For the past decade and a half, Tahoe has enjoyed a direct-connect funding pipeline to Washington, D.C. that has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into restoration work around the lake. On Aug. 16, some of the nation’s most powerful politicians, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and longtime California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, delivered dire news at the annual Tahoe Summit — Tahoe’s federal money tap is about to go from a flood to a trickle.
Since 1997, $1.55 billion has been spent in the Tahoe Basin for environmental restoration, and more than $1.2 billion of that has come from the now bare coffers of state and federal governments.
Today Tahoe faces a new reality. More challenges than ever confront the lake — declining clarity, aging urban centers, climate change, invasive species, and the possible dissolution of the TRPA — but Tahoe is now going to have to face them with a minute fraction of the funding.
But for all the funding doom and gloom delivered by politicians at the Tahoe Summit, one piece of good news counterbalanced the harsh reality of future funding. The nascent Tahoe Fund, a private organization raising money for public Tahoe projects, was heralded as a new model for Tahoe fundraising.
With encouragement, and two sizeable personal donations from Sen. Feinstein, the Tahoe Fund has collected $750,000 so far for conservation, recreation, and stewardship at Lake Tahoe. The money will be distributed to a variety of public projects spearheaded by Tahoe’s public agencies. The Fund’s first funding distribution is helping keep a new park near South Lake Tahoe, Van Sickle Bi-state Park, open to the public.
Cindy Gustafson, Tahoe Fund president, said Feinstein encouraged Tahoe Fund founders that ‘we need to help ourselves.’
‘We need to get more investment and more ownership to take care of the lake through other mechanisms,’ said Gustafson.
While the to-date donations are a drop in the bucket when compared to the hundreds of millions that have historically been handed to the Basin from government, the future of the fund is bright. In its second year, the organization is finding its legs after assembling a board of some of the region’s most notable business, community, and environmental leaders. And as the organization grows, something that has been conspicuously absent from the Tahoe Basin is now materializing — a group of the region’s movers and shakers, who in the past often found themselves vehemently disagreeing over planning in the Basin, are now sitting down at the same table and charting a positive future for Lake Tahoe.
The Tahoe Fund follows a model that has had great success across the nation. Organizations such as the Yosemite Fund and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy have been around for decades, funneling private money into natural treasures. And the Tahoe Fund is one of a new crop of public-private conservation organizations that are trying to bridge the gap between declining public funding and conservation needs. A similar public-private conservation, the Northern Sierra Partnership, started in 2008 with major funding from the Morgan Family Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and has been using a mix of public and private money to piece together Northern Sierra habitat and open space that was fragmented into alternating public and private pieces during the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
‘Conservation is everybody’s business,’ said Lucy Blake, president of the Northern Sierra Partnership, who also founded the Truckee-based Sierra Business Council. ‘For the last 20 years in California, we’ve had state and federal agencies investing generously in conservation. They’re investing heavily because the public supports that investment with bond measures. But conservation benefits us all, and clearly there is a role for private conservation,’
At the Tahoe Fund, corporations and individuals have been quick to sign on, almost as if they had been waiting for a broad-based organization like the fund to be created.
‘[The response to the fund] has been tremendous. And I think part of that is there was a vacuum — no one is doing the things we are doing,’ said Partick Wright, a board member of the fund and the executive director of the California Tahoe Conservancy. ‘I think people really see that need, and they want to be part of something that is bringing people together.’
While the fund is clearly set on a course to grow into a major funding source in the Tahoe Basin, the fund’s founders are realistic about the organization’s current impact.
‘It is not going to fill the void in the lack of public funding, but in some key areas it can make a big difference,’ said Wright.
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