Board approves Village at Palisades Tahoe Specific Plan

Published Nov. 20, 2024

The Placer County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the Village at Palisades Tahoe Specific Plan project at its meeting Tuesday in North Lake Tahoe.

The Village at Palisades Tahoe Specific Plan includes an 85-acre resort village located in northeastern Placer County and the redevelopment of the existing ski resort base area at the west end of Olympic Valley. The plan includes 8.8 acres for employee housing, a community market, shipping and receiving and employee intercept parking. Known as the eastern parcel, this portion of the development would be located 1.3 miles east of the resort near the entrance to Olympic Valley.

The specific plan will allow for a hospitality and recreation-based, all-season mountain resort community with up to 850 hotel, condominium-hotel and fractional ownership residential units. The developer would be limited to a maximum of 1,493 resort bedrooms with 297,000 square feet of new and replacement commercial space for restaurants, retail, private recreation uses and skier services.

The plan includes construction of a new fire station within the proposed village at the west end of the valley, employee housing for 386 workers, public transit improvements and contributions to reduce transportation impacts. Public trail improvements such as flushable restrooms and parking at the trailheads to Granite Chief and Shirley Canyon trails, a new sewer connection and flush restrooms at Olympic Valley Park and restoration of Washeshu Creek to correct impacts from prior channelization in 1960 are also written into the resort development.

The board's approval on Tuesday included certification of the project's final environmental impact report, approval of the plan's development standards and design guidelines, an amendment to the Olympic Valley General Plan and Land Use Ordinance, adoption of an ordinance to rezone all acreage in the specific plan area, approval of the plan's development agreement,and approval of a water supply assessment.

The specific plan was initially approved by the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 15, 2016, and was subsequently litigated. The appellate court determined the environmental impact report had deficiencies with four specific analyses: wildfire evacuation traffic control responsibility, construction noise impacts, public transit and regional impacts to the Lake Tahoe Basin as they relate to water quality. On Nov. 8, 2022, the Board of Supervisors took action to decertify the EIR and rescind the project approvals in accordance with the appellate court decision.

Alterra Mountain Company, owner and developer of Palisades Tahoe, worked with county staff and an environmental consultant to revise portions of the EIR analysis. While the project proposal itself is unchanged from what was approved in 2016, the negotiated development agreement between Alterra and Placer County includes more workforce housing units and includes a stipulation that all of those 386 local worker housing units will be constructed in the first project phase.

The plan also includes multiple added measures to reduce the impacts of vehicle trips in the area - including a lodging fee that would generate an estimated $20 million over the life of the project to fund efforts that reduce vehicle miles traveled in the region. A Tahoe Regional Planning Agency mobility fee would also be implemented generating an additional $2 million of mobility improvements and VMT reduction strategies within the Placer County portion of the Lake Tahoe Basin. The plan would also require Alterra to improve the state Route 89/Olympic Valley Road intersection and develop traffic management and parking plans on higher visitation days, as well as annual traffic analysis and reporting.

In all, this plan includes an additional $7.5 million invested annually in local transportation and vehicle miles traveled-reducing projects and programs funding on top of the roughly $10 million in funding expended by Placer County in the eastern portion of the region. The board also approved the future creation of a transportation technical review advisory committee to oversee the distribution of new funding and the possibility for the committee to track the plan's mitigation efforts.

Alterra also committed to a total of $3.4 million for capital improvement projects for local parks and trails over the life of the specific plan. The board discussed the potential use of a parks committee to oversee or advise on the use of that $3.4 million in new funding.

At the Sept. 5 Planning Commission meeting, Alterra revised the specific plan to remove the following uses from the mountain adventure camp: simulated skydiving, skate park, BMX park, action river, lazy river, rafting, stand-up paddle boarding, rope swings, wakeboarding, water games, water skiing, water slides, waterfalls, wave pool and wave rider. At that meeting, Alterra also announced it will apply a 15% local resident discount in the development agreement for access to the mountain adventure camp.

Learn more about the Village at Palisades Tahoe Specific Plan here: www.placer.ca.gov/8213/Village-at-Palisades-Tahoe-Specific-Plan .

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