SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Two City Council seats will be up for grabs in the City of South Lake Tahoe this coming November. The seat held by Councilmember Cristi Creegan and another seat, previously held by former Mayor Pro Tem John Friedrich and now held by Councilmember Devin Middlebrook, are set to expire in December.

The expiring seats have seven candidates vying them. This article is part of a series getting to know the candidates and their views on topics.

In this installment, the seven candidates discuss their views on tourism:

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Aimi Xistra

I support sustainable tourism. I think that we have entities like Keep Tahoe Blue, the TRPA, that are involved in cleanups after large events like [the] Fourth of July. We have a dedicated community to keeping our area clean.

I think that we could do a better job of proper education and increased messaging to our tourists about what the expectation is that our community has when they visit. In many situations, it can’t be successful if you don’t set expectations.

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I would love when you arrive at lodging properties within our Tahoe Lodging Association, that you get a sheet that says these are our expectations as a community for our visitors, keeping the lake clean, packing in what you pack out, clean up after your dog, utilize our public transportation systems, rent a bicycle, and I think that sustainable tourism goes hand in hand with education and setting expectations for our visitors.

Nick Speal

Tourism is the major component of our economy and so it’s important that we have and continue to have a healthy, sustainable tourism industry.

I think a lot of the direction where I’d like to see the industry go towards is managing impacts of over-visitations. Sometimes we see beaches get overly littered and polluted, which hurts not only the environment, but also the reason that brings people back year after year. And so I think being proactive on bringing people together from the private industry and local governments to be able to identify solutions to any kind of peak visitation impacts is really important.

I think that it’s important that we have an affordable place to live so that way we can have a workforce that can support the tourism industry because no one likes to visit a place where they’re closing early due to staffing or don’t have enough people to maintain trash cans and things like that.

Keith Roberts

We need to do a better job of managing [tourists]. I really like the Tahoe valley greenbelt plan and couple that with the mid-city plan. If we can get those fast tracked and in place as fast as possible, I think it will spread the tourists out more, at least on a minute by minute basis where we’ll have more attractions by the Y, they’ll be able to ride bikes from the airport to the casino corridor, hopefully helping with some of the traffic.

I know my friends and even my boss might be afraid that I’m talking about taking customers away from them, but if there’s less traffic and less congestion, then even more of the locals will come out on holidays where most of us locals now on the holidays, we either work or we’re hiding, you know?

But we could spread the tourists out, [and have] a better transit system, which will get more of the cars off the road. They can take the transit to the ski resort. They can come back, take it to dinner and take it to the casino and then still get home without having to get in their car. I think that would just be better for the entire city, not just the people at the Y and our businesses at Midtown, which kind of get left behind in a lot of the focus

Heather Cade-Bauer

It’s a necessary economic factor in this town. Our town wouldn’t survive if we didn’t have tourists.

David Jinkens

Tourism is a very important part of our local economy. It sustains our businesses and promotes job growth. According to recent data from our chamber of commerce, visits are down.

Having said this, we want visitors to have a good experience in the South Shore and we want them to respect our community and the people who live here.

We can have both if the private sector and city officials deal with the situation in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. We must be certain that we have adequate locations for people to park their cars and take microtransit while they are in town.  

We must ensure that our neighborhoods are not flooded with cars that block driveways and traffic flow. When they are using our beaches and open spaces we must ensure that they understand the rules for keeping them clean and if they don’t, then they need to take enforcement action to discourage bad behavior.  

We must get the word out to our visitors before they arrive and after they arrive that we welcome them to town if they treat us with care and respect.  Outreach to them is important.  

I want our locals and visitors to have a good experience and we can do both when we deal with the matter responsibly.

Caitlin McMahon

It’s vital. It’s vital. It’s important.

