Council candidates answer South Tahoe High student questions on housing and environmental threats

The South Tahoe High Climate Crew Club and Key Club asked questions of this year's candidates for South Lake Tahoe city council. Not all candidates replied and there are no responses from Brad Jacobson, Tamara Wallace, or Sherry Eddy.

Due to the length of the questions and answers (there are seven of them) they will be split up over the next few days. This is the third day of answers with two more questions answered below:

4.) Do you believe South Lake Tahoe suffers from a lack of affordable housing? If so, what policies do you support or plan to implement in order to address this issue?

SCOTT ROBBINS - We are deep into the worst housing crisis in the history of Lake Tahoe, a crisis about which our city council has made much fuss, but far less concrete action. Housing is the single most critical resource in the Tahoe basin today. Today some 600 locals live in converted motel rooms, and many locals have themselves, or know someone else who has faced eviction as their rental was sold out from under them.

In the last twenty years, our community has increased the total number of housing units by 20%, but in that same time we’ve lost 10% of our local population and 36% of our school enrollment. Second homes which sit empty most of the year account for over 50% of all residential units in Tahoe, nearly 8000 mostly empty homes. We’ve built vacation homes, and lost locals and families. This is not a healthy path.

We’re short on housing - but we’re not short on homes.

My solution is a vacancy tax. A fee charged to the owners of second homes that sit empty, and which are not rented to local residents. Vancouver had a very similar problem of vacant second homes (mostly used as investments) and instituted a vacancy tax of 5% of the property’s value. As a result, 30% of their empty 2nd homes were converted into rentals. Just this year, the city of Oakland, here in California, started a similar fee (a flat rate of $6000 per empty 2nd home). If we can replicate Vancouver’s success here in Tahoe using the same system as Oakland, that would add 2,400 new housing units on the local market overnight, without needing massive, and extremely slow construction projects. It would also raise some $33 million dollars annually, nearly doubling the cities general funds budget. This would allow the city to aggressively purchase the several derelict motels along highway 50 and renovate them into affordable workforce housing. Given the environmental issues here in the basin, it is vastly easier and faster to renovate existing buildings, than it is to build new construction.

DAVID JINKENS - Yes! It is a serious problem for our work force and our economy. The city can and must address our share of the affordable housing shortage in the South Shore. County government and our friends in Nevada must do the same. We can’t solve all of their affordable housing. They need to help. In the city we need to take a hard look at vacant and non environmentally sensitive lands to see if they can support quality work force housing. Large employers must also contribute to the solution by either providing housing for employees or helping their employees afford housing. Existing workforce housing in old motels should be preserved and upgraded using Federal and State funds and grants and loans and remain available to our workforce. City government must also ensure that TRPA is working with and supporting our efforts to see that affordable housing is provided.

NICOLE RAMIREZ THOMAS - Short Answer: Yes! There is a lack of affordable housing everywhere and South Lake Tahoe is not resistant to this strain on locals. But there are many things being done about it here. Creating dignified housing takes time. A dedicated funding source for housing is needed to really make headway on this challenge.

Yes. There is 100% a lack of affordable housing in South Lake Tahoe. I also know that there is a lot underway to address housing from the City level. On October 19th the groundbreaking for Sugar Pine will occur. This was a big lift for City staff and the Council to get underway. Please consider attending this event!

The primary things that are needed are time and money (money above all). A funding study is being conducted to determine how to create a steady funding source for housing because that is what is needed to tackle the issue.

I know that the City is currently exploring every possible avenue for creating housing or helping people find housing. It is important to keep in mind that everyone deserves GOODhousing, not just any housing. Recently people have commented that hotels should serve as housing. Things like camps and converted hotels, should only be a temporary solution to housing. We want dignity in housing. Also, converting hotels for temporary housing takes time and money.

Other measures, aside from building new houses, are how to use existing housing stock. The Lease to Locals program is one way that the City is trying to get locals into vacant houses or rooms. A tax or fee on vacant houses has been discussed but not brought forward. People have mixed feelings about this, but it is common in other places. Another possibility is rent control. These are some of the ideas and options being explored.

I have spoken little about housing because we need to look at housing as an economic issue. People often forget that housing is closely linked to the economy. Diversification of our economy and support for the existing economy, which is primarily tourism, are important to creating economic stability. A lack of housing is one element, but affordability, condition and quality of housing are another. Building houses or creating places for people to live is one way to diversify economy. We should aim to look for stability in both housing and the economy. There are many approaches to working toward this goal.

