Largest Tahoe Resort Gets Approval for Massive Ski Village
After a public hearing that lasted nine hours, the Placer County Board of Supervisors last month voted to approve a controversial new ski village that will be added to the Palisades Tahoe resort in Olympic Valley.
Alterra Mountain Co., a Colorado firm that owns Palisades Tahoe, has for the past 13 years been seeking approval for an expansion on 85 acres of land mostly occupied by asphalt parking lots adjacent to the resort’s base.
The project will add about 850 lodging units, 1,500 hotel rooms, 300K SF of commercial space including restaurants and a movie theater, 3,000 parking spaces and housing for 300 ski area employees to create what the developer is calling “a world-class village commensurate with our world-class mountain.”
During the county board meeting, local residents from North Tahoe and Truckee expressed concern about the expansion’s impact on their quality of life, the water supply and the anticipated surge in traffic, which they said will cause gridlock on mountain roads and create lengthy wildfire evacuation delays, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
A group calling itself the League to Save Tahoe, which opposes the project, said the amount of car traffic generated by the expansion in relative proximity to the Tahoe basin could jam roads miles away near the lake, worsening the lake’s famous water clarity.
According to one estimate, the plan could add up to 3,000 daily car trips to the modest mountain roadways leading to and through Olympic Valley.
Alterra’s original proposal in 2011 included more lodging units and hotel rooms than the plan that was approved last month. A scaled-back version of the project, which was approved by the county supervisors in 2016, was challenged in court by the nonprofit conservation group Sierra Watch, which argued that the county failed to adhere to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Two years ago, a judge ruled in favor of Sierra Watch and ordered the county to rescind its approvals.
While Alterra has invested heavily in enhancements for the on-mountain skiing experience at Palisades, including a $65M mountain gondola that was completed two years ago, the company is aiming with the expansion to create an all-season resort that will be less dependent on increasingly erratic winter weather.
“We must diversify our activities to better manage the uncertainty,” Amy Ohran, Palisades president and COO, said at the county board meeting.
Earlier this year, the plan for expanded amenities at Palisades included a 90K SF indoor water park. Alterra dropped that idea following community backlash, the report said.
Alterra has agreed to contribute $2M to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which regulates development in the Tahoe basin, to mitigate traffic impacts. Palisades said a parking reservation plan it instituted last winter reduced the number of car trips to the resort by 22,000 relative to previous winters.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM