Editor’s note: This story includes reporting on the once-anticipated Truckee Art Haus project, co-owned by Moonshine Ink reporter Melissa Siig. Siig was not involved in any conversations for this article. Her husband, Steven Siig, was the source utilized.

The comment seemed to be in jest, made during a January 2024 Town of Truckee Planning Commission meeting: “Who’s harder [to deal with],” Commissioner Dan Fraiman asked a project planner, “Marriott Corporate or town staff and planning commission?”

Fraiman, whose planning commissioner term ends in March 2025, is a builder of custom luxury homes, as well as commercial and modular construction. His question came after a lengthy discussion on sign standards for a proposed hotel in the Gray’s Crossing neighborhood, during which he’d commented on Truckee’s design standards as the reason “why it’s a pain in the butt to do anything here.”

The Town of Truckee is a 31-year-old jurisdiction navigating maintaining its mountain character while also supporting growth — and this in a state desperate to meet housing demands.

“I think planning departments always face challenges between part of the community’s interest in wanting to see change and growth and part of the community wanting to see things not change. Oftentimes planning departments are stuck in the middle,” said Denyelle Nishimori, community development director. “When you ask about what’s the planning department’s philosophy, we’re often at [the mercy of] whatever the community’s interests are. That’s our role.”

That philosophy is under fire. Many developers and homeowners claim, and have been for years, that Truckee’s planning decisions are more arduous than the public-facing process implies. Moonshine Ink heard mentions of complicated steps, expensive fees, and predetermined bias for projects. An organizational assessment of the town, conducted by third party advisory firm Baker Tilly, is expected to be completed in January 2025. Some have audibly hoped the results will address the problems in the planning division — both process and culture.

“I know so many people that are ready to galvanize and want to do great things, but they feel stymied by the [town’s planning] process,” said Heather Rankow, founding vice chair of Tahoe Housing Hub, as well as founder of Developers Connection, a development consulting business. “And it’s not even just big developers. It can be down to [accessory dwelling units] and red-tagging people and not willing to work with them and threatening to lien their property. And I’m just like, oh my gosh, are we really doing this over an ADU? Nobody with an ADU should have to go get a lawyer to try to get to some place where they can make it work.”

“If [the construction community] were a union, we’re ready to strike.”

~ Ciro Mancuso

“Over the past 40 years, I’ve developed projects in many different jurisdictions.
The amount of unofficial power that’s been afforded this specific planning staff is unique,” said Rick Holliday, the mind behind the Railyard Project in downtown Truckee. “They’re not elected by anybody, they don’t really answer to anybody. I think they’re driving the development agenda for Truckee, not the people
of Truckee.”

Town staff is aware of the frustrations and says change is constantly happening to improve the planning process, though individual staffers maintain that the planning division is simply there to uphold regulations and policies put in place by elected decisionmakers.

“Ultimately, I think some of the frustration is about the rules and what’s been adopted versus the planners themselves,” Nishimori said.

The “Truckee Way”

A top reason people seem to struggle with the Town of Truckee planning process, according to Nishimori, as well as Town Planner Jenna Gatto and Town Manager Jen Callaway, is competing interests — constituents don’t want to see very much growth. In a 2024 springtime poll, town staff found that among the 404 registered voters who participated, the third-highest ranked answer for improving Truckee (after more affordable housing and reducing traffic congestion) was “limit growth, development.”

“One of the things that stands out in Truckee is how valued community character is,” Callaway said. “We have a whole separate element in the general plan. A lot of our standards are designed to reflect … and to retain our community character.”

Other communities, she continued, make development decisions based on the economic impact. “My understanding for the town is, since incorporation,” Callaway said, “the town has never made a development decision because of the economics of the dollar value coming into the community for that development. It’s retaining the community character and the standards that the community wants.”

It’s through that lens that Truckee’s planning division defines its method. There are rules, and the planners abide. “We don’t personally have agendas,” Gatto said. “It’s really just what does our general plan and our regulations say, and those are what we follow.”

According to the three town staffers interviewed, the planning division is not made up of project advocates or community liaisons or regulation police. They are planners, hired to be community-minded and engaged in the fundamentals of public service.