As with all things, but especially with housing, good policy that provides dignified living situations is important. Housing should not be a transitional space. It should be a place of security. Housing security is a major issue as well. One might be able to find housing but how long they can stay there is another question. Moving is incredibly expensive.

Not having housing for workers in South Lake Tahoe substantially increases the cost of living for people that have to move out off of the mountain. Not being able to find a house or afford to rent or buy a house near where one lives increases other costs such as gas, time for commuting, stress getting to work. All of these things decrease someone's quality of life. We want people to have dignified living situations that foster quality of life. We need to keep this in mind when we consider what types of housing we are trying to create and how we implement policies.

It also costs business money too when they cannot find people to work or people are leaving because of the cost of living or no housing.

Housing is a big issue everywhere right now. Best practices are currently being done at the City level and more avenues to help with housing are being explored. Money is the number one challenge, so a steady revenue stream is needed.

JOBY CEFALU - One of the greatest challenges we face is affordable and workforce housing. From a city perspective, we need to look at our area plans and find the right areas within the city to incentivize developers by allowing a greater number of units to be built on specific properties and locations and streamline the planning and development process for both new and existing projects to get them done as quickly as possible while still protecting our environment. In real estate, the term “highest and best use” is what drives development. Until the city can develop streamline planning and development and incentivize developers to build workforce and affordable housing we will continue to see luxury homes and condos rather than our greatest need of housing for our workforce.

KEVIN BRUNNER I don’t “believe” in lack of affordable housing, I LIVE it….as do many of our local residents. I think we can use currently available properties and create fast options for housing. Such as getting developers to renovate and rework empty motels into family housing. There are federal and state grants and even partnerships with noon profits we can pursue to buy up abandoned properties and create units there. I’d also like to see these options fast-tracked and at the top of the priority list, we need housing YESTERDAY.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could partner with someone like Habitat for Humanity and build energy-efficient houses in a couple of months?

NICK SPEAL - Overwhelmingly yes! The fallout from our housing shortage touches every aspect of our community and economy. We stopped building housing in the 80s and in recent years the shortage has driven prices through the roof. 80% of our homes were built before 1980, while only 1% of them were built in the past decade.

Kids grow up and can’t find a place of their own. Over 5000 people commute for work into the basin. The Tahoe Prosperity Center identifies a need for over 3000 new homes on the south shore in the next 5 years.

There is no one solution to this problem; there are many. We need to work with the TRPA to cut back the red tape that has been holding back new housing. We can increase the allowable density near transit so that new residents won’t need to drive as much and can waste less heat in modern multifamily buildings. The City can partner with state agencies, just as we did for Sugar Pine Village, to subsidize affordable housing for low-income residents. And we need to tap into better utilization of the roughly 50% of existing houses that aren’t being used as full-time homes. I’m considering a vacancy tax like they have in Oakland and Vancouver to discourage distant investors from hoarding unused houses and I want to hear from members of the community about what they’d like to see to vote for a measure like this.

CHANTELLE SCHELLIING - Absolutely! There is an affordable housing crisis throughout our nation including our own city. People who work in the hospitality and service industries as well as our firefighters, simply cannot afford to live in the same city that they work in. This is an issue that is currently being addressed by projects like the Sugar Pine Village, but we need additional supplemental solutions to lower the cost of living, increase diverse housing options, and maintain a local workforce.

As a City Council member, and as mentioned before, I would review current housing projects, evaluate trends and data on housing availability and housing need, and, of course, I would survey the community on their concerns and supplemental solutions to address the housing crisis.

Some potential solutions could include:

Short Term:
Re-establishing first-time home buyer programs and creating an easy pipeline for locals to purchase their own homes including partnership with LTCC to develop skills/ gain more education for higher paying jobs.
Establishing a program for first responders to own their own home in the city they serve and protect and increasing their wages.
Rezoning for diverse housing options including expansion of existing smaller apartment complexes, creation of new housing, and better regulation of updates to distressed housing.

Exploring a reduction of taxes on locals to offset the high cost of living and enable more savings for housing

Mid-Term:
Requiring hospitality and large recreation corporations — the ones who benefit most from our workforce — to designate part of their living spaces or separate facilities to house local workers.
Repurposing vacant, distressed residential houses/ buildings for low-middle income families and multi-family housing.
Evaluate and expand eligibility qualifications for Sugar Pine Village residents.
Constructing additional dwelling units (ADUs), that could be designated solely for the local workforce. Construction of ADUs also helps to satisfy the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA).