We need to work with visitors, because some of our slogans, like don’t trash Tahoe, [or] we’re going to keep Tahoe blue, unfortunately end up becoming things that we have to deal with, instead of things that are going to be components of someone’s vacation. We need to merge coming to Tahoe and respecting this place and I’m not saying that people coming to Tahoe don’t respect this place, I’m saying that we can do better.

For instance, for Fourth of July, Keep Tahoe Blue has been instrumental in cleaning up our beaches. Their volunteer efforts are great. I’m involved in them. They do a wonderful job. I know a number of people that work there and the thing is, can we do better to keep the litter off the beach?

Like, why aren’t we ticketing these people? Because we could be, immediately, when they get up, and leave a piece of trash. If we ticketed them, not only would we make money, but these people would think twice about littering in South Lake Tahoe. Then, all of a sudden, they’re going to tell their friends, ‘I got a $200 ticket for littering on the Fourth of July in Tahoe.’ Well, that’s going to go up on the marquee or the newspaper, and all of a sudden, people are going to stop littering in Tahoe.

The thing that we’ve done that I really like is that we’ve provided a lot of public trash cans and recycling bins.

How do we get that trash from the beach to the trash can, without disrespecting [tourists]? Because we need them.

Another thing is that—I think that we can, and this is just an idea—during COVID and the subsequent years, people decided to buy vans, very expensive vans throughout California [and] I think we should rent out parking in our city lots. It can be a reservation system. We have to do it in a way that people don’t live there.

Many of these people are actually living in these over $100,000 vehicles, and they’re traveling around the country. If we welcome them, that’s going to be good for us. We can provide them a place to park, and monitor it, ticket people that are getting out of hand.

But we’re going to get some revenue, and that’s the issue here. Tourism is our revenue, but somehow the city doesn’t have any money.

And also, we’re doing a lot to change the look of Highway 50. There’s a lot of dilapidated businesses on Highway 50, and that’s a sad look. It is the thoroughfare. You know, when you go by and you see businesses all fenced up, it’s not a good look. We’ve got some things in the works.

I think it’s important to get people that are making decisions up there, to push those things to works because somehow things are getting tangled up.

So I believe in tourism. It definitely is very important.

I also think some people have illegal Airbnbs, and we could actually fine them, but we’re not. These people aren’t being fined.

You can have an Airbnb, but you need to have a permit to operate that Airbnb. I’m not saying don’t have one. What I’m saying is that there are avenues in which the city could be getting more revenue and for some reason, that isn’t happening.

Because the tourists are coming, and we need them.

Marjorie Green

My first encounter and experience in Tahoe, I was the tourist. I think this is a beautiful place and lots of people want to be here.

I don’t think it’s right for some people to [say], ‘this is our place and you can’t have it.’ I think this is a beautiful place and we share it with all the other people that want to be here. Not everybody has the privilege to live here.

I think it’s a privilege. For many years, I wasn’t able to live here full time, so then I was a visitor.

So I think that tourism is not only great in that we get to share the beauty of this area with lots of different people across the country, across the world, but it’s also essential for our economy. It’s still the base of how things are operating here, right?

There aren’t that many other jobs that don’t somehow either primarily support tourism or have that secondary support from tourism. So I think it’s necessary. Finding the balance is probably going to be an ongoing process. Like how can we minimize cars? How can we minimize people who don’t understand how to interact with the wildlife that we live with?

Overall, I appreciate that there’s a lot of tourist dollars coming into this town that help support the community in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise. We have more parks here—parks that we can go to—than I see in other towns of this size, and that’s probably because of the tourism.

We have a hospital because we have more people coming in. You know, if this was just a town of 20,000 people, we probably wouldn’t have the facilities that we do if not for the tourism.

So, it’s a tough balance to strike, right? I think tourism is necessary. Our economy is built on it and we also want to support and share this natural, beautiful place that we have the privilege to live in, but we also need to find ways of minimizing the impact both to our local community and also the nature from just potentially too many people coming in at once or maybe not behaving in a way that is sustainable for the land.