“planning departments always face challenges between part of the community’s interest in wanting to see change and growth and part of the community wanting to see things not change. Oftentimes planning departments are stuck in the middle.”

~ Denyelle Nishimori, town of Truckee community development director

“Oftentimes a project will churn for a very long time until we can get [it] into an approvable fashion,” Gatto explained. “I’ve been here for 18 years [and know] how hard our planners are working to help people get their projects approved. That being said, we will stand up and we’ll oppose something if it isn’t consistent with what our community wants us to do.

“Getting to yes is part of the ‘Truckee Way.’ It’s in our DNA, it is what is expected of us, but at the same time, we are also tasked with upholding what our community wants to see for Truckee and that’s what makes our jobs really hard.”

The town provided multiple examples of how the planning division exemplifies a ‘getting to the yes’ mentality, such as the Ruppert Mixed Use Project preliminary application, which has issues related to parking, density, and property lines. Staff provided “options the applicant can consider to successfully permit the project and items that may not be able to be resolved (i.e., identifying major issues at the outset so the applicant can decide how to proceed),” per an email.

“I can’t honestly think of [any] occasions where we’ve thrown up roadblocks that are our own,” Gatto said. “We’re not making up regulations, we’re always citing the code or the reason for a response. Sometimes, projects change from a pre-application to a formal application, and there sometimes tends to not be recognition of, oh, your project became bigger, so now your fees have changed. And that’s simply just math.”

Since 1996, of the 3,274 applications submitted to the town, 17 have been denied.

A former planner for the town spoke with Moonshine about their experience working in the department. Because they’re still active in planning, they requested to remain anonymous. This person remarked there wasn’t anything alarming about how work was performed at the town. “There were a lot of developer frustrations, just like you’re hearing today, about the process taking too long,” they said. “I think Truckee has very high design standards and it comes at a cost. Developers don’t like that but look how beautiful the town is. There’s that balance.”

The road to obtaining the Truckee ‘yes’ is seen more critically by Nevada County District 5 Supervisor Hardy Bullock, who said he’s heard from his Truckee constituents since he first entered office 4 years ago that they see the town’s planning division as “not customer service centric, it’s not facing the proper way, [and] it’s very difficult and hard to navigate the process.”

Bullock added, “I think it’s a problem that needs to be fixed … I’ve told the town many times, this is coming your way because I’m telling you that I’m hearing about this.”

Changes are being implemented within the town, but it takes time. “You don’t just hear one complaint and say, ‘Oh, that’s a problem,’” Callaway said. “We need to get that evidence, and then development code changes … I think some of the frustration is the time it takes to actually determine something’s a real problem and we need to revisit it and then change the code requirements to make it work.”

Dylan Casey, executive director of California Housing Defense Fund (Cal HDF), said slow-moving permitting is a broad issue. “California historically has had what we call a discretionary housing permitting process at the local level where you have a set of rules that the development needs to comply with,” he explained. On top of that are community meetings and staff input. “And that sounds good, but the problem with that is that it creates a very unpredictable timeline. And unless the city is really diligent about moving the process along, it can delay projects for many, many years. Which makes it very difficult to finance and build housing when you don’t know when you’ll be able to move forward with it.”

On Truckee, Casey said he’s heard from developers with projects under review for stretches of time: “The reasons in each case are very case-specific, and so I don’t want to make any broad comments on the reasons for this, but I can say we’ve gotten the impression that it is a very slow process up there.”

The developer lens

While both Nishimori and Gatto were very clear that the town’s planning process is straightforward and not driven by staff’s personal opinion, developers who spoke with Moonshine tell a different story.

The history of attempted development in the Truckee Railyard has been documented many times over the years by the Ink. Truckee Art Haus was one of the projects that was closest to the completion mark before the developers eventually stepped away, frustrated.

“We love what we’ve done with the Art Haus here in Tahoe City, and we got to a point where we realized that Truckee needed this, but on a larger scale,” said Steven Siig, co-owner of the Tahoe Art Haus & Cinema alongside his wife, Melissa. “And we thought we were the ones to do that.”

The Railyard Master Plan included the construction of a movie theater, and Holliday was quickly on board.

