Tahoe homeowner ‘blindsided’ by settlement with NV Energy  

(Photo courtesy of Dr. Staci Baker)

Lake Tahoe resident Dr. Staci Baker is regretting her decision to enter into a settlement with NV Energy, which cleared trees and vegetation from her mountain property in 2022 without notice or permission. In May, NV Energy agreed to pay Baker $30,000 for the damage caused by the removal of trees and brush deemed by the utility to be fire hazards to electricity lines and utility infrastructure. Now, the company is off the hook for what Baker and others call widespread ecological harm.

“It was a complete blindside,” Baker said upon learning the settlement prompted the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada to close its case on a complaint she filed last year against the utility. “I did not understand at all that by agreeing to settle I would not be able to have the PUC hold NV Energy accountable for the damage to the adjoining riparian area and all other riparian areas.”

Nevada Administrative Code says if a complaint has been settled and the PUC has been notified, “the Commission will dismiss the complaint.”

Baker says she intends to file another complaint regarding U.S. Forest Service land adjacent to her property. She says it’s been “horrifying” to watch the utility, with the assistance of the Forest Service, “take trees above the prescribed size that we cannot grow back and do not have the climate conditions to grow back.”

The work is part of NV Energy’s Resilience Corridor Project, a $21 million effort to “create resilient forests adjacent to approximately 28 miles of NV Energy utility infrastructure on the Nevada side of the Tahoe Basin.”

Like Baker, no one informed David Simon that the Forest Service, on behalf of NV Energy, intended to thin the trees surrounding his home a mile from the lake. 

“If they had, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” Simon, a retired attorney, told the Current in 2023. “Whereas, if somebody tells you, ‘hey, we’re going to take out 90% of the trees in your forest, you’d not only take notice, you’d start taking action.”

Simon, like his neighbors, learned of NV Energy’s Resilience Corridors project when a wide swath of cedars, pines, and other massive trees vanished from his home’s view. 

Baker and neighbors contend the utility and the Forest Service are exceeding the parameters of the project, which calls for removing trees and brush “immediately adjacent to utility infrastructure” and thinning the forest up to 1,000 feet from utility equipment “to improve forest health, remove trees that could grow into or fall on power lines and reduce hazardous fuels.”

“This is clearcutting. Commercial logging,” says Baker, pointing to “ancient trees” felled by the utility and the Forest Service. 

“Riparian fuels, such as mature aspen trees, will be removed only if they have the potential to grow into the utility infrastructure,” says the U.S. Forest Service’s Decision Memo, which notes trees of more than 30 inches in diameter would be removed only with the approval of a Forest Service biologist in the event it is a safety hazard, infested with insects, or in the way of equipment.

“Many of the trees felled were certainly over 30 inches,” Tahoe Area Sierra Club co-chair Tobi Tyler wrote in 2023 to NV Energy, the Forest Service, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) and the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District, adding that “photos show that thesespecifications were not followed, there were no buffers in place and wholesale destruction of wetland and riparian corridors occurred.”

The project, Tyler complained, “did nothing to improve the environment or make the forest more resilient and the public safer. In reality, this was and continues to be a commercial logging operation sanctioned as a ‘forest resiliency’ project.”

In response, the utility and the agencies agreed to increase notifications to the public, abide by best management practices, and facilitate communication among contractors. 

“Whether they are following through on these things, I’m not sure,” Tyler said Wednesday.  

NV Energy, in a statement to the Current, said it has taken steps in recent years to improve communication with customers in areas where deforestation crews are working. 

“Last year, we hired a dedicated customer communications specialist for work that happens within the natural disaster protection program,” the utility’s spokeswoman Meghin Delaney said via email. “This role, among other duties, coordinates direct outreach to customers, responds to media, and helps organize and attend community events to provide education and outreach to the communities we serve.”

Given her service as chairperson of the PUC and as a member of the TRPA, Tahoe resident Hayley Williamson has unique insight into the project, as well as the state regulation that prevents the PUC from holding the utility accountable when a complaint is settled, however, she declined to be interviewed, given the potential for the issue to come before the PUC in the future.

America’s forests are increasingly subject to commercial logging, and much of it occurs with little oversight.  The NV Energy project, under federal law, is excluded from requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The same exclusion would apply to deforestation efforts under the Fix Our Forests Act, federal legislation which seeks to increase forest management through thinning and prescribed burns. The bill is supported by all of Nevada’s congressional delegates, with the exception of Rep. Dina Titus, a Democrat from Las Vegas.

“Under FOFA, logging operations up to 10,000 acres (15 square miles) could move forward without any public input,” Tyler wrote in a recent opinion piece. “To put that into perspective, that’s roughly the size of more than 7,500 football fields, cleared without so much as a town hall meeting. That’s not forest management, that’s a corporate giveaway.”

The bill, says Tyler, “advances a deeply flawed narrative that commercial logging and grazing are effective wildfire mitigation strategies. The science says otherwise.”

Climate change, not tree density, “is the root driver of the catastrophic wildfires we’ve seen across the West,” Tyler wrote. “Logging our way out of this problem is not just shortsighted, it’s counterproductive.”

Studies, Tyler noted, indicate measures such as creating defensible space around structures and hardening buildings against fire, offer more protection to communities.

“FOFA includes no funding for these proven strategies,” Tyler wrote. “Instead, it funnels energy and attention into large-scale commercial logging, which may actually increase fire risk by removing old-growth trees that are naturally more fire-resistant.”

Some scientists are at odds with what they deem an alliance among governments, electric utilities, and the commercial logging industry under the guise of fire management. Archaic methods that are futile in controlling fire are wreaking ecological havoc and exacerbating risks for people and property, they say.

“The Forest Service uses the term ‘thinning and fuel reduction,’ a euphemism for commercial logging,’” says Dr. Chad Hanson, an ecologist and vocal critic of traditional fire management practices at a time when climate change has increased fire severity. “What they’re really doing is selling and removing large, commercially valuable trees on a fairly significant scale. Not only does that fail to protect homes, it will actually make a fire spread faster, and often more intensely toward the homes.”

The vast majority of homes that burn in wildfires – about 90% – are ignited by embers, carried on the winds, sometimes from miles away in advance of the flames, experts say. Logging reduces canopy cover and windbreak. 

“What you get are hotter, drier, and windier conditions that are more conducive to moving rapid wildfire toward homes,” Hanson says.

“The benefits of harvesting timber extend way beyond a healthy forest and reducing hazardous fuels. Timber harvesting also supports jobs and businesses in the local community,” Brad Seaberg, timber sale contracting officer for the Tahoe National Forest, said in 2023. “When forest land is properly managed, forests have both economic and ecological benefits. Regular thinning provides an improved environment for maximizing a site’s growth potential, which results in larger, healthier trees and more valuable timber.” 

The Forest Service did not respond by publication to requests for comment, or for data on the amount and value of the timber removed from the Tahoe forest.