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Battle over Squaw Valley plans
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SQUAW VALLEY  (AP) — A leading environmental group has stepped up the fight against the proposed expansion of a Lake Tahoe ski resort, saying its impact on traffic and mountain scenery threatens to destroy the charm of the site that hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics.

Sierra Watch’s opposition comes ahead of a public hearing Thursday in Kings Beach, California, on a draft environmental impact report of the project from Placer County, California, planners.

Operators of the Village at Squaw Valley just north of Lake Tahoe are seeking approval to build a year-round indoor recreation center and 850 hotel-condominium units with 1,493 bedrooms on over 80 acres of the resort’s parking lot.

They would go up around the former site of Blyth Arena, where ice hockey and figure skating competition was held during the 1960 Winter Games. The arena was torn down in 1983.

The new plans would change the resort’s character forever with high-rise hotels and condo projects containing as many rooms as in three major hotel-casinos on Lake Tahoe’s south shore combined, said Tom Mooers, executive director of Nevada City-based Sierra Watch. He also criticized what he called developers’ plans for a “massive indoor amusement park as big as a Walmart.”

“The more we delve into the (proposal), the more we see how development would transform Squaw Valley into a noisy, urban place and threaten everything we love about the Tahoe Sierra,” Mooers wrote by email. “Traffic would choke Tahoe’s highways, so visitors would be stuck in their cars instead of enjoying the great outdoors.”

Andy Wirth, Squaw Valley’s president and CEO, acknowledged there will be an impact on traffic, but said his resort is “fiercely committed” to developing mass transit to mitigate problems.

The current plan is down considerably from the original proposal for 1,275 units with 3,097 bedrooms and represents only 38 percent of the units and bedrooms allowed under the Squaw Valley General Plan, he said, adding seven stories would be the maximum building height.

Developers revised the plan 28 times to lessen impacts in response to community feedback after attending 300 meetings over the last three years, said Wirth, a former wilderness ranger and a grandson of Conrad Wirth, who was National Park Service director under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

“Do (opponents) think the 82 acres of parking lot are attractive to what we hold dear about Lake Tahoe? Do they think they add to the aesthetics?” he asked. “The community believes there can be something better than the parking lot, and we agree.”

While Squaw Valley’s ski terrain is on par with the greatest ski areas, Wirth said, the resort needs a better quality and variety of lodging in order to compete in the future. Plans call for the project to be built over 20 years, depending on market conditions.

Opponents “make it sound like it’s on a biblical scale of adverse impacts,” he told The Associated Press. “We’ve done extensive work to make sure it fits into the mountain environment.”

The draft environmental impact report finds that while the project would cause some significant impacts, the vast majority of them would be mitigated “to a less than significant level,” said Alex Fisch, Placer County senior planner.

The report concludes the proposal would affect traffic “very infrequently and only under peak hour conditions on a peak day,” and the development would not “substantially alter” scenic views of the mountains and natural environment for visitors, he added.

“I want to stress that it is not unusual for projects to have some findings of significant impact, which does not mean that the project is bad,” Fisch wrote by email. “It just means that there are some impacts that can’t be completely mitigated.”

Mooers said the Lake Tahoe area has seen many major development proposals, including a failed plan to span the mouth of the lake’s Emerald Bay with a new freeway 50 years ago.

“The good news is that none of this is inevitable,” he said. “Tahoe has plenty of examples of bad ideas ending up in the dustbin of history. Now it’s our turn to ensure a misguided proposal doesn’t ruin everything we love about Tahoe.”