INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — On July 29, the Boys & Girls Club of North Lake Tahoe (BGCNLT) announced an expansion of its services in Incline Village, made possible by a generous gift from the Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation and a grant from the State of Nevada.
The Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation is donating two buildings in Incline Village, renovation funds, and operational support to launch a new “Duffield Center for Great Futures,” which will house an Early Learning Center, Teen Center, and administrative offices.
BGCNLT Executive TeamProvided / BGCNLT
BGCNLT also received funding from the State of Nevada to help launch the opening of the Early Learning Center. Funding was a result of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and is intended to address the lack of early learning opportunities and preschools in Nevada. The Early Learning Center will serve infants as young as six weeks old through age five with year-round, all-day programming, closing a long-standing gap that has made reliable, affordable infant and early childhood care difficult for local working parents to find close to home.
The Teen Center will serve youth in grades six through twelve with out-of-school time and specialty programming throughout the school year and summer months. While still in the design phase, initial programmatic ideas for the Teen Center include a fabrication lab, a state-of-the-art e-gaming space, a digital journalism studio, and a café.
BGCNLT is currently in the design and development phase for both buildings, with the intention to begin renovations and construction in spring 2027. The goal is to begin serving youth in early 2028.
“We are incredibly grateful to the Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation and the State of Nevada for their support, and we’re ready to carry out the important work of expanding our services to all age groups in Incline Village,” said Mindy Carbajal, Chief Executive Officer of BGCNLT.
“The Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation has proudly partnered with BGCNLT for many years. We believe supporting youth programs has had an expansive impact in North Lake Tahoe, and we are happy to be a part of their next phase of growth,” said Chris Watts, co-president of the Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation.
With this generous support, community partners, and Club families, BGCNLT will be able to expand its capacity in Incline Village, deepen its academic support, enrichment, and mentorship programming, and extend its reach to families who depend on the Club.
For more information on the Boys & Girls Club of North Lake Tahoe, please visit www.bgcnlt.org.
For more information about the Dave & Cheryl Duffield Foundation, please visit www.duffieldfoundation.org.
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – In coordination with the City of South Lake Tahoe, the U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit will begin work on the Bijou Park Creek Stream Environment Zone Enhancement Project over the next few weeks. This project is linked to the City of South Lake Tahoe’s Bijou Park Creek Watershed Restoration Project and involves stream and meadow restoration along Bijou Creek. A joint National Environmental Policy Act/California Environmental Quality Act analysis for this project was completed in 2025.
This week, Forest Service crews are scheduled to begin removing hazard trees and vegetation in preparation for restoration work and will install Best Management Practices around the project area. Restoration work is expected to wrap up in early October.
For public safety, access to some areas may be temporarily disrupted when work is taking place. The public should be aware of tree removal activity and keep a safe distance from equipment. Hazards may be present even when operations have ceased for the day.
As part of this stream environment zone enhancement project, two areas will be restored. The Upper Bijou Park Creek restoration along Ski Run Boulevard south of Pioneer Trail includes installation of rock steps to stabilize the stream channel and raise the bottom of the stream bed to allow for improved water flow. This work is anticipated to take approximately three weeks to complete and is scheduled to begin after Labor Day.
The project also includes stream environment zone improvements to Bijou Creek in the meadow north of Pioneer Trail along Blackwood Road. In this area, man-made berms constructed in the 1980s are causing flooding issues downstream. These berms will be removed and replaced with new berms that will be installed along roads and buildings to reduce flooding issues. Improvements will also be made to the existing trail to protect the meadow and creek and prevent sediment from entering the stream. This work is expected to take approximately five weeks to complete and is planned to begin on August 31.
Additionally, the City of South Lake Tahoe’s contractor will be completing the Tamarack Culvert Replacement Project, also part of the Upper Bijou Park Creek Watershed Restoration Project, downstream of the Bijou Park Creek Stream Environment Zone Enhancement Project. This project will allow Bijou Creek to overflow its banks and continue to spread out and wet the stream environment zones north and south of Tamarack Avenue instead of being confined and disrupted by a single failing culvert. This project is targeted to start on or around Sep. 9 and is anticipated to be completed by Oct. 15.
If you didn’t get a chance to download the Tahoe Tap podcast, don’t worry. We have you covered. Here’s a recap of the interview portion of the podcast.
El Dorado County District 5 Supervisor Brooke Laine has spent much of her life watching Lake Tahoe change.
Some of those changes, she says, have come at a cost. The freedom she remembers as a child – building forts, playing in the woods and tearing apart beaver dams – is harder for today’s children to experience. But in other respects, Laine believes Tahoe has made significant progress, particularly in environmental restoration and transportation infrastructure.
