By admin 
As legislators, tribal representatives and conservationists celebrated three decades of partnership at the 30th annual Lake Tahoe Summit, they acknowledged the basin faces future challenges including climate change, wildfires and invasive species.
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The event — which took place at Sand Harbor State Park in Nevada — brought together Democrat and Republican lawmakers in a rare bipartisan coalition.
“This has now become a national model for bipartisan cooperation and collaborative conservation,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who hosted the event. “It just reminds us of what we can do when we put any of our differences aside, and focus on protecting our home and what we care about.”
Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Harry Reid of Nevada helped convene the first summit in 1997, which marked the launch of the Lake Tahoe Environment Improvement Program. The EIP is a bi-state, bipartisan partnership of more than 80 public and private organizations — including government agencies, nonprofits, the private sector, scientists, and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California — that works to restore and protect the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Rosen cited major achievements since the summit’s founding.
In the past 30 years, she said, the EIP partnership has completed more than 900 lake-saving projects, prevented hundreds of thousands of pounds of fine sediment from entering the lake and completed 100,000 acres of hazardous fuel reduction treatments to protect the community from wildfire.
She said the team has constructed or improved more than 200 miles of bike and pedestrian trails, incorporated more than 60 years of scientific research into management decisions and inspected more than 120,000 boats to prevent aquatic invasive species.
These projects have reinvigorated the local economy, according to the Nevada senator. The Lake Tahoe Environmental Protection Program supports an average of 1,700 jobs each year, she said, and every $1 million investment into Lake Tahoe generates approximately $1.6 million in economic output.
“Protecting our environment and supporting our economy are not competing goals,” Rosen said. “They never have to be here in Lake Tahoe. They just go hand in hand.”
She said the EIP’s work isn’t finished, however, and the challenges facing Lake Tahoe will continue to evolve.
The region will see forests threatened by climate change, longer and more intense wildfire seasons, increased numbers of visitors, and new invasive species that threaten the lake’s ecosystem, according to Rosen.
Addressing these challenges will require “creativity, collaboration, and commitment,” she said, but a new generation of environmental stewards have already stepped up. Rosen pointed to two regional youth initiatives called Generation Green and the Lake Tahoe Ambassador Program.
Rosen and “Team Tahoe” — a name for the EIP partnership coined by Feinstein — announced the introduction of the Harry Reid Lake Tahoe Trailblazer Award and its first recipient, Cal Pete.
Pete is a member of the Washoe Tribe, raised in Dresselville, Nevada, who has dedicated his career to tribal conservation, natural resource protection and community health. As director for the Washoe Tribe’s Environmental Protection Department, he bridges modern science and indigenous ecological knowledge to lead restoration projects in the region.
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The award recipient said he and the Washoe Tribe hope to reestablish tribal presence in the basin after the completion of the Máyala Wáta Restoration project, which will restore almost 300 acres of meadow habitat in Meeks Meadow.
Communication between the tribe and agencies has improved, Pete said, but there is still a long way to go.
Along with the Washoe tribal leader, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., received special recognition because the summit will be his last. Amodei announced in February his plans to retire after eight terms in the House.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime, as the son of a wildland firefighter who spent much of his time within this basin and with the state division of forestry, to be able to say that in some way, you carried on that legacy for our family in terms of doing the right thing by the resource that’s just on the other side of that ridge line,” the congressman said.
While Amodei and others emphasized the bipartisan nature of the summit and the EIP, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., slammed the Trump administration for “treating our public lands as commodities, rather than a public trust.”
“When the values that have brought us together for the last 30 years are under strength by an administration that has slashed agency budgets and workforces, while attacking fundamental science and … undermining scientific institutions,” he said, “we know we have even more work to do.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., echoed Padilla. She cited the federal administration’s funding cuts to the U.S. Forest Service, including firefighters, saying these actions make it more challenging to manage land and control, mitigate and prevent wildfires.
“Let me just say again, as the appropriator sitting on this stage, we have all fought to continue the appropriation of those funds, and we will continue to do so to make sure the funding gets into our communities,” she said.
Cortez Mastro touted the bipartisan Tahoe Restoration Act, passed in 2024, which reauthorized $15 million for lake-saving work. At the same time, she said, it is necessary to modernize previous legislation, the Santini-Burton Act. This 1980 bill authorized the U.S. Forest Service to use funds to address water pollution in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Introduced by Cortez Mastro, Schiff and Padilla, the Santini-Burton Modernization Act would allow the Forest Service to use the same funds to manage public lands in the basin, with an emphasis on protecting lake clarity, reducing wildfire risk and addressing recreation impacts. It would also expand the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California’s authority to manage lands in the region.
Keynote speaker Tommy Caldwell, a rock climber who was the first to free climb the Dawn Wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan, closed the summit. As someone who has traveled the world, he said, there is no place better than Lake Tahoe.
“Luckily, there’s been enough people that care enough about this place to bring it back,” he said of the region, which he now calls home. “Let the story of Lake Tahoe remind the world that while humans have the power to destroy, we also have the power to restore.”
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