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Opinion: Don’t believe the hype with recent Brockway Campground news

Nikki Riley
Opinion

The potential sale of the 120 acres on Brockway Summit by Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) to the US Forest Service is undoubtedly a positive for future, permanent land conservation in the Tahoe Basin.

However, it has been made clear by Mountainside Partners that the application for the Brockway Campground will remain in place until the sale goes through, December 2017.

Let’s not celebrate yet. The public should be wary that if the Martis Valley West Project (MVW) is denied on September 13 by the Placer County Board of Supervisors, the Brockway Campground application will likely be kept open for further consideration.



While we at Mountain Area Preservation (MAP) have been requesting the permanent conservation of land in the Tahoe Basin since 2014 we are staunchly opposed to the MVW project. MAP has attempted to negotiate and find common ground over the last 3 years with SPI and Mountainside, yet our input has been disregarded.

We will not sit idly by while a sprawling, over scaled, environmentally destructive project receives entitlements with a thinly veiled promise of land conservation on SPI’s property to the East of Highway 267 (6,376 acres).



Today the MVW project proposes the Brockway Campground land as their emergency access, further exacerbating impacts to Lake Tahoe. We support the conservation of East side, but if the Trust for Public Land and the Truckee Donner Land Trust can’t raise a hefty amount of money to buy the east side, the land stays under SPI ownership with the ability to harvest timber and restrict public access.

Don’t believe the hype. Martis Valley West is a train wreck of catastrophic proportions. It is sprawl and must be denied. Please attend the September 13 meeting at the North Tahoe Event Center in Kings Beach at 9:45am and voice opposition to this project.

Nikki Riley is Development Director for Mountain Area Preservation.


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