A Common Adirondack Public and Private Stewardship
By Dave Gibson
Keith McKeever, retiring Public Information Director at the Adirondack Park Agency (APA), accepted much-deserved recognition at their recent meeting for his many years of admirable public service. In his short acceptance remarks, Keith implored all listening “to hold the line” for the Adirondack Park’s open space.
Keith’s message, as I recall it, was that the goal of protecting private open space is connected quite directly to the goal of more community development including necessary infrastructure directed to the Park’s settled areas in Hamlet and Moderate Intensity Use areas.
These paired goals stem directly from the 1971 APA Act. Keith recommended that a dedicated Adirondack Park fund for planning, building and maintaining public infrastructure in Hamlet and Moderate Intensity Use land use areas be enacted into law.
Keith’s recommendation has origins dating back to the 1990 Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century‘s final report, which stated (Recommendation 42):
“The state should establish an Adirondack Park Community Development Corporation as a public benefit corporation empowered with limited bonding authority to provide affordable housing, community facilities and water and sewage systems in Park hamlet and moderate intensity use areas…
“In recognition that the Adirondack Park is a special place of statewide interest, the state should provide technical support and cost-sharing through the Community Development Corporation to help local governments develop the capacity to compete for state and federal funds for housing infrastructure and community facilities.”
“To the extent that state action has aggravated the mismatch between resources and need, the people of the state should assume responsibility. State taxpayers as a whole should expect to provide special financial assistance to Park communities adversely affected by their Park location; that is the price we must all pay for preserving the beauty and natural character of the Park, a region that inevitably requires restrictive land use planning and the discouragement of inordinate population growth.”
“The state government also should restructure its local aid programs to make them more equitable to Park communities. It should help local governments develop additional revenue sources, particularly ones that advance environmental protection goals. To insure the high level of environmental protection and public amenities required in the Park, the state should subsidize services mandated on communities but particularly difficult to provide in a park setting.
“Basic to the Adirondack park Agency Act was the idea that local governments would be full partners in the administration and management of community planning programs. The commission believes that this is crucial today and that local governments should be given the technical and financial help to get this job done.”
Broadening the scope of this recommendation was Commission member Claire Barnett, then residing in Westport in the Adirondack Park. One of my organizational contributions – through the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks – was to host a 1990 conference at the Hotel Saranac to inform participants about the Commission’s report.
George Davis, Commission executive director, was there to answer questions, address concerns, and to correct misperceptions and misinformation about what was in the report.
Joining George at the conference was one of his Commission members, Claire Barnett. Claire brought a wide, diverse, global perspective about the Park to her year on the
Commission.
At the 1990 conference she delivered a remarkable address about the Park as a whole which I think very much resonates today. Let’s say her address seems
to have withstood the test of time, warranting its posting now.
Claire titled her address “A Common Public and Private Stewardship,” reposted here in its entirety. I invite you to read Claire’s presentation and let me know if you find points which resonate with you:
The Commission proposed that the Park in which environmental consideration receive the highest priority should become a model for sustainable development. It should set an example of common public and private stewardship for the world.
Quite a mission statement! What this requires is that the Park, the land and its people, should enjoy not only the very best in natural resource planning (and who among us would want less?) but also the very best in community planning.
Some months ago I suggested ‘community planning’ to an environmentalist friend. His response was ‘we already study plant communities.’ I had to say that I meant people communities, i.e., comprehensive planning.
It is imperative that if the Park is to serve as a model for the world that we establish baseline data on all aspects of the Park. We had better know what we’re doing and be able to chart the changes that take place.
As a result of this need for both natural resource and community planning, the Commission recommended several key organizational changes aligning specific State
agencies along Park boundaries: the Departments of Environmental Conservation, Transportation, Health, and Economic Development.
In the cases of DEC and DOH we also proposed that the Park Agency issue all permits: single-source permitting for all players, one set of rules. The expanded APA would also prepare annual State of the Park reports utilizing input from all of the just named Departments, but from the County planning units as well.
What did the Commission suggest for local government planning? 105 units of local government in twelve counties serve the needs of the Park’s 130,000 permanent
residents (and so many more seasonal residents and visitors). The Commission suggested that these units of local government be given:
o $500,000 annually available in local assistance planning funds from the Park Agency,
o incentives for technical assistance and planning,
o state subsidies for county planning staff, and Hamlet revitalization programs, and
o inventories and set asides for critical public areas, those town and village beaches, ballfields, village parks, and picnic grounds which so many residents and tourists enjoy.
For too long, recreational access has been viewed as only what DEC provides on public lands. In fact, most tourist are looking for scenic and recreational access along the roads and in the hamlets – the very places where local governments are struggling to provide it.
Just the way full-time Park residents are increasingly walled off from shoreline access, Park local governments are similarly priced out of expanding their municipal areas.
o A community development corporation for housing and infrastructure improvements.
