the Basin to handle increased infrastructure, tourism pressure, and density while its evacuation constraints remain unchanged.
That is not conservation, but growth management framed as stewardship.
And the public — whose safety and quality of life are most directly affected — is being asked to accept this structural shift without a clear, transparent discussion of its implications or consequences.
Tahoe’s future cannot be secured through reassuring language that masks fundamental policy changes with unknown outcomes. True stewardship requires clarity, honesty about tradeoffs, and an unwavering commitment to life safety.
Before modernization proceeds, the public deserves clear answers:
Will Santini-Burton lands remain permanently protected from development-enabling uses?
Will evacuation capacity be treated as a primary planning constraint?
Or are we witnessing a further retreat from protecting the Basin to accommodating development pressure?
Tahoe’s history offers a clear lesson: once development pressure gains momentum, it is not easily reversed.
This is precisely why the original Santini-Burton Act existed in the first place.
Modernization must not become a euphemism for dismantling its core purposes. A law designed to stop development pressure should not be repurposed to manage it.
If, as Ms. Regan writes, “There is nowhere on Earth like Lake Tahoe, and the public lands that surround Big Blue are the heart and soul of life in our community,” then modernization must strengthen — not weaken — permanent protections that have safeguarded these lands for nearly five decades.
-By Dana Tibbitts