But sitting down with town planning staff, Siig said there was limited encouragement. He says they were met with such responses as, “Why would we want to build a movie theater in downtown Truckee? People would just go to Reno,” and “We don’t think it should be a theater. We think you should open a restaurant.” Nishimori and Gatto refuted such claims.

The meetings became increasingly contentious, Siig recalled. “Both my investor and I left a few of these meetings with chairs on the floor,” he said. “And I’m a pretty easygoing guy, [but there were] chairs on the floor, slamming doors” over the resistance to having a movie theater.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a misquoted traffic mitigation study fee. What was initially recorded by the town to cost $25,000 was later corrected to $250,000, but the correction wasn’t noticed until after town council voted to approve the project.

“After all these years and all of the chaos we’ve had, I’m counting my losses, which I think was $450,000,” Siig said. “For nothing, for absolutely nothing.” He added that he believes hurdles were intentionally put in place because the theater didn’t seem to fit staff’s idea of Truckee. “You’re trying to talk about reinvigorating a part of town and fulfilling a need that the community has been pleading for, and you’re trying to fulfill something that’s in the master plan for this area, and the town is basically fighting you at every corner.”

“Both my investor and I left a few of these meetings with chairs on the floor.”

~ Steven Siig, Tahoe Art Haus

In 2020, the Siigs officially called it quits for the Truckee Railyard theater.

Another downtown Truckee project: Residences at Jibboom, a 62-unit mixed-use community anticipated to go vertical in the spring of 2026.

Developer Sean Whelan, who bought the property in 2017, has been vocal with his complaints over the town’s approval process. After staff initially signed off on a pre-application for the project in 2018, Whelan and his team prepared more thorough plans. When he sat down with town staff again, he says he was told the proposed project wasn’t a good idea “and no longer supported even though the pre-app letter said it was an approved use and after spending $300,000 on architects and civil engineers.”

What followed were years of revisions and redesigns, various permits and requests for development code amendments, alternative funding routes, switching architects, legal fees, a partner who quit, and more. Read About That Jibboom Street Dirt Lot for a 2022 update from both the town and Whelan during the 6-year process. Generally speaking, the town averages 1.5 to 2 years to process such rezoning applications
as Whelan’s.

Businesses and residents chime in

Aimee and Kane Schaller opened Elevation Escape Tahoe, an escape room on Donner Pass Road, in early August. The building was existing, and the work to be done minimal.

“Low voltage electrical and non-load bearing walls,” said Aimee Schaller, “and you would’ve thought we were asking to build the Taj Mahal.”

Upon approaching town planning in early 2024, Kane Schaller said that despite staff confirming the escape room was an allowable use, they were told zoning verification was still required, a 30-day process.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. You’ve already said that it’s an approved use, but you’re still going to delay me for 30 days,”’ Kane Schaller said, recalling their explanation. “They said, ‘Well, it’s actually going to be 30 days to decide whether or not we have a complete application. And then 30 days from then.’ That costs us thousands and thousands of dollars of rent every month because of these delays for a use you’ve already said is approved.

“For a tenant improvement project for an approved use, we shouldn’t even break stride on the way through the planning department to the building department.”

“you would’ve thought we were asking to build the Taj Mahal.”

~ aimee schaller

Schaller said after he emailed council and the town manager, the process was finished in 3 weeks. But it didn’t end there. After submitting a building plan for the business, the next step before opening, Schaller was informed that despite other divisions and agencies providing comments within days of submission, town planning would take an additional 25 business days to reply.

“Again, this is after the initial 3 weeks at the beginning of the process,” Schaller’s second email, sent April 2, 2024, to the town council and manager stated. “This is untenable. All of the entities/departments that have a much more onerous lift to review details will be done in less than [half] of the time that the planning department claims that they need to decide what they want to comment on for a business that they have already reviewed. After the building (decades ago) and the business type (months ago) have already been approved by planning, what can they possibly need to still review, let alone that will take them 5 weeks to make a decision on.

“Simply put, you are allowing the planning department to choke out our town with bureaucracy; once the zoning is deemed permitted, it makes no sense that the planning department can hamstring the process like this.”

