‘The need to blame is high”

The board of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has made fire safety a priority, “allowing” homeowners near the pristine Northern Nevada lake to increase the cleared fire protection area around their homes.

At least, that’s the policy executive director John Singlaub contends the agency now follows.

Area residents don’t seem to have gotten that memo. Some 1,200 irate neighbors shouted Mr. Singlaub down on June 25 when he tried to defend the planning agency’s policies in South Lake Tahoe as a wildfire swept the area, destroying 200 homes.

Critics say the fire was able to cause that much damage because of the agency’s draconian policies — designed to preserve the lake’s legendary clarity by preventing runoff erosion.

Traditionally, that’s meant homeowners are forbidden to cut down trees or even clear brush that builds up, providing fuel for wildfires during dry seasons.

Residents explain they’ve been afraid even to remove dry pine needles from around their homes. The agency threatens to fine residents if they do so more than five feet from a structure, since exposing the bare soil encourages erosion, they say.

One Tahoe resident, Neil Cohn, points out what a difference that can make. Defying the agency edict — or at least what residents perceive as an agency edict — “I went around my whole property and took out every single pine needle,” Mr. Cohn explained to reporters Thursday, pointing to the blackened property line where the advancing fire stopped short of his home, after destroying the homes of eight of his neighbors.

Mr. Singlaub expresses shock at the public outrage directed at his outfit. “The need to blame is apparently high,” he rationalizes.

Those who move to the shores of the lake do so knowing full well that land use restrictions designed to preserve the legendary body of water that drew them there are more onerous than are found at other locations. Certainly the planning agency does good work when it prevents chicken rendering plants and the like from locating in the watershed — though it’s been known to err on the wrong side of the basic right of a land-owner to make reasonable productive use of his or her own property, sidestepping the constitutional ban on uncompensated “takings” (for instance) by endlessly extending “temporary” bans on new home-building, even on land properly zoned for such use.

But if Mr. Singlaub is truly shocked, this only shows how out-of-touch some at the agency have become with the way their approach grates on property owners, who clearly believe the TRPA is failing woefully at striking a reasonable balance between protecting the waters and protecting the residents.

“People are probably being unfairly critical of TRPA,” comments Malcolm North, an associate professor of forest ecology at the University of California, Davis. “But it’s partly of their own doing. They’ve been a pretty top-down, draconian agency. They have made significant improvements in recent years, but I don’t know that people have noticed.”

To say an agency needs better “public relations” is usually interpreted to mean a new layer of glitz and flim-flam to dress up the same old policies. If it seeks to maintain the confidence of voters and taxpayers, the TRPA must go a bit further than that. It must seek real public input as it re-examines its policies to make sure all current and proposed restrictions really serve a substantial purpose. And then it needs to reach out and make sure residents know what those current restrictions really are — and which have gone by the board.