Vision for Tahoe snow sports and Winter Olympics museum moves closer to reality

The Abridged version:

• The Placer County Planning Commission voted last week to recommend the approval of the Sierra Nevada Olympic Winter Sports Museum and Cultural Center, which would be hosted at the Olympic Valley Park.
• The museum, which will honor the 1960 Winter Olympics in Placer County and the region’s ski history, has been pushed by winter sports advocates and community members for decades, facing previous opposition from the U.S. Forest Service over a park deed restriction.
• If the county Board of Supervisors votes to approve entitlements for the project, which could happen at a meeting in late October, organizers will still need to extensively raise funds and receive further permissions before the museum breaks ground.

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Placer County’s Olympic Valley just got one step closer to having its own museum.

At a meeting last week, the Placer County Planning Commission voted to recommend that the Board of Supervisors approve entitlements for the Sierra Nevada Olympic Winter Sports Museum and Cultural Center, more commonly known as the SNOW Sports Museum.

Efforts to open the museum commemorating the 1960 Winter Olympics and the region’s ski history have been decades in the making, largely led by local ski enthusiasts and the SNOW Sports Museum Foundation nonprofit. After previously facing roadblocks including opposition from the U.S. Forest Service, the project is getting its big break with backing from county government.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” said Bill Clark, president of the SNOW Sports Museum Foundation. “It’s something worth being proud of and sharing with the locals and visitors, nationally and even internationally, Placer County’s place in Olympic history.”

Inside the museum

At the commission meeting, senior county planner Patrick Dobbs described the foundation and Placer County as “co-applicants” for the proposed project. The museum and cultural center would be hosted in a two-story, 20,000-square-foot building inside the county-owned Olympic Valley Park, with outdoor spaces, trails and landscaping areas open to the public.

Key features of the site would include the museum dedicated to the 1960 Winter Olympics, an interactive cultural center on the history of winter sports in the Sierra Nevada, a regional Winter Sports Hall of Fame, a community hub for events, a learning center and a cafe and gift shop, according to the SNOW Sports Museum Foundation’s website.

Guests would be welcome daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Annually, the museum is projected to attract 60,000 to 70,000 visitors, including upwards of 10,000 student visitors, according to a presentation given by Dobbs at the commission meeting.

“A museum dedicated to the region’s ski and Olympic history has been identified as a key investment in the community — including in the 2015 Tourism Master Plan created in partnership with the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association,” Dobbs wrote to Abridged by PBS KVIE.

Overcoming opposition

County support has been a “big green light” for a project that previously faced significant challenges, Clark said. In previous years, plans for the museum were blocked due to pushback from the U.S. Forest Service and a Placer County commissioner. When the federal government originally transferred the park’s land parcel to Placer County, it included a deed restriction banning commercial development on the parcel — a restriction the Forest Service said applied to the SNOW Sports Museum.

But after more recent talks with the foundation, the Forest Service has since changed course, ruling in January that the museum plan does not appear to violate the deed.

Placer County supervisors will tentatively consider approving entitlements for the museum plan at their Oct. 20 meeting, which city planners are currently preparing for, according to Dobbs. The entitlements requested include an environmental impact report — which has already been certified by supervisors — an amendment to the county general plan establishing a “cultural amenities” land use district and rezoning.

A long road ahead

If supervisors give the project the go-ahead, the county and community organizers still have a long way to go before construction can begin. Clark said that they will begin fundraising for the museum, and the project will need to undergo a design review and obtain building permits.

The museum’s conditional use permit, one of the entitlements up for review by county supervisors, would give organizers a 10-year exercise period for fundraising and other pursuits needed to implement the project.

“It’s a long overdue project, so there’s a lot of enthusiasm, and there’s a lot of people who have been very, very patient,” Clark said. “The whole culture of snow sports in the mountain communities up and down the Sierras is the common thread that ties everybody together.”

Though it will be several years before the museum opens in Olympic Valley, community members and visitors can still get a taste of the project at the Boatworks Mall in Tahoe City, where the SNOW Sports Foundation operates a one-room exhibit dedicated to the 1960 Winter Olympics and the region’s ski heritage.