2023 Advocacy Efforts - NTCA

2023 Advocacy Efforts

USPS

At the direction of the NTCA Board of Directors, talking points were developed as a starting point for North Lake Tahoe residents and businesses to use or customize as they saw fit if they wished to contact the United States Postal Service to speak out about diminished levels of service impacting quality of life and our businesses.

Email Template/Talking Points:

As a resident of Eastern Placer County, the unreliability of the postal service throughout the North Lake Tahoe region is causing significant daily impacts on my quality of life and the operations of local businesses in my community. The specific problems our community continues to experience, include:

  • No mail delivery for multiple days in a row (and multiple weeks, in some instances), misdelivered mail, and important documents sent to local addresses that are never delivered such as mortgage and utility bills and payments, prescriptions, etc.—all of which occur regularly.
  • Packages are not consistently delivered to residents or businesses. Additionally, when community members go to the post office to pick up a package, staff often cannot locate items due to the volume of packages, lack of staff, and space constraints.
  • Inconsistent package delivery is made even more challenging when long wait times are the norm and not the exception.
  • USPS staffing shortages due to non-competitive pay. The starting wage for postal service staff does not align with the cost of living in our area. To remedy the current staffing situation which will in turn impact service levels, this needs to be addressed.

These are critical issues, as the USPS provides a necessary service that our community needs to be able to rely on. Please take immediate steps to improve the level of service in North Lake Tahoe and communicate those actions to those who live in and run businesses in our region.


Proposed Bill SB 584

At their meeting on June 7, 2023 the North Tahoe Community Alliance Board of Directors elected to oppose the proposed bill SB 584. If enacted, the bill would impose a tax on the occupancy of short-term rentals (STR) in California at 15% of the rental price of the short-term rental. In North Lake Tahoe, this tax would be assessed on top of the 10% TOT tax and 2% TBID assessment already collected on STRs in Placer County that are being reinvested locally in transportation and workforce housing initiatives.

NTCA created a letter to email or speak to via phone call to your Assemblymember.

Outcome: 

Thanks to advocacy efforts from all around California, and the direct activation of 946 individuals who sent letters to Assembly Housing, we put a stop to SB 584 (Limon) for 2023.

SB 584 has been turned into a two-year bill, which means that it will not be heard in Assembly Housing & Community Development on Wednesday, June 28. The bill will be eligible for a hearing in January 2024, if the author decides to move forward. It will still have to pass Assembly Housing and Assembly Revenue & Taxation and go through all of the similar hurdles it would have this year, but must move out of committees and off the Assembly Floor by the end of January. A much tighter timeframe and a steeper challenge for SB 584 to overcome. 

The next steps are that we will continue to monitor SB 584 and engage in discussions with the author’s office. If activation is needed, we will send out communications in 2024.

Thank you for your engagement on this critical issue! Together we raised our industry’s voice and asserted our economic impact on California’s economy. Thank you as well to CalTravel for their lobbying efforts on behalf of all of us in California.

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The TOT-TBID Dollars At Work program is powered by the North Tahoe business community. Thank you to the business owners who created the Tourism Business Improvement District.