By Malia Wollan
The New York Times
A bistate compact made in 1969, and updated in 1987, clamped down on runaway development, with the result that much of the infrastructure looks like it did in the early ’70s, when Elvis Presley was a regular.
That water, Lake Tahoe, can be as smooth as glass, but the politics of land-use planning along the lake’s 72-mile shoreline are some of the most contentious and muddled in the country.
Lawmakers from the two states tend to have very different ideas about how to manage development around the lake, to say nothing of the more than 50 federal, state and local agencies with jurisdiction in the basin.
But last month, after nearly a decade of wrangling, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the bistate agency that regulates development, approved a new plan that will guide building there.
