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Federal authorities charged the former mayor of South Lake Tahoe with wire fraud on Tuesday, about a year after she issued a public statement confessing to embezzling nearly $400,000 from the church where she worked as an administrator.
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Tamara Wallace’s legal woes came to a head on the same day her successor, Cody Bass, was ordered to spend 10 days in a Douglas County, Nevada, jail for a harassment conviction stemming from an altercation at a brewpub.
The two cases have embarrassed leaders of the small California city of 21,000 near the Nevada border, leading to a tumultuous City Council meeting last year, followed soon after by a decision to appoint Bass mayor even though he had already been charged in connection with the brewpub incident.
Wallace, who faces up to 20 years in prison on the wire fraud charge, has not yet appeared in court or entered a plea in the case.
In charging documents, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Fogg said Wallace embezzled nearly $390,000 from a South Lake Tahoe church between 2019 and 2025. The documents do not name the church, but in her public confession published in the form of a letter to the Tahoe Daily Tribune, she said it was a Presbyterian church.
The Lake Tahoe Community Presbyterian Church later wrote its own letter confirming it was the victim of the theft and said it had referred the matter to law enforcement. The church said Wallace had been fired from her position and had not been a member of its congregation.
Wallace began working at the church in 2018 as its bookkeeper, Fogg wrote in the charging documents. She managed the organization’s finances and was responsible for paying bills, tracking expenses and monitoring the church’s budget, he wrote.
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She was an authorized signer on the church’s bank account and was able to write checks and initiate electronic payments, the documents say.
She started taking money from the church about a year into her job, according to the charging documents. She used the money for a variety of purposes, including paying her home rent and travel expenses, the documents say.
In her published confession last year, Wallace said shame about what she had done led her to attempt suicide. She listed numerous reasons for her actions, including alleged abuse as a child, memories of the Sept. 11 attacks and an armed robbery she said she experienced with her husband while traveling in Russia.
“Sorry is not a strong enough word to explain the depths of my regret and shame,” Wallace wrote in her confession.
A date for her arraignment in Sacramento federal court is pending, according to court records.
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