Nevada to buy Tahoe development rights

Friday, March 21, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Division of State Lands Administrator Pam Wilcox said the agency will buy, at fair market value, land and "coverage" rights or the coverage rights themselves.

Land agent Sarah Grable said coverage is the term used by the California-Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to refer to the amount of land each property owner can legally develop or cover up. The number of square feet that can be covered on each parcel differs according to a long list of factors, including such things as how close it is to the lake shore and steepness of the terrain.

Grable said the money for the program comes from permits and mitigation fees already collected by the bi-state TRPA.

Coverage rights can be bought and sold and transferred to other property, possibly making a parcel legally developable or allowing a homeowner to expand. Grable pointed out an advertisement in a real estate flier offering 2,000 square feet of coverage for sale.

But she said Nevada has no plans to collect and resell the coverage.

"At this point, we're actually just getting it off the market so the land can't be overdeveloped," she said.

She said landowners often have unused coverage rights they do not plan to ever use on their property, and "If they're interested, we're interested in looking at their property."

While Nevada is just beginning its program, California has been using the California-Tahoe Conservancy to buy up coverage for several years.

Analyst Jerry Willmett said the conservancy has bought about a million square feet of coverage rights over the years, but has committed about 600,000 square feet of that back to different remodeling, expansion and new construction projects in less sensitive areas. He said that represents 2,441 projects. Willmett said the idea is to remove the coverage rights from environmentally sensitive parcels of land and allow them to be used in areas more appropriate for development.

He said a lot of those coverage rights are used to add a room to a house or to expand the size of plans for a new home. Some are used for commercial projects that don't have enough coverage rights to do what the developer needs.

But Willmett said local building officials, TRPA and the conservancy try to make sure that whatever the rights are being used for is appropriate.

He said those rights, without land, are now selling at anywhere from $5 to $8 a square foot. The real estate ad offering 2,000 square feet of coverage was asking for $10 a square foot.

He said the conservancy tries to buy the land as well as the coverage rights. Then, he said, they recoup some of the cost on environmentally sensitive lands by removing the coverage rights and letting them be used elsewhere, effectively preventing the sensitive parcel from being developed.