Maintain Roads and Infrastructure for a Clear Lake Tahoe, Kraatz (1)

“Living in the Tahoe Basin is a privilege,” says Peter Kraatz, Deputy Director of Public Works at Placer County. “If you go back a hundred years there was a big push to turn it into a national park. It is not a national park. It is a sensitive landscape though. It got developed the way that it did. We are trying to correct the way it got developed in the past and make it a better place,” he says. Kraatz sees private property owners as stewards of the Tahoe Basin, in partnership with local government. He says, “I feel like in the Tahoe Basin we really should put a lot of emphasis on the fact that we live in a very special, place, in a very sensitive environment that has a higher bar for protecting the environment. If we want to continue to live around an incredible gem of a water body and still keep the economy going we have to look to ourselves for the solution.”

While operation and maintenance of roads is the critical element for the next decade in the strategy to meet the Clarity Challenge and restore Lake Tahoe clarity it is not evident how funds to do the work will be secured. Peter Kraatz, Deputy Director of Public Works at Placer County says in this interview, “I get a lot of complaints about the condition of our roadway surfaces which also adds to the water quality dilemma. We’ve got a lot of roads in Placer County that are already pretty beat up, pretty alligator cracked. That is a reflection of a fund source that just can’t keep up with our road condition, the snow removal we do, all of the things that we do to keep our roads safe. We are maxed out. It goes back to this question of where we find additional funding sources—not only to keep our roads in good condition, a safe riding surface, but also to do the things that we need to for sediment reduction and restoring Lake Tahoe clarity.”

Public Works professionals throughout the Lake Tahoe Basin are striving to meet the Clarity Challenge—to reduce the number of ultra-fine sediment particles that get to Lake Tahoe every year by one-third by 2026. This is no small task. Among them is Peter Kraatz, Deputy Director of Public Works at Placer County. In this 2012 interview Kraatz talks about the “preferred design approach” engineers use to design systems that reduce the transport of ultra-fine sediment to Lake Tahoe.

We now have the tools to understand how to prioritize. We know that doing everything everywhere is not the best strategy and now we have the tools to strategically make prioritization decisions for Lake Tahoe water quality. It doesn’t make sense to put our implementation dollars toward areas that don’t connect hydrologically to the lake. “The prioritization is critical,” says Bob Larsen, Staff Scientist at the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We have the tools to be able to assess where to put our dollars to make the biggest difference—to address the real problems. The actions we are taking under the Total Maximum Daily Load are directly addressing water quality. We can now have a conversation about the relative cost-benefit of taking one action over another,” he says.

“We all depend on the benefits of transportation infrastructure so we all have a role to play in mitigating the impact of that infrastructure on water quality,” says Bob Larsen, Staff Scientist at the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. He says, “Everybody who is living in and enjoying this Tahoe basin has the responsibility to deal with the problems that result from the infrastructure we all use. We all need to be part of the solution.”

On a dollar for dollar basis annual operations and maintenance activities are more cost-effective at reducing pollutant loading and are cheaper than large-scale capital improvement projects, otherwise known as infrastructure projects. In this interview Bob Larsen, Staff Scientist at the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board points out that, “the challenge that we have right now is to figure out how we can help local government do the more cost-effective operations and maintenance activities that are needed to improve water quality.” Funds for capital improvement projects have historically been easier to secure in the Tahoe Basin than have been funds for ongoing operations and maintenance. This situation is not unique to Tahoe, jurisdictions across the country are seeking revenue sources to meet the need for operation and maintenance of existing infrastructure.

Roadways, in particular the state highway system and some of the other high traffic roadways, are a disproportionate source of the ultra-fine particles that are causing the decline in Lake Tahoe clarity. In this interview Bob Larsen, Staff Scientist at the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, talks about the central question for today’s road managers in the Lake Tahoe Basin, “How can we better manage roads to reduce the amount of traction abrasives and roadway products that actually make their way into the stormwater and into Lake Tahoe?”

Bob Larsen is Staff Scientist at the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. In this 2012 interview he says, “I think the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) provided us with the opportunity to be more involved in the process [of solving Lake Tahoe clarity decline], to engage with the scientific community and our implementing partners to figure out, to better understand, the problem and to better understand what the potential solutions might be—to be a more-active partner in the restoration of Lake Tahoe’s transparency.”

“I am inspired by the collaborative spirit at Lake Tahoe,” says Patty Kouyoumdjian, Executive Officer of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. “I am very optimistic that if there are challenges I think that we are going to meet those,” she says. And there are challenges to executing on the plan to restore Lake Tahoe clarity. In this interview Kouyoumdjian reflects on the challenge of “being able to financially pay for some of these measures, not just in the short term but in outgoing years.” She also notes that while collaborative culture is an asset, the mechanics of coordinating across local, state and federal agencies can be a challenge unto itself but is essential to success. “We can’t solve our problems in the Basin with the work of just one or two agencies, there are other decisions and other actions that need to occur,” she says. “There are mechanical challenges to getting local governments and other leaders together and solving problems as a group,” notes Kouyoumdjian, but her outlook overall on restoring Lake Tahoe clarity is optimistic.

There is a clear path we can take to restore Lake Tahoe’s clarity according to Patty Kouyoumdjian, Executive Officer of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. She says, “I think we are very clear on where the sources of pollution are and I think we are relatively set on what actions need to happen to improve lake clarity”. In this 2012 Tahoe Project interview Kouyoumdjian emphasizes the “true and hard and real measures that we have to reach,” talking about the reductions in ultra-fine particles that have to be made at Lake Tahoe by 2026. She says, we now have “a very clear roadmap of what we need to do,” to accomplish our goal of water clarity at Lake Tahoe.