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[av_heading heading=’Sleepy Lake Tahoe Towns Spurred to Tremendous Growth’ tag=’h3′ style=” size=” subheading_active=” subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=” custom_class=”][/av_heading]
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After 1950, year-round auto access gradually transformed sleepy Lake Tahoe towns into a booming four-season resort mecca. By 1960, Walt Disney helped to launch the first nationally-televised Olympic Games from Squaw Valley—and Tahoe entered an unprecedented new era of unbridled economic growth and breakneck land development.
One (unintended) trigger to Tahoe’s tremendous growth was a 1954 federal law effectively banning slot machines nationwide—except in Nevada. With casinos in Los Angeles and San Francisco suddenly shut down, eager gamblers starved for excitement had little choice but to jump in their cars and head to Las Vegas or Reno. To tempt these streams of gamblers to stay and play, Tahoe’s once-sleepy little stateline border communities suddenly witnessed the construction of enormous new high-rise casino towers as torrents of free-spending travelers poured toward the Lake.
Hence by the early 1960s architects had sketched out plans for a city the size of San Francisco ringing Tahoe’s shores. Highway planners proposed four-lane freeways ringing the lakeshore and a concrete bridge spanning Emerald Bay. Wetlands that naturally filtered Tahoe’s waters were paved over to build airport runways or dredged to create marinas. Gridlock and smog became inescapable. Tahoe was transformed on a scale its earliest pioneers could not possibly have imagined.
But other forces were at work at the Lake as well. Since the 1930s, for example, one of Tahoe’s wealthiest residents, Colonel Max Fleischmann—heir to the massive Fleischmann’s Yeast fortune, and a lifelong conservationist—had worked closely with his friend Lester Summerfield (a Reno attorney widely known as Nevada’s “Mr. Republican”) to bring both California and Nevada to the table in order to reign in the chaotic growth they saw as a threat to the Lake. After 1951, the Fleischmann Foundation under Summerfield’s leadership continued to champion conservation causes. By 1961, with the Nevada Department of Health forecasting an “average of 30 million gallons of sewage per day and at times 50 million” spilling into the Lake, Summerfield and the Fleischmann Foundation demanded that the Washoe County Planning Commission delay approval of the new Incline Village development package on the north shore. Warning grimly that the federal government might soon have to step in “to prevent a national tragedy,” California’s Governor Pat Brown eventually helped to broker a long-range plan calling for the transportation of all treated sewage from the Basin. In 1969, under the leadership of then-California Governor Ronald Regan and Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt, a bi-state, bipartisan compact between California and Nevada was finally ratified by the U.S. Congress. By 1971, a system of pipelines for exporting Tahoe’s effluents completely outside the Basin was largely completed, and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency had been formed.
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