Long-Term
Developing a local workforce pipeline program with the community college for students in on-campus housing.
Completing of Sugar Pine Village
Exploring additional federal and state funding for more affordable housing projects.

CODY BASS - Yes, housing is a serious crisis in our city. I don’t believe that we want our local workforce living in old motels that were not designed for permanent living, as we may need to have this type of housing for some of the more transient people that need a new start or a place to sleep so they’re not left in the cold. Our local workforce deserves much better. We need to partner with developers, employers, and nonprofits to create ownership opportunities that are affordable. Our professional skilled workforce must have the opportunity to own, as we also must develop affordable rentable housing. I have learned of projects that deed restrict brand new housing units, but actually allow for the ownership of the home at a very reasonable price. We must take this on with multiple solutions all working together. We must implement solutions that can create housing in the near term, while setting goals for the long term that will have lasting effects for generations to come.

5.) What do you believe is the most significant environmental threat to the Lake Tahoe basin, and what policies do you believe could be beneficial in counteracting this threat?

SCOTT ROBBINS - In the short term, the exploitation of our local environment from relentless over-tourism is visible everywhere from the overflowing trash on our beaches and trails, to the endless miles of traffic choking our air and roads. We should increase the tourism occupancy taxes (the tax on hotels and AirBnB’s), this will raise more revenue per-tourist, while reducing the overall number of visitors, and their accompanying environmental impacts. The city currently collects and spends some $3 million, every year, on tourism advertising. This money should be diverted for actual local needs, including public transit and trash mitigation.

It is difficult to take our city’s talk about leadership on the problem of long-term climate change seriously when we simultaneously encourage visor traffic that results in jams that can stretch into Sacramento.

And a serious problem it is. We already face summers so hot and dry that Caldor-level wildfires have become the norm, not the exception, and we will soon begin to see winters too warm for consistent snow. If we do nothing, if we cannot demonstrate leadership, if we cannot be taken seriously, then the children learning to ski in Tahoe today will be the parents of the last generation to ski in Tahoe, and our jewel in the Sierras will be lost for future generations of locals.

It was disappointing then, to see the new recreation center will nonetheless receive a significant amount of its heat through the burning of fossil fuels rather than using electric heat pumps. In a building that was originally budgeted for $40 million, but for which the city recently issued a bond that will, with interest, cost $84 million, this was apparently deemed wasteful spending. This is short-term thinking about long-term infrastructure that will last at least a generation.

The state of California has recently mandated that all new vehicles sold by the year 2035 will be fully electric. We must make real efforts in improving both the reliability and capacity of our electric grid, undergrounding utilities, and increasing clean and reliable generation capacity to sustain an electrified future. These are achievable goals. They will require sustained focus and effort - but they can be done.

We can move our public transit towards electrified bus service, support electrified school buses, along with improved capacity for public charging infrastructure. Lake Tahoe Unified School district recently chose to replace several of their old school buses with new diesel buses, despite strong local efforts in support of electric options. This was another missed opportunity at the local level.

We can also support local clean generation with a mix of incentives and requirements to install solar generation above our many large, open parking lots. Such systems have the secondary benefit of shielding parked cars from the sun and inclement weather and have become common in new developments as costs decrease and demand for clean generation has increased (solar panels are quite warm and can melt and shed snow loads). While many of our houses and homes are highly shaded, we are all familiar with how hot our parking lots can get in the summer.

The problem is not too large to solve, but there is an enormous amount of work to be done in a thousand little places. Many small changes can add to a large-scale shift in the way we interact with and extract resources from our environment.

DAVID JINKENS - Catastrophic fire, radiation from unprotected and above-ground cell towers, and pollution from lead and microplastics in our environment and Lake. The solution is not easy, but it must be done. Make Federal and State lands more fire safe. We need to start in the City of South Lake Tahoe! Place cell facilities underground as they were originally intended to be, and not allow major pollution of deteriorating plastic limbs on cell tower monopines from polluting our environment. We can do all these things if we have the political will to do so. TRPA must be motivated to see that our Basin is free of all pollutants and not cave to powerful and wealthy special interests.

NICOLE RAMIREZ THOMAS - Short Answer: I think the biggest environmental threat to the Lake Tahoe Basin is drought.

