Posted on 06/26/2007 9:50:48 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry.
Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe.
They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late.
In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses.
And if there was an object of scorn in the crowd, it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a powerful bi-state environmental land use agency charged with managing the resources of the basin.
When a speaker mentioned the agency, the crowd responded with a chorus of boos. "What a joke!" yelled one man.
The wrangling began in earnest over the assignment of blame, including arguments over whether federal and state forest managers had made their tree clearing rules too strict in the face of pressure by environmentalists.
A common sentiment Monday was expressed by Jerry Martin, a bartender at the Horizon Casino Resort, whose house was still standing, although eight others around it had burned to the ground. He said U.S. Forest Service rules regulating the harvesting of dead trees were too stringent for those living next to government land.
"I hate to get political, but environmentalists wouldn't let us cut down the dead trees," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
If it’s your property you should be able to take care of it so these things WON’T happen. There are plenty of people who know how to care for their land in California so wildfires won’t destroy it.
Add to that something about thanking them for making us so dependent on foreign oil - including Mexico’s, which according to a caller to Rush today, is the real reason we are supposed to embrace shamnesty and a limitless influx of people their own country doesn’t want.
We’ve got the same problem here in Western Montana. We can’t cut down dead trees killed by bark beetles because of the greenie wacos also known here as the Friends of the Bitterroot. Makes no sense.
I am afraid that it has not burned enough homes to result in a meaningfull policy change. It looks like it burned only enough to justify expansion of the current regulations.
Evidently it is burning north and has jumped both highway 89 and highway 50. It will burn all the way to the edge of the lake. At that point it will get real interesting.
I also note that it burned some of the older, less valuable homes off of Pioneer road. I can see a gov’t buy out for these homeowners...maybe they got some left over FEMA trailers in Hope Arkansas that these folks could have....provided they moved elsewhere.
This guy lost his house and still posted this letter to the paper! And what about all the dead trees in the forests?
Defensible space: TRPA not to Blame
Anyone blaming the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency for not letting them cut trees around their house is full of it.
Maybe that was true a couple years ago, but things have changed. I simply called the Lake Valley Fire Department, which is allowed by the TRPA to mark trees for cutting. It was so easy, made an appointment, they came out, asked which ones I wanted out, then they recommended which others should be cut. They also recommended what else I should do to create defensible space. I was about two-thirds of the way through their recommendations they gave me a one and a half years ago. Just two weeks ago, I requested that my permit be extended so I could take down the rest of the trees and they informed me they had money to help subsidize, I think it was a three-person team at $60 an hour.
Unfortunately, it did not help, I lost my home. It takes the efforts of everyone around you to do the same.
Jeff Glass
Boulder Mountain Drive
South Lake Tahoe
After the fox ate the chickens and burnt down the hen house and their homes.
Are you old enuff 2 remember when Ike appointed the wildly popular Governor of CA to the Supremes? He lead that court to modify how representation within one of the two houses of each state's legislature is established. One house was based on demography, the other on geography! With the infamous "Cows Don't Vote" or "One Man, One Vote" decision he and his court set the stage for total domination of every state's rural regions by metro-sexuals!
For instance, as you were pointing out... My county is represented by one state Senator that we must share with 13 other rural countys. Los Angeles County, on the other hand has 13 state Senators and totally dominates that house of the legislature.
If our national legislature were screwed up this way, then 10 western states would only have 2 votes in the US Senate!!!
I share your desire for spliting CA, but rescinding this stupid tampering with what worked for nearly 200 years would be a good start!!!
Sincerely,
SierraWaspman
I never thought of it that way. Excellent illustration of the absurdity.
That is a great billboard near Payson. It makes me furious that the enviro-whackos think they know how to manage a forest. They are imbiciles!
Don’t you love how they all know how farmers, dairymen and ranchers should conduct their businesses in the Central Valley, when 90% of them think Fresno or Sacramento are “somewhere near the Bay Area”?
We had a hearing today by Cal-Fire (CDF) on the new State Responsibility Area (SRA) fire hazard maps. www.fire.ca.gov These don’t include the FRA (Federal Responsibility Areas) or the LRAs (Local Responsibility Areas. Most in the SRAs will face new and very expensive building material requirements in 2008.
http://www.pushback.com/environment/forests/
Thank you. I guess I don’t stay up as late as I used to. They used to bill him as “The smartest man you could talk to for free.”
State of Jefferson!
SIERRA REPUBLIC!!! (our 51st united state)(all CA except coastal counties)
Have you ever heard of the state of Franklin?
It was SO close to becoming a state. It was a corner of the Carolinas, Virginia, IIRC. A war came along (1812?) and disrupted the plans. I have birth records of a couple ancesters with their place of birth as State of Franklin.
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