Residential property owners, mean-while, have faced challenges with the town’s ADU process. (The launch of a new ordinance got a bumpy start in 2021; read Your Short-Term Days Are Over.)

Rankow, who’s worked for numerous construction and architect companies in the area, is often hired by developers and residents alike to provide design and construction consulting in the Truckee/Tahoe region.

A homeowner in the Prosser area, she said, has gone through multiple stages of grief with the town in his efforts to utilize part of his house as an ADU. During his attempt to become compliant, he faced numerous hurdles for having a too-tall retaining wall, a too-large bear box, issues with his septic system, records stating part of the space was a guest house and whether that would count as a pre-existing ADU, the threat of a lien on his property, and more.

“All you’d have to do at the town is make the decision,” Rankow said of the historical record point. “Yes, we recognize that Nevada County in 1978 said that this was a guest house. We will say it’s existing non-conforming. Done. It’s not like you don’t have the authority to be able to do that. And that’s where I feel situations like that, things get very twisted.”

In her work with developers, Rankow said she’s also experienced town staff making changes to projects at the 11th hour. In one case, she gave as an example, two conditions were added 5 days before a public hearing that incurred a $1.5 million cost to
the developers.

“I tell all the owners, if you are one, two, three meetings in and it’s not solved, then you need to start CC-ing the town manager and all of town council and all of the planning commission and [Contractors Association of Truckee Tahoe] and Moonshine Ink,” Rankow said. “You need to flood them with the data.”

Nishimori said the town is taking in more permits for ADUs than for new single-family residences — the first time such a trend has occurred. Similar to developer cries of foul, she said the town knows people are angry about code compliance with ADUs.

“[Our part-time senior planner who’s dedicated to ADUs] goes out and does site inspections,” Nishimori said. “I will admit a lot of them right now are after the fact. Maybe some of the frustration you’re hearing too is that people aren’t understanding ‘well, I bought this house, and it had this ADU and now you’re telling me it’s not an allowed ADU.’ So, she does get some of that, but there’s no judgment in that. She just says, okay, it doesn’t matter … We just want to see them come in and have [the ADUs] be safe [for the inhabitants].”

The lynchpin and the audit

At the center of all conversations surrounding the planning division was Nishimori. Now the community development director, Nishimori began working for the town in 2002, rising through the planning division to one of the top-most staff positions.

Nearly every person who spoke with the Ink for this article, on or off the record, organically brought up Nishimori as someone who, beyond keeping the town’s rules and vision in mind, guides what projects are approved with a firm hand.

Ciro Mancuso has constructed more than 500,000 square feet of building in Truckee over the last 25 years and said he’s “never seen such a mess as we have now with the planning department.”

That is in part why he “started building [his boat storage unit] without a permit because of what [Nishimori’s] process was. She weaponizes the code rather than uses the code for guidance.” In response to the illegal construction, Nishimori determined that demolition and deconstruction of the structure
was required.

The Contractors Association of Truckee Tahoe (CATT) submitted a public comment during a June council meeting in reaction to that decision, stating that demolition “despite structural integrity, simply because the permits were either not obtained or have expired … is not only counterproductive but also sets a concerning precedent for our community and our members … We ask that the town council further direct the town manager to ensure that the town government, particularly [the planning and building] departments, adopt a culture of customer service and not a culture of misapplied ‘guardianship’ or enforcement and work with its citizens and businesspeople in a supportive manner.”

While the town stepped back its requirement to demolish the storage unit, council determined Chief Building Official Mike Ross had full authority to determine whether or not the structure and foundation were safe and allowed to remain. As of press deadline, Mancuso awaits reports from a third-party contractor to determine soils tested and construction performed on the site were done properly.

“It was verbally communicated to Ciro that the soils and construction was done properly and saw no reason for removal,” Katie Mancuso, a real estate agent who’s married to Ciro, wrote in a later email. “The building permit keeps getting pushed out as the town comes up with more requirements and more roadblocks. There is no common sense.”

As community development director, Nishimori considers herself the face of the department, which is not always easy. “It can at times mean having tough conversations or making tough decisions that directly impact community members,” she wrote in an email. “A discussion with a homeowner about the ADU they didn’t realize was unpermitted when they purchased the property, a conversation with a developer about a proposed commercial project that exceeds the allowed height limit, a dialog with neighbors about a proposed housing project. With every tough conversation or decision, there is opportunity to listen, to understand, to ask questions and to work together on solutions and options to move forward.”

