8 minute read
news
from May 15, 2014
Tahoe plan headed back to court
Environmental groups on May 7 appealed a recent ruling by federal District Judge John Mendez upholding a regional plan update adopted by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. The appeal, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, argues that Mendez “failed to analyze the RPU’s negative impacts on soil conservation, water quality and air quality,” according to a statement from the law firm Earthjustice. “On top of that flaw, TRPA made erroneous findings that the RPU would protect Lake Tahoe’s environment.”
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Earthjustice, a law firm with offices in nine states and Washington, D.C., that has handled many major environmental cases dealing with air quality, fracking, Arctic drilling and climate change., is handling the appeal for the Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore.
“The Agency’s strange strategy to protect Lake Tahoe and its surrounding landscape from the damage caused by excessive urbanization over past decades is to promote even more development,” said Earthjustice attorney Wendy Park. “We will continue our fight to protect the lake from the misguided actions of the agency charged with protecting and restoring its environment.” In a prepared EAST SHORE, LAKE TAHOE statement TRPA executive director Joanne Marchetta said the plan “authorizes less than half as much new development as the 1987 plan, maintains growth caps and urban boundary limits on all development and authorizes no new hotel accommodation units, continues some of the strongest scenic protections in the nation and assures no new high-rises can be built, supports greenhouse gas reductions and smart growth, proposes modest infill redevelopment in a handful of existing town centers.”
The dispute has split the two green groups from some of its longtime allies, including U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada.
Highton pen slows
After a quarter century, Sparks Tribune columnist Jake Highton is calling it quits. The journalism professor emeritus, for whom the term irascible was invented, sent a message to Trib editor Dan Eckles:
“I cannot part from the Trib without thanking the paper for 25 years of amazing publication of my column. I say amazing because it was radical, leftist, atheistic and shouted my weekly outrage. Few other newspaper editors in America would have printed it because it was so far from the thinking of most of their readers. For its publication I will always owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Sparks Tribune.”
Highton, an occasional RN&R contributor, is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, editorial writer for the Detroit News, copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, and author of numerous books, including Nevada Newspaper Days and the journalism textbook Reporter. Several collections of his Tribune columns, too, have been published in book form. He created the Highton Scholarship Endowment for journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Start voting now
Just what the public needs—news of the election after next.
A panel of the Democratic National Committee recommended that the 2016 presidential nominating process begin with the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, followed by the New Hampshire primary, then the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina primary. The Nevada event could be held no earlier than Feb. 20. —Dennis Myers
Snow covered?
Drought impact sweeps the state
“When you don’t get the recharge in the drought, you start to see wells drying by up,” said Steve McKay of McKay Dennis Myers Drilling, Inc. His firm is getting more business as a result. “There’s definitely some areas that are being affected by the drought, and we have to deepen the wells,” he said. “There’s been some wells drying up in the Callahan ranch area and Virginia Foothills. … There’s also been some issues in the north valleys, Red Rock and Golden Valley, those areas.” They’re having to “go deeper when you’re drilling down into the water table.”
Steve McKay Well driller
At Climate Central, a website for journalists who cover climate, Bobby Magill wrote, “The driest places today are the places that have been dry for two or three years or longer: California, northwest Nevada and the southern Great Plains of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, northeast New Mexico and along the ColoradoKansas border.” He called it a revival of the “dust bowl” template of the early 1930s.
Nevada wildlife officials say rattlesnakes are likely to drift toward urban areas as the drought dries up ground cover that serves as food for the snakes’ prey—field mice and rats—who will head for greener and wetter soil.
“Because of the early spring, they’ve probably been out a little more than usual already,” said Nevada Wildlife Department spokesperson Chris Healy. “What has occurred is that because of the lack of green-up and the lack of moisture, the small rodents that are the snakes’ food base start heading for irrigation ditches, edges of town, and the snakes will follow. Urban residents will be more likely to have an experience with a rattlesnake.”
