Managing Regional Scenic Quality in the Lake Tahoe Basin

Local, state, and federal interest in preserving scenic quality has provided a unique opportunity to practice visual resource management on private and public lands in the Lake Tahoe basin. In 1989 the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency adopted a comprehensive scenic resources management plan to protect existing scenic resources and improve design and development in this world-renowned vacation area. The plan details management strategies for maintaining and enhancing identified scenic resources, an important component of the regional plan's environmental threshold carrying-capacity approach to land-use planning and environmental protection. Environmental threshold carrying capacity is defined as a standard necessary to maintain the significant recreational, educational, scientific, natural, and public health values in the Lake Tahoe basin. The plan includes site planning and design standards applicable to projects within viewsheds along designated scenic highway corridors and an improvement program to restore scenic quality. By 1991, monitoring of the plan by means of videotaping and comparing photographic slides revealed that several of the most poorly rated urban areas had improved since 1989. Conversely, outlying residential areas had been degraded be cause of the cumulative effects of low density, sprawling development otherwise permitted under the regional plan.