Extreme drought is crippling the Basin. It contributes to fires, algae blooms, bark beetle, and much more. It also contributes to a decrease in clarity of the lake. It is part of the climate change cycle and drought has been present in the Western United States for a long time now. I think that policy-wise there needs to be some water policies created that help with conservation of this precious resource. Some things, such as not watering lawns, have been mandated but there are other things to explore. Educating people on water usage is important. Things as small as restaurants only serving water by request and restricting the types of vegetation that can be planted are among water mitigation measures other cities have implemented that make an impact. There are many options to look at in the vein of water conservation in the basin.

JOBY CEFALU - I believe at this current juncture storm drainage is one of our greatest threats to Big Blue. Currently like in the movie ‘Finding Nemo’ all drainage leads to the lake. This is a big one as the cost and sustainability are challenging, but filtration in drains and diversion to the sewer system are critical to our delicate ecosystem. We have had some great projects in the past that have helped, but unlike BMP’s, this would eliminate and control the largest pollution source. As well, leading the way in reducing our carbon footprint through available sources that are already at a point of technology that work. Tahoe should lead the world, but putting in place regulations based upon desire rather than practical and sustainable technology does nothing. We are close on many concepts but once again Lake Tahoe is a unique area of which has drastic swings from summer to winter weather so placing unsustainable restrictions will only hurt our working class and multi-cultural population negatively and drive more locals away with unrealistic constraints.

KEVIN BRUNNER As much as drought and fire will continue to be a serious challenge in the future, I think our biggest threat is unsustainable tourism.

The number of visitors has exploded in recent years, especially day-trippers who come here to get away from the heat in the valleys. We need to do more to educate and encourage our visitors to be more mindful of our ecosystems and wildlife. Things like the ban on single-use plastic bottles is a good step, but we need more.

PSA’s are fine, but how do we motivate people to pick up their trash and slow down for wildlife? I think we can have conversations with other agencies, and look at whether we can expand ticketing for litter offenses while also making more trash cans available and emptying them more often. Changing human behavior isn’t easy, but we have to take a stand and protect this place we love.

NICK SPEAL - Lake Tahoe is the jewel of the Sierra and we have a duty to protect our beautiful and unique environment from pollution of all sorts.

As an economy that benefits from tourism, we need to protect the lake from visitors’ short-term local impacts, especially trash and micro-plastics. I support bans on plastic water bottles and grocery bags and styrofoam that splinters into pieces and ends up in the lake.

But the biggest threat is climate change — and it affects us right here at home! Last year we saw the snowiest December ever, followed by the longest dry spell on record. If we don’t cut our emissions in time, these extremes are only going to get worse.

This is why sustainability is at the core of my platform. I’m proud of the City’s pledge to transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2030, and now the next City Council will be the ones in charge of the implementation to actually get us there.

I’ll expand our sustainability department to leverage external grants and collaborate with utility companies. We need major investment in clean energy generation and storage in order to eliminate fossil fuels 24 hours a day. We need electrical capacity upgrades and local redundancy for reliability through increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters. I’ll support homeowners to upgrade insulation, dramatically reducing winter energy bills. And we can lead by example with City facilities.

CHANTELLE SCHELLIING - It is hard to determine whether wildfires or pollution (air and litter) are the most significant environmental threat to the Lake Tahoe basin. I believe I answered for both in my previous responses. However, I would add-on by noting the need to install more waste receptacles proportionate to foot traffic and incentivize the hospitality industry to play active roles to reduce their carbon and waste footprint.

CODY BASS - I believe Climate Change is the largest threat to the planet. On the local level: I believe the number of vehicles entering and leaving the basin is our largest local threat. We must begin planning transportation projects that will bring people to Lake Tahoe without a vehicle. To do that we must have reliable transit when they arrive. In most high alpine environments across the world that have tourism as we do, passenger rail is generally the preferred travel for tourists, as many of them live in the flat land, and really should not be driving in the mountains. I have asked why a rail project using the existing pavement of Spooner Summit is not in our 25-year transportation plan. I even voted no on approving the plan because I believe we must be planning for the future and vehicles will only increase if we don’t make a plan. As high-speed rail will be upgraded between San Francisco and Reno bringing the trip to around 2 hours, we need to begin planning for a high-speed rail between Reno and Carson, and eventually a line up Spooner that would get folks from the Bay Area and Sacramento to Tahoe faster by rail than car. This can happen in our lifetime, but the planning must start now.