Nishimori said that despite claims otherwise, she wouldn’t have questioned specific projects, like the Truckee Art Haus or Residences at Jibboom. “It’s not about liking/not liking something (and I would not have said this),” she wrote, “it’s a conversation about options, problem solving and helping get to a successful outcome with the decision makers.”

Ciro Mancuso said fellow builders have stopped working in Truckee, and won’t return until there’s a change in town leadership, specifically the planning division. “If [the construction community] were a union,” Mancuso said, “we’re ready to strike.”

This includes affordable housing builders, says Truckee Planning Commissioner Dave Gove, who works as a real estate agent and has been a planning commissioner for 6 years. “In this environment, regulatory burden makes it cost-prohibitive to build stand-alone affordable housing, so any affordable housing is borne on the back of a larger project,” he shared. “If your community has the reputation of being one of the hardest jurisdictions in the state to get a project approved, you don’t get the larger project or the affordable housing.”

“Getting to yes is part of the ‘Truckee Way.’ It’s in our DNA.”

~ jenna gatto, town planner

Some are looking to an organizational assessment as a possible solution for improvements.

In May 2024, the Town of Truckee officially contracted with Baker Tilly for a best-practices review of the government agency.

“It was the right time from my perspective to do a holistic organization-wide look at our services, our staffing, our practices, how we operate, and get some neutral independent feedback on that,” Callaway said.

As part of its process, Baker Tilly hosted community engagement sessions to hear from certain focus groups. To populate those sessions, the town provided a list of regular community partners (the Truckee Chamber, Sierra Business Council, and others) for
the consultants.

Whelan attended the chamber and Truckee Downtown Merchants Association sessions over the summer. “The meeting turned into 1 hour of Truckee planning department-bashing,” he recalled. “People are furious.” More specifically, said others on background, Nishimori was mentioned as a stumbling block.

CATT, too, had a listening session. Executive Director Edward Vento touched on the organization’s involvement with the Baker Tilly assessment. “CATT is aware of some ongoing inefficiencies within the Town of Truckee Planning Department and has been collaborating with the town to address these concerns,” he wrote in an email to Moonshine Ink. “We look forward to reviewing the findings and recommendations from Baker Tilly’s ongoing assessments to work with town leadership, public stakeholders, and elected representatives to identify practical, long-term solutions for addressing any issues highlighted in the study, including those issues raised by the public and CATT membership.”

Baker Tilly declined to speak with Moonshine.

The town said it has been provided a brief verbal summary of these community sessions, which included comments on planning process and code questions, and expressed general lack of trust among the development community.

Nishimori agreed that part of the town code needs to catch up to new ideas. “We did that when we first heard about makerspaces, that our code didn’t even have that in it. So, we had to change our code to address that. We didn’t have a use called fast casual restaurant, so we had to change that. But we have all sorts of new things that people present as unique ideas. Those are things that, when they’re willing to tell us about their frustration and help us understand, then we can go back in and make those recommendations to the council to change things to make it so those are uses that are compatible and the community wants to see.”

Supervisor Bullock said Nevada County is on hand to provide any assistance, having recently gone through its own independent audit that “did a lot of heavy lifting to reorganize our building and planning department so it was customer centric.”

While some speculated that the Truckee assessment could pave the way for significant leadership changes, others, like Katie Mancuso, anticipate a more “padded” report that will be protective of the town.

Still, she sees now as the time for change. “I want it to be heard loud and clear that the community at large is resounding the same sentiment of where the problems are coming from … [The town says], ‘It’s a process, we’re just following the rules, following the code.’ That all sounds great and fair, but the truth is there are so many that have the same sour taste and experience that is directed back to the planning department. This begs the question, is it the process or the current leadership and their interpretation of the process?”

Nishimori said reporting on the situation could be an opportunity to open up the door to solutions: “If there are regulations that are challenging, if there [are] other perceived roadblocks to new ideas, let’s get them on the table and be open to hard conversations.”