During her Tahoe Tap podcast interview, Laine discussed the competing demands of her geographically diverse district, Tahoe’s relationship with El Dorado County, vacation home rentals, snow removal, utility concerns, the future of Emerald Bay and what she sees as a continuing need for stronger regional cooperation.
A district with dramatically different needs
District 5 stretches from Tahoma on Lake Tahoe’s West Shore to Pollock Pines on the western slope of the Sierra, encompassing 11 distinct communities.
Laine said one of her first moves after becoming supervisor was creating a District 5 advisory committee with a representative from each community. The group meets quarterly, giving residents a direct opportunity to identify local problems and priorities while also learning from communities facing similar challenges.
The needs of Pollock Pines and the Tahoe Basin can be “almost like night and day,” Laine said. But some concerns cross those geographic divides. Pollock Pines residents, for example, have pushed for a developed community park – the type of basic amenity that can still require millions of dollars and significant county involvement.
Does Tahoe get its share of county revenue?
One of the interview’s more provocative discussions centered on how much revenue the Tahoe Basin generates for El Dorado County and how much comes back to the region.
Laine cautioned that the county does not clearly delineate revenue by district, making it difficult to establish a precise calculation. She said she had no evidence proving whether the basin currently receives an amount proportional to what it generates, although her suspicion is that it does not.
She pointed to a financial analysis from the early 1970s, when Tahoe-area residents explored creating a separate county. According to documentation from that effort cited by Laine, the basin at the time was receiving roughly 22 to 23 cents back for every dollar it generated for El Dorado County.
Laine said she later examined transient occupancy tax revenue and found a similar pattern: the basin generated about 70% of the county’s TOT while receiving roughly 22 to 25 cents on the dollar back.
There are complications in making a simple comparison. The basin now houses a juvenile detention facility serving the entire county, for example, while other county services are concentrated on the West Slope.
Still, when asked what she would do with a “magic wand,” Laine floated a much larger structural idea: a Tahoe County encompassing the California side of the Basin and another on the Nevada side. Or, ideally, a single bi-state county covering the entire Tahoe Basin.
Budget cuts and regional representation
Recent county budget cuts have also affected Tahoe organizations, including tourism and business groups.
Laine said she believes those reductions were generally proportional to cuts elsewhere in the county. She opposed making them so abruptly, however, arguing that organizations facing the loss of county funding should have been given a more gradual path – potentially reductions of about 30% at a time – to develop an exit strategy. That approach did not win support from her colleagues.
Beyond the county itself, Laine represents local interests on regional bodies that play significant roles in Tahoe, including the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, Tahoe Transportation District and Tahoe Conservancy.
Those seats, she said, provide opportunities to identify duplicated efforts and build partnerships. They also highlight a recurring challenge: Tahoe’s local voices can compete with representatives from Sacramento, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and elsewhere.
That makes cooperation among El Dorado County, South Lake Tahoe, Placer County, Douglas County and other local governments especially important, Laine said.
Senior center faces costly repairs
The future of South Lake Tahoe’s senior center remains unresolved.
Laine described a long-running disagreement between El Dorado County and the City of South Lake Tahoe over responsibility for the facility, dating back to a leaking roof in the early 2000s.
More recently, a county assessment identified approximately $2.5 million in immediate needs, according to Laine. Those include heating and air-conditioning equipment, accessibility issues, electrical work, and other deficiencies. Even that investment, she said, might extend the building’s useful life by only another five to 10 years.
At the time of the interview, Laine said the county had no maintenance dollars programmed for that work. She also raised the question of whether South Lake Tahoe’s new multigenerational recreation facility could meet some senior needs, while acknowledging controversy surrounding that possibility.
“There’s a lot of questions, not a lot of answers at this time,” Laine said, calling the issue a high priority.
Snow removal staffing and new equipment
After staffing shortages created snow-removal concerns in Meyers and elsewhere in the basin, Laine said the county has made progress recruiting seasonal workers.
El Dorado County maintains approximately eight full-time Department of Transportation employees locally and was able to hire roughly eight additional seasonal employees last winter, she said. Recruitment incentives included a signing bonus of about $6,000, while county wages became more competitive with other local employers.
Laine said the county was fully staffed the previous winter and expected that to continue.
Equipment has also been upgraded. The county purchased two new snow blowers and two graders, with two additional graders expected, replacing some machinery dating to the 1970s. Laine credited Measure S oversight and basin-specific transient occupancy tax funding for helping make those purchases possible.
Energy reliability becomes an urgent concern
Following a major South Shore power outage shortly before the interview, utility reliability was another prominent topic.
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