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84 L osing critical day-to-day battles, environmentalists looked for new ways to obviate the trpa Compact’s deficient language. Assemblyman Z’berg had held hearings at Tahoe in 1972 to find ways the government could acquire and protect private lands designated too fragile for building, and in the summer of 1973 he introduced a bill proposing to reconstitute ctrpa. With the lake’s local officials calling for the abolishment of the “cumbersome and useless” agency, Z’berg argued that if the public needed to fund land acquisition, it should have a bigger voice in making policy.1 The National Science Foundation (nsf) funded a study that issued a scathing indictment of trpa, finding that only the nonlocal California board members were voting to protect the environment most of the time. If expectations of the Z’berg bill were realized, the study concluded, ctrpa would be able to protect the environment on the California side of the lake. In the fall of 1973, Z’berg pushed the bill through the California Legislature. It added a second state representative; the governor would now appoint one from Northern California and one from the South, and the six members would choose a seventh as chairperson. This configuration meant state representatives would outnumber local members, shifting the balance of power. The bill provided funds for the ctrpa directly from the state legislature, avoiding the county finance battles , and assigned the agency wide-ranging jurisdiction over state public works and transportation in the basin. Governor Reagan was slow to appoint the new representative, but once staffed in the spring of 1974 the new ctrpa immediately joined the development melee.2 ctrpa proposed limiting building on the California side of the lake to single-family houses until they could develop a master plan. Local businessmen and builders claimed outsiders were using a moratorium on construction to shut down the tourist trade, and they formed an organization to promote development, a short-lived group called the “Council for Logic.” Plainclothes officers attended ctrpa’s public meeting at a Tahoe high n i n e n influences i n f l u e n c e s 85 school in June 1974. The chairman of ctrpa, local West Shore real estate agent Gordon Hooper, contended that the agency had an obligation to citizens of the state and the United States as well as local property owners, but the message went unheard, as an unruly crowd of several hundred shouted him down.3 The lead federal government agency in the basin, the Forest Service, was consistent in balancing public lands for a combination of uses. Regional forester Doug Leisz had a substantial history of protecting the lake basin’s watershed values. He had previously served as forest supervisor of the El Dorado National Forest, one of three forests with public lands jurisdiction at Tahoe in the 1960s. As supervisor he had denied California’s Department of Fish and Game a permit to raise the water level of Grass Lake, on the south rim of the basin, to create a fishery. Grass Lake was California’s largest sphagnum bog, and adding water to it would have destroyed several endangered bog plant species . He had also shielded Pope Beach from incursion by the Tahoe Keys development , resisted the proposed West Shore freeway, and protected the Desolation Wilderness from the construction of unwarranted power-company roads. In the same post, he got the Sierra Club and the Four Wheel Drive Association to endorse trail boundaries for off-road wilderness travel and oversaw the expansion of Heavenly Valley and Sierra Ski Ranch.4 Leisz was also active in acquiring land for public use in the Tahoe Basin without condemnation actions. In May 1971, the Tahoe Daily Tribune asked: “Who owns Meeks Bay Resort?” Before Americans arrived, the Washoe Indians had used the idyllic West Shore bay for home sites, fishing in the lake and Meeks Creek, gathering food and medicinal plants in the meadow behind the bay, and hunting in the timber stands leading into the Desolation Wilderness. Americans originally used the area for grazing and timberland. Beginning in 1921, as the forest grew back, a private owner developed the land as a resort, offering camping and cabins. In 1968 the Macco Corporation, a subsidiary of the Penn Central Railroad, bought the property, planning to build a seventeenhundred -unit condominium complex on its 645 acres. In 1970 Penn Central ran into financial difficulties, and the Forest Service’s Andy Schmidt became aware...

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