“Living in the Tahoe Basin is a privilege,” says Peter Kraatz, Deputy Director of Public Works at Placer County. “If you go back a hundred years there was a big push to turn it into a national park. It is not a national park. It is a sensitive landscape though. It got developed the way that it did. We are trying to correct the way it got developed in the past and make it a better place,” he says. Kraatz sees private property owners as stewards of the Tahoe Basin, in partnership with local government. He says, “I feel like in the Tahoe Basin we really should put a lot of emphasis on the fact that we live in a very special, place, in a very sensitive environment that has a higher bar for protecting the environment. If we want to continue to live around an incredible gem of a water body and still keep the economy going we have to look to ourselves for the solution.”