SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Bulldozers, excavators, and other demolition equipment are still a ways off for South Lake Tahoe’s Motel 6. It currently sits boarded up with a surrounding chainlink fence and security camera units standing watch.

The site may remain this way until summer 2025.

The roughly 50 year old building along with an adjacent restaurant building—both on 31 acres of land—transferred from the Johnson family to the California Tahoe Conservancy in March. The conservancy had some help with the purchase.

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“Nothing in Tahoe happens with one agency,” Chris Carney says and adds, “This is a bit of a poster child for collaboration in the sense that we had so many funding partners whose involvement was essential to actually move this forward.”

Half a dozen agencies chipped in to purchase the property for $15,400,000, including the California Wildlife Conservation Board, Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Tahoe Fund, and the League to Save Lake Tahoe.

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They have a purpose of restoring the site to the former meadow, floodplains and watershed habitat that existed there before development in the seventies.

But before taking a wrecking ball to the site, there are a few hoops they’ll have to jump through first.

“By the time you go though planning phases, getting all of the permits, which you can imagine for a project of this size, is quite a bit of permitting to go through” Carney says, “we expect that will take us into the winter.” This would slate demolition potentially for summer 2025.

In the meantime, there’s a possibility the City of South Lake Tahoe might use the site for emergency personnel training. City Director of Development Services, Zach Thomas announced this to City Council on May 7 and informed them of discussions with the conservancy about entering into a Memorandum of Understanding regarding the property.

In addition to the training, the memorandum would detail demolition and restoration timing, city code requirements pertaining to abandoned buildings, and future use of the tourist accommodation units from the property.

In a video about the acquisition, Julie Regan with the TRPA says the units could be transferred to support affordable housing.

As of council, May 7, the conservancy had yet to submit plans for demolition or restoration there.

There’s another element to this land acquisition that the public can get excited about. “It was really that critical last piece of private property,” the conservancy’s Stuart Roll says, “which essentially made it challenging to add public access all along the river and restore the entire river, so it really filled that missing piece which was really critical for variety of reasons.”  

With the California Tahoe Conservancy owned Upper Truckee Marsh north of the property and Tahoe Resource Conservation District owned Johnson Meadow south, across Highway 50, the property provides a decades long sought after linkage for publicly held and restored areas of the upper Truckee.

The conservancy will determine the exact details for public access in future planning stages, but plans could include parking areas, and interpretive signage. “Access for all is really important too,” Roll says.

There’s currently a bike trail that runs through the property. The conservancy intends to further enhance public access to the site in conjunction with the restoration plans.

As far as restoration goes, it’s the final piece to provide comprehensive restoration throughout the entire lower section of the upper Truckee, which is important for Tahoe’s clarity and water quality. The Tribune outlines the benefits to restoring these wetland habitats in an article titled, The significant environmental impact of Tahoe’s scarce wetlands.

After building demolition, asphalt removal, and soil stabilization, they’ll turn to their restoration and public access plan, but it could be several more years before that project begins. With planning, environmental compliance, and fund sourcing, the current target start date for that larger project could be around 2028.

“Also, we do not yet know if it will be a single year or multiyear project because we are still in the early project planning stages,” Roll says.

The Tribune will provided updates as demolition and other site plans unfold.