11 minute read
Spring is Around the Corner
It’s Time to Think About Your Defensible Space!
By Tia Rancourt
AS WE MAKE OUR WAY INTO
SPRING, it is a good time to start thinking about getting our yard cleaned up and that means making sure we have adequate defensible space. Effectively managing the vegetation around your home is something we can all do to help reduce the threat of wildfire, not just for your property but for your neighbor’s property as well.
Let’s Get Started
• Within the first 5 feet of the house – routinely remove all dead vegetation, including shrubs, fallen branches, grass, weeds and flowers, as well as dead or dying standing trees or recently fallen trees. • From 5 to 30 feet of the house, remove every spring by May 1st. Needles and leaves that fall after the removal period can accumulate on the ground if they do not create a fire hazard. • More than 30 feet from the house, do not allow fallen needles and leaves to exceed a depth of 3 inches. • Thin dense shrub stands to create more space between them.
Depending on the slope of your terrain, shrubs or small clumps of shrubs should be separated from one another by at least twice the height of the average shrub. More distance is needed on steeper slopes.
For Jeffrey Pine and White Fir trees, create a separation between canopies of at least 10 feet, increasing that distance on steeper slopes. • Ladder fuels are vegetation that can help the fire climb up from lowgrowing plants to adjacent taller shrubs and trees. Remove shrubs and trees growing under the drip line of trees and remove low-hanging branches not to exceed the bottom 1/3 of the tree’s height. • Clearing debris and vegetation from the first 5 feet away from your house can make a significant impact and get you started. • Move your wood pile at least 30’ from your home. • Remove pine needles from the roof and roof gutters, and under deck areas. • Consider fire-resistant landscaping.
Maintaining a defensible space is an ongoing activity. Each spring, re-evaluate your defensible space and implement the necessary recommendations. Also consider your home vulnerability and review the Wildfire Home Retrofit Guide for recommendations on how to retrofit exiting components of a home to withstand wildfire.
Take advantage of our FREE Curbside Chipping service available spring through fall months.
Please note the following guidelines when requesting this service:
• Piles must be curbside and easily accessible. • The branch diameter cannot exceed 6 inches. • Pile must not contain stumps, roots, garbage, nails, lumber, or pine cones. • Pile must not exceed 30 feet in length, 6 feet in height, and 6 feet in width.
Chips will be left on-site and can be spread around the property for landscaping or erosion control, but not within 5 feet of a structure. If you choose to spread the chips within 30 feet of a structure, ensure that mulch beds are separated by noncombustible areas, such as dirt, rock, or pathways. Also, ensure that mulched areas do not contain highly flammable vegetation.
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: www.tahoelivingwithfire.com
IF ONE LIVES ON the north shore of Lake Tahoe for any length of time one eventually comes to hear and read all kinds of things about the early days of our community. These accounts all seem to describe how the Oklahoma based CPA Art Wood and his colleagues bought 9,000 acres of undeveloped forest land through legal slight of hand from the reclusive and reluctant millionaire George Whittell and with the help of Harold Tiller, Bill Anderson, Ray Smith and others created on these wooded acres the town of Incline Village here on the edge of “the fairest picture the whole world affords” to quote Mark Twain. The story that follows is this author's attempt to tell what the late Paul Harvey might have called The Rest of the Story. And it all starts not here in Nevada but five thousand miles away in Honolulu, Hawaii.
On June 30, 1930, Manuel (Manny) Reginald Sylvester was the 4th of 14 children born to parents who emigrated to Hawaii from Portugal to work on the sugar plantations. He was raised in a poor neighborhood of Honolulu but by dint of hard work and part-time jobs managed to attend both the private St. Louis High School and the University of Hawaii where he majored in accounting and was enrolled in the ROTC program. Between his junior and senior years, the army sent some of the ROTC cadets to an internship at Fort Lewis, Washington and on that trip in 1951, Manny took the opportunity to come down to Reno to visit an uncle who was an avid fisherman with hands-on knowledge of Lake Tahoe. One day they found themselves on the north end of the lake and cruising along the shoreline near what now is the site of The Hyatt Hotel Manny's uncle pointed to a strip of shoreline and said, “do you see those houses over there back in the woods? That's what we call millionaires row.” Manny doesn't now recall much of the discussion, but the impression of wealth and beauty was firmly impressed on his memory forever.
A year later Manny had graduated from college, and he was married to Margaret Howie. Manny and Madge spent their honeymoon traveling around the mainland and came to Lake Tahoe, this time staying on the south
Manny & Madge Sylvester
shore. It was as beautiful as ever. Returning to Hawaii Manny then served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army and then joined the CPA firm of Black & Gillette in Honolulu. In 1959, a chain of movie theaters and broadcast stations named Consolidated Amusement Company decided to put itself on the market and Baker & Gillette was retained by an investment group out of Oklahoma City called Billups, Wood & Mascho to do the financials for the deal. Manny's firm figured out a way for the investors whose lead man on the project was a fellow CPA named Arthur Wood, to buy the properties from Consolidated for something like 11 million dollars and then resell them six months later for nearly double that amount, netting a handy profit for the Oklahoma investors.
