President's Message

By: Dave Peterson, Board President

I’m writing this as Thanksgiving approaches. You will read it closer to Christmas, so I will attempt to make it time appropriate. Here is a summary of hot topics that the association is dealing with:

Board Elections. We had a good board election, with many good candidates throwing their name in the hat. The membership chose Peter Grant, Pete Wolcott, Jim Siegfried, and myself to serve the next two-year term. No sooner did we seat the new board, one of our legacy board members, Joy Curry Norem, had to resign because she sold her property. So, per our bylaws, the board considered several candidates and appointed Michelle Pandori to replace Joy. The remaining legacy members are Ken Silveira and Joby Cefalu. The new board jumped right into the raft of heady issues we face.

Other Elections. There are 2 outstanding issues that are out for member vote: the CC&R revision, and the CMT Year 2 funding assessment. By the time you read this, the CMT vote deadline will have passed, so I hope you all voted. I voted for the assessment, and I hope you did too, but most importantly, I hope you voted. Many of these elections have a quorum requirement, so it’s important that you exercise your voting rights. The CC&R revision vote was extended twice by the board because a quorum had not yet been reached. If you have not voted and have lost your ballot, please contact the TKPOA front office to request a replacement. We need all members to vote on these important things!

Professional Management. The board is moving forward with a transition to professional management of the TKPOA. Please see Mark Madison’s more detailed article in this issue of the Breeze. The change is expected to solve a number of operational problems, mitigate some liabilities, and help us move forward to a better future for the Keys. Mark goes into that deeper in his article.

Drinking Water. The board (absent me; I recused) chose to move forward with actions toward consolidation with STPUD. I’m told that the process will take time. In the meantime, we continue to contract with Jennifer Lukins to manage our Water Company, assisted by several TKPOA staff. The water system is producing water that meets drinking water standards, albeit at a reduced production rate due to the slow throughput of the temporary uranium treatment systems. We were able to water our landscaping through the summer, thanks to most of us sticking to the strict irrigation schedule. So, we are not “normal”, but are stable. And many of you already have or will soon convert your landscaping to low-water use (and low maintenance) designs. This will really help reduce system water demands going forward.

As I mentioned above, the uranium treatment systems are temporary. They were constructed outdoors on temporary pads, with above-ground piping. We have to hire a contractor to erect temporary shelters over the well 2 and 3 treatment systems each winter, and then hire them to tear them down in spring. It is expensive. And the ion exchange treatment media has a limited life. When the media needs to be changed, it will be very expensive (this will include radioactive waste disposal). My hope is that the long-term plan associated with the consolidation with STPUD will address these issues in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. But it’s important for all of you to know that what’s out there right now is TEMPORARY. It is just a band-aid.

Lagoon Water Quality. We finished year 1 of the Controlled Methods Test (CMT), and results show that the herbicides did a great job at knocking the invasive weeds back. Years 2 and 3 are designed to test more benign methods such as hand pulling, bottom barriers, and UV light treatment, to see if spot treatments of those methods can hold back regrowth. We will also continue large-scale UV-C treatment and the laminar flow aeration effort. It’s an important test, and many eyes are on this. The cost exceeded the original estimate set back in 2017 by a large margin, driven by extensive the monitoring & mitigation requirements in the final permit. The board in May chose to go forward with the test due to conditions being right, and uncertainty as to whether they would be right next year or the year after. As there was no time for a new assessment vote at the time, the board decided to borrow from reserves in the short term and pay those back with future assessments. In the fall,

the board approved an emergency special assessment for the year 1 cost overage, to pay the bills we had already incurred. Emergency special assessments don’t require a member vote and that is why you never saw a ballot for that one. The emergency assessment, unfortunately, was due at about the same time as property taxes. This was our bad; nobody on our end caught this. Sorry about that! Staff has been working out payment plans for members claiming a hardship.

The board did not think it appropriate to fund years 2 and 3 of the CMT with the emergency assessment and kicked it back to the Water Quality Committee for a recommendation on a funding mechanism for the two remaining years. The WQC recommended a special assessment for year 2 only. That is what is currently before the membership for a vote. Year 3 funding will be either included in the 2024 budget or handled through another special assessment vote next year. The board will need to decide which way to go on this.

In the meantime, I hope you all agree that this CMT needs to continue to completion, so that we can have the data needed to formulate a long-term control solution. It’s costing us and the government and the League to Save Lake Tahoe more than originally estimated, but we’re getting good results; this is getting us there!

There is one final point I’d like to make here. The CMT is intended to test methods to control invasive weeds. This is a fairly narrow scope. There are other weeds in our lagoons that are native, such as Elodea. But the CMT is not intended to get rid of natives. Some of the methods (e.g. UV-C) will kill natives too as a fact of life, but that is not the intent. So don’t be surprised if you hear victory celebrations at controlling the invasives, and you still see weeds in the water. It is very possible that a future long-term invasives control program will still leave a healthy growth of native water weeds in the Keys that will need nuisance control by harvesting or some other method. Sorry if this subtlety catches you off guard, but it’s important that we all understand this!

Also, as you all know, our algae problem is getting worse at the same time. While the CMT doesn’t address algae directly (it’s not an invasive weed), much is being done to monitor algae growth in an effort to understand the conditions that foster its growth. This needs continued effort. I suspect that some form of nutrient removal will be required. That’s what the mothballed circulation system did years ago. It extracted water in a couple of locations at the south end of the Keys, ran the water through a water treatment plant off of Texas Ave. (now mostly demolished), and then re-injected the water at various locations throughout the Keys. Many of you have suggested re-starting the circulation system. There are three problems with this: (1) the intakes are too high and don’t work in low water years like this, (2) many of the pumps and motors are inoperable, and (3) absent a treatment system to remove nutrients, simply pumping the water out and re-injecting it accomplishes nothing; it’s simply moving the same turbid, nutrient-rich water around in a circle. So yes, something needs to be done about the algae, but it’s going to take some thought on the part of the WQC and consultants, and some hard work, and lots of money. We are, as part of our CMT effort, including a modest investment in evaluating the condition of the existing system and scoping the work required to make it an effective part of the water quality solution.

Corporate Yard, Marina. This is probably a less visible problem to most of you, but it’s complicated and important and you should hear about it. A few years ago, the California Tahoe Conservancy (CTC) started a major ecosystem restoration project on the Truckee Marsh, east of the marina. Our corporate yard, located off of Dover Ave., encroaches on the lands they wanted to restore. So, we did a land swap: we swapped our Dover yard for a parcel by the marina, and they gave us time to relocate. That time will be up next year. At the same time, we had several legal disputes with the old marina owner, and they owe us approximately $1.2M. We are working with the new marina owner to settle that debt and are confident that this will happen. We have concurrently been searching for a new place for our corporate yard, and a new way to handle our harvested water weeds before they get hauled off to the Carson Valley. We’ve had a board committee working on this deal for some time and we are actually getting close. I hope that the deal can be done in the next 1-2 months, and that one of our committee members or Mark Madison can write an article in the next Breeze to tell you about it. It will be great to get this done!

I’d like to close with a giant thank you to all our member volunteers! Our annual volunteer appreciation event is December 15 at 6pm at the Pavilion, which will probably be in the past by the time you read this. But for all staff and volunteers who do the tough but interesting work of this HOA, my thanks to you!