The Tahoe Blue Event Center in Stateline.
Issues with the Tahoe Blue Event Center in Stateline were front and center at Wednesday’s meeting of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s meeting on Wednesday.
The Tahoe Blue Event Center has been out of environmental compliance after a failure to track visits to the center, which impacts vehicle miles travelled.
The Tahoe Douglas Visitor’s Authority was supposed to install Bluetooth sensors to establish a baseline and track visits but didn’t.
A change was made to the event center’s permit to reach the goal of reducing miles and car trips for locals in response.
The permit was also altered to change the cap for the center from number of events to a limit on attendance per year.
The new cap for attendance is now 250,000 attendees per year, with 43,000 attendees as the cap for peak summer attendance.
Chief Science Officer Dan Segan said the agency looked at the data for car trips and attendance to decide on the cap, which would meet the goal of not increasing the miles traveled.
Previously, the events cap treated small conferences the same as seat-fillers like Tahoe Knight Monsters games or the recent Harlem Globetrotters event.
The Tahoe Blue Event Center helped establish new microtransit routes in the area during its construction and have committed to having specific bus routes for large events like hockey games.
Center tickets have a current surcharge of $4 that goes to funding transit for the area. Now, these surcharges will be adjusted for inflation per ticket, which Segan said at peak attendance could bring in $1 million.
The sidewalk along Highway 50 between Kingsbury Grade and the casino core will also be improved to increase options for locals who are attending events, which officials hope will decrease car usage to the center. This will mobilize a Highway 50 street management project that has previously stalled.
California Governor’s appointee Ashley Conrad-Seydah said she felt the wording in the new compliance plan was still a little vague, saying that they “shouldn’t repeat the mistakes from the first time.”
In response to public comment, Carson City Representative Shelly Aldean clarified that the event center’s mobility mitigation fee would be used in the casino core or event center’s area of impact.