Places like the Steamboat Ditch Trail and “all these trail areas that have been developed on the edge of town” are likely danger spots, Healy said, and dogs should be kept on leashes because they would be are great risk from snakes. “People are going to have to be aware,” he said.
While the danger from snakes may be a nuisance, he said, the snakes “do a really valuable job keeping those rodents in check.” It just that the drought brings them closer.
The University of Nevada Cooperative Extension warned that “opportunistic weeds” are expected to be a problem for “parks and recreational areas, public lands, ranches, farms and landscapes.”
“Invasive weeds can out-compete native vegetation, crops and livestock forage,” said Extension specialist Kent McAdoo in a prepared statement. “They can also pose fire hazards, lead
On the fourth day of spring, there were sandbars in the Truckee River as it left Lake Tahoe.
to erosion and water quality issues, and impact wildlife habitat.”
Bureau of Land Management officials are meeting this week with local advisers in Battle Mountain on the interrelated topics of sage-grouse mitigation, livestock grazing conditions and drought.
The U.S. Drought Monitor in Lincoln, Nebraska, reported that the portion of Nevada experiencing extreme to exceptional drought during the four weeks ending April 29 rose from 34 to 39 percent
That agency also reported that the Sierra snowpack—the water supply for the Truckee Meadows—is melting far more rapidly than usual. About half of the snowpack is already gone, yet because there was so little snow during the winter, which created only a small snowpack, downstream reservoirs have benefited very little from the melt. This is happening in a state whose Spanish name means snow covered.
Just as local governments in Nevada are putting together local ordinances for medical marijuana dispensaries, the drought is putting together an unexpected obstacle for the water-hungry medicine. Availability of supply could be compromised. Farmers and ranchers in the state have already experienced two previous drought years for their more traditional crops like alfalfa.
On May 6, the new National Climate Assessment—required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990—reported that climate change is a growing threat that has begun to affect people in their daily lives, as perhaps with the exhausting of wells in western Nevada.
In the report, Nevada was placed in the “southwest” category, which it defined as Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, an area seeing its highest temperature increases in 600 years. This section of the report had considerable information tailored to the Colorado Plateau and California, but not to the Great Basin. However, warnings that did apply to Nevada include health problems caused by heat, increased rangefires, reduced snowpack and stream flows, and threats to agriculture.
While all this was going on, anti-science entities were doing their best to stir things up. Right wing websites—the kind that complain about the slanting of the news— characterized marijuana growers as exacerbating the drought, and others challenged the National Climate Assessment or faulted the federal government generally.
And more sandbars in the Truckee between Wadsworth and Pyramid.
Fox News on National Climate Assessment: “Alarmists offer untrue, unrelenting doom and gloom.”
Newsmax: “Officials: Pot Growers Worsening California’s Drought.”
Conservative Las Vegas columnist Thomas Mitchell: “Federal agencies using drought to deter ranchers.”
The Heartland Institute, a political group funded in part by Exxon Mobil, sent a set of three quotes out by email for reporters to use in their stories on the Climate Assessment. Here’s a sample:
“It would take a whole squadron of environmental activists years to come up with the whoppers told in this report. The report falsely asserts that global warming is causing more extreme weather events, more droughts, more record high temperatures, more wildfires, warmer winters, etc., when each and every one of these false assertions is contradicted by objective, verifiable evidence. It reads like a press release from the Nature Conservancy and the Union of Concerned Scientists—probably because it essentially is a press release
from the Nature Conservancy and the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
All three quotes attacked in that fashion, without saying specifically what was wrong with the science in the report. Ω
Chris Healy nevada Wildlife Department
Changes
A worker uses a pressure hose inside the downtown Sparks amphitheater. At a cost of $268,000, roof and ceiling are being enclosed and nesting sites removed to make it bird-proof. LED lighting will also be added to the 1989 structure.