About the same time, the Consolidated deal was wrapping up, a tax client of Baker & Gillette named David Heath called the Honolulu firm from Reno where he was on business and said he'd learned about an option to buy 9,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Tahoe. The option was about to expire without being fulfilled, so there might be an opportunity for someone to make some serious money. Manny was the only one of his firm who had any experience with Lake Tahoe and he strongly pitched the idea that not only was Tahoe one of the most beautiful places in the world but also suggested that Art Wood—who was then back in Honolulu finishing up the Consolidated deal—might be interested. Jack Baker then called a staff meeting to discuss the possibilities and at Manny's urging it was decided to approach Art with the idea even though someone else licensed to operate in Nevada would probably have to handle the details. Art said he was interested but that he would first need to see the place. A few days later Wood, along with partners Jack Eagle and Eugene Jordan, flew from Honolulu to Reno and found themselves in near-freezing temperatures even though it was the middle of July. And to make things worse, the airline had lost Art's luggage, and he had only the Aloha attire he'd left Honolulu in to wear. Art hated cold weather, and in the terminal, he supposedly told Eagle and Jordan he had no interest in going up to a frozen lake to look at some pine trees in the snow and was going to take the next plane home. But having come this far his
companions talked him into at least seeing the property and once they did they all decided yes, this was indeed worth pursuing. Back in Reno they retained the services of the Bible, McDonald & Jensen law firm to secure the soon to expire option and then move on with purchasing the 9000 acres from owner George Whittell.
The erstwhile option had apparently been granted for $50,000 a year earlier to a party which now couldn't fulfill its terms. Some said that Whittell himself was now having second thoughts about the deal. Manny says he heard somewhere the original option was to a group of Nuns who intended to build a convent on the property but then couldn't raise the money and sold it to a benefactor. Still another version was that Whittell considered selling it to the University of Pacific for a conference grounds but then backed away from that. In the event, the owner of the option ended up being a "mysterious former navy commander named John Maloney" who resided in Seattle. Art Wood's new attorney Robert L. (Bob) McDonald apparently traveled twice to Seattle to meet with Maloney but was unsuccessful in obtaining a sale. Finally shortly before the option expired Maloney himself traveled to Reno and McDonald secured the option in Maloney's suite at the Holiday Hotel for $150,000— three times the option cost. Time was now running out to make a deal. Most versions of this part of the story have the option signed over to Wood's partner Eugene Jordan who quickly tendered it to a “nominee” or holding company created for the purpose named Nevada Lake Tahoe Investment Company which Manny characterized as a syndicate probably created specifically for tax and legal purposes. Manny further suggested that Kansas investors he called “The Miller Brothers” might have come up with the 5.4 million dollars required by Whittell to exercise the option (9000 acres at $600 an acre) since “...none of us had that kind of money so quickly available." In any event, the money—in cash as demanded by Whittell--was lugged to the Thunderbird Lodge front door and delivered on time to the aging and now wheelchair bound George "Captain" Whittell and the newly formed Nevada Lake Tahoe Investment Company now owned the property. In less than a year (required, apparently for tax purposes) title to the property was then transferred to Crystal Bay Development Company (CBDC hereafter) for the sum of 25 million dollars. Much has been made of the idea that in just one year the investors made a profit of some 500% on a 5.4 million dollar investment. But Manny points out flaws in that math. First of all, the money raised by CBDC was in exchange for stock in the new company. Secondly, all the expenses to that date including the option costs, legal fees, other expenses and the 5.4 million paid to Whittell had to be paid back. Finally, the CBDC needed money to start the build out of the new community—the roads, sewers and other infrastructure. To raise the millions needed the CBDC sold shares in the enterprise to some 35 or more investors so none of that money could be considered profit. Any profits would come as CBDC sold lots and homes and licensed the hotels and casinos the developers were planning. To complicate “following the money” virtually all of the records of the CBDC from this period were destroyed in 1960 when a fire at their temporary offices in the basement of Eugene's Chateau, a trendy Crystal Bay restaurant which hung over the lake off present Route 28 just up the hill from Incline, burned to the ground. The fire was thought at the time to have been “of suspicious origin” and apparently even the Washoe County District Attorney thought as much, but nothing ever came of the follow up investigation.
In 1960, Baker & Gillette did accept an offer from Art Wood to participate in the CBDC stock offering and Manny's firm went in for 10% or 2.5 million dollars which they borrowed from the Bank of Hawaii. His firm then ceased to be involved in any planning or operation of the Crystal Bay Development Company. To close this part of the story—more will be forthcoming in a future edition of Live.Work.Play—although Manny Sylvester played a small part in the creation of Incline Village, if he and his colleagues at Baker & Gillette had not steered Art Wood and his associates to the deal with George Whittell the option would probably have expired and the land subsequently sold to the U.S. Forest Service which was aggressively trying to obtain and preserve the unspoiled forests on the east shore of Lake Tahoe. The aging "Captain" Whittell increasingly viewed the USFS as the preferable option to the Nevada State Park Service with which Whittell now had a contentious relationship over their lease of his land for the new state park at Sand Harbor. Manny 's next return to Incline Village came in 1964 when he and Marge bought a condo here but his work in Hawaii made them seasonal visitors only until Manny retired in the mid-1990’s and they became Nevada residents. Their generosity to Incline and Crystal Bay charities is well known and even at the ripe old age of 92 Manny continues to be a donor to the Parasol Foundation and a host of other area community organizations even though poor health prompted his return to Honolulu in 2015 where he resides to this day in an assisted living environment—the last living member of the team which once helped create Incline Village.
Richard Miner
PAST PRESIDENT, INCLINE VILLAGE & CRYSTAL BAY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
