Congress has passed a bill to reauthorize the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act, which will allocate $300 million for various projects through 2034.

The funding will support the Lake Tahoe Environmental Improvement Project, one of the most far-reaching conservation programs in the country. The program is a partnership between more than 80 public, tribal and nonprofit organizations known as “Team Tahoe.”

“One of the main projects coming forward is a 59,000-acre fuel reduction project on the west shore of Lake Tahoe called ‘Lake Tahoe West,’ and that is one of the projects that we could see potentially benefiting from this source of funding,” said Jeff Cowen, public information officer with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

Thanks to the 2016 Lake Tahoe Restoration Act, thousands of acres of forest fuels have already been cleared from the area.

“The Lake Tahoe Restoration Act of 2016 has helped us treat 21,000 acres of forest in the basin. But all told, since 1997, we’ve treated 94,000 acres together,” Cowen said.

Since the Lake Tahoe Environmental Improvement Project was first launched in 1997, partners have completed 830 projects, including wetland restoration, improvements along bike trails, forest fuel reduction to mitigate the impact of aggressive wildfires and the monitoring and removal of invasive aquatic species in the lake.

Cowen says projects resulting from the funding will also boost the local Tahoe economy.

“Our program has actually produced about 1,700 jobs a year in the Tahoe Basin, which is not insignificant when we’re looking at a population of about 55,000 people. But we’re also looking at every $1 million that goes into the restoration. We’re seeing $1.6 million in economic output, so more than double,” Cowen said.

A major takeaway from having the support of the federal government is the maintenance of North America’s largest freshwater lake for generations to come.

“We’re restoring something that is a dream far, far into the future. It’s potential that we could be doing work today that is actually still going to be protecting the lake long after we’re all gone,” Cowen said.

Lake Tahoe is also the world’s third-largest freshwater lake.