Why divide up the job of realizing a whole Park? Why not have the State do it all or for that matter, why not have local government do it all? Why do we need a common public stewardship? The State needs a partnership because the State will never have the resources to do it all.
It will never have the money for the staff to accomplish the whole mission, or even the resources to plan and to inspect every septic, every subdivision, every setback. In addition, ‘environment’ has become a very personal affair.
It is no longer that beautiful wild land over there where no one lives. It is now what we eat, what we drink, the air we breathe, the products we buy. Who among us does not want the State to protect our personal environmental quality?
Will, then, achieving the vision of the Adirondack Park ever be able to compete with an issue like 5,000 more police officers in New York City? No.
The local governments of the Park need a partnership because they are so very small, isolated, loaded with so many responsibilities run in effect by volunteers, and subject to global economic forces which threaten their basic social and economic supports.
The same global forces which are dismantling the social structure of the communities are dismantling the landscape. Those of us who live in the Park are forever more part of the world market place in timber, in agriculture, in tourism, in mining, in recreational real estate, and in environmental affairs.
Isolated local conditions are no longer the prime determinants of market success; there is little or nothing any local government acting alone can do to save its job and
personal income base in forestry, farming and tourism. We are very rural. And because of State ownership patterns, we will always be rural. That’s fine. No Adirondacker would advocate transforming this place into a city, a suburb or a shopping mall parking lot.
Why, then, has there been such opposition to the Commission report? First, language. The Park has a very long and distinguished history in which many of you have played a strong role in Park protection.
This is the Park’s history of natural resource planning and protection largely from the outside looking in, not from the inside looking out. The language of that outside planning and advocacy is substantially different from the language of protection as advocated from the inside.
More specifically, one man’s open space backcountry is, in fact, another’s woodlot or working farm.
It may be instructive to borrow lessons from other land and community protection efforts. An effective way to help save the privately held open spaces of the Park may be
to speak the language of the adjoining communities and to help insure that sustainable forestry, agriculture and recreation are reasonably economically attractive.
The diary farms of the Champlain Valley are all but gone and the butter on the table here in Saranac Lake is from Wisconsin. Our solution must be greater than just a gross reduction of development rights. Otherwise we have forsaken the communities which are a part of the Park and an integral part of the land.
The language barrier has another aspect. The word ‘development’. Your organization [the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks] has called for a reduction in development. What does that mean? When the Park Agency speaks of development it means the endless process of lot subdivision and real estate construction.
When the Essex County Development Agency speaks of development it means permanent private sector jobs, something neither this organization nor the APA are opposed to. Yet when environmentalists speak of stopping all development do they mean all new property subdivision or all saved or created full-time jobs?
Second, education. We are all paying the price of 15 years or more of neglect of the fundamental information and education needed inside the Park to promote an understanding of the Park and its potential.
It is very difficult to communicate from village to village or across County lines. The hamlets are very much like ancient Greek City States, isolated and independent.
These attributes make political discourse difficult, placing a ceiling on local business market areas, inhibit economies of scale in the provision of public services, and prevent residents from viewing the Park and trends as a whole.
Only the APA and the environmental groups have organized at a park regional level. There is no other organization which has tried to understand the issues of the Park, the land and the people, and to communicate them.
Third, process. For too long, it seems the Park land protection advocates have been preaching to the choir. There have been far too few opportunities for genuinely concerned citizens to become involved or to express themselves on land protection ideas.
This is changing. I hope so. Think of the position we would be in today if the Farm Bureau had been asked to contribute proposals to save farming and farmlands,
and the ESFPA [Empire State Forest Products Association] and RC&Ds had discussed proposals to save papermills, sawmills, and value-added wood products.
[RC&Ds refers to Resource Conservation and Development Councils were regional organizations designed to bridge the gap between local grassroots needs and federal conservation funding established under the Federal Agriculture Act of 1962.]
This is the time of year when hard pressed rural local governments form their budgets. This is the time when local health providers, planners, all request County
appropriations. Everyone’s ducking.
In a tight budget situation, the best way to survive is not to be seen or heard and better yet, not to be associated with anything controversial, like the Commission Report.
What can you do? You can speak like ecologists. Speak for the vulnerable constituency of local health, human service and education providers who understand the merits of the Commission’s recommendations in those Hamlet and Quality of Life areas but who cannot allow their agencies to be associated with the Commission Report.
This is what a common public and private stewardship is all about. Accepting, embracing the Park as a whole entity and advocating those measures which will achieve a whole Park, a model of sustainable development for the world.
Claire Barnett is founder, past executive director, and now senior advisor to the Healthy Schools Network, where she has earned local, state, and national awards. A member of the Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century, Barnett has also served as Director of Special Projects at a regional economic development center at SUNY Plattsburgh. She directed the successful Main Street conference series with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She has an MBA in health systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).