Gibson: APA Members Must Have Their Questions Addressed
By Dave Gibson
This month’s pressure placed on Adirondack Park Agency members to accept the APA staff’s permit conditions for a very large expansion of an RV Park (Sunset View) on the Great Sacandaga Lake in Mayfield is part of a pattern of exerting tight staff control over Adirondack Park decision-making.
This month, APA legal counsel Damion Stodola advised those members seeking clarification and questioning the permit conditions for the RV Park that the 60-day permit time clock was expiring. Essentially, his stern advice was the equivalent of “time’s up, approve the staff permit with staff conditions now or we will violate your law.”
Mr. Stodola’s vehement refusal to consider much less accommodate member concerns is not only uncivil, but also grossly inconsistent with the Agency’s legal duty to assure itself that all projects do not cause, in APA’s judgement, an undue adverse impact on Park resources. To render such a determination ought to require adequate information about a project. If that information is not available, Agency Members have a right and responsibility to ask for it.
As explained in a recent Adirondack Explorer article by Gwendolyn Craig, APA member Art Lussi, the longest serving member of the Agency (nominated by Gov. George Pataki in 2006), stated that in his long experience Agency members would occasionally seek to amend permit conditions by asking the staff to question and discuss particulars with applicants over the phone, negotiate to amend permit language to address Member concerns, and bring the permit back to the full board for a vote on the second day of a two-day meeting.
In the article, Lussi lamented that the Agency no longer was holding two-day meetings which allow more flexibility for debate and “tweaking” of permit conditions. The agency has not held a two-day meeting since August 2023.
I agree with Mr. Lussi. Over the years, there have been many occasions when Agency members asked staff to negotiate with applicants this way. Sometimes Members asked staff to call applicants, seek their consent to stop any legal time clocks, and return with answers to member questions, or desired amendments to permit conditions.
Carver Sand and Gravel’s 2022 permit was a case in point, I recall. At times I observed the Agency to briefly adjourn while staff called an applicant to negotiate changes. If necessary, based on input from Members, staff has asked applicants to stop the time clock and allow more board discussion and a decision in the following month. Barton Mine’s 2024 permit was an example that I recall.
Similarly, Mr. Stodola could have and should have offered to seek more information from the RV applicant this month to accommodate Member questions and concerns, but that option was, as the English might say, “not on offer.”
Of course, for the APA to impose significant changes to permit design and conditions or to deny a permit outright requires an advance, adjudicatory, evidentiary public hearing – which the staff have refused to recommend since 2011. This is also part of the control staff exert over all aspects of Agency decision making.
Former APA associate counsel Sarah Reynolds made this abundantly clear when she argued before the full board in May 2024 – without objection from
the Members – that hearings had become unnecessary because staff are so good that they have already uncovered all the necessary information needed to render a decision of no undue adverse impacts to the environment during normal project review – with the cooperation of applicants.
In fact, Ms. Reynolds stated at the time that the mere threat of a public hearing was sufficient to get all applicants to cough up all the necessary information to render a judgement of no undue adverse impact. So, hearings become unnecessary, she stated – implying at the same time that APA Member involvement in weighing the evidence from a hearing and rendering their own judgement about adverse impacts was also superfluous.
What Reynolds stated was and remains nonsense. Applicants frequently do not provide all the information staff request of them, even after multiple notices of incomplete application are issued. For proof of that, APA held about 150 public hearings from 1973- 2011, averaging about three to four per year during APA’s first four decades.
Obviously during all that time the staff believed that they and the Members lacked sufficient project information and evidence to weigh adverse impacts for certain complex, controversial developments, and required a hearing to do their due diligence and uncover that information through sworn testimony and cross examination of expert witnesses.
All of those evidentiary records, 150 of them, went before the full Board for a final determination – decision-making that the current Agency executive staff seem determined not to concede.
Of course, for 15 years the full Agency Board has been a passive partner in ceding that degree of control by not demanding that more permits come before them for a decision, and even that an occasional evidentiary hearing be convened for a few of the more complex projects, such as Barton Mine’s expansion in Johnsburg, the granite quarry in Forestport, the 34-new home lots surrounding Woodward Lake, Lake George’s herbicidal treatments, or even this RV Park in Mayfield.
Given the number of questions about the Mayfield RV Park from at least five members during the October meeting, and the three votes against approving the project, perhaps that passive behavior is starting to change.
The bottom line for an Agency to whom the legislature has given responsibility for the overall protection of Adirondack Park resources ought to be this: Agency staff and Members deserve, and the law demands that they have the best possible information about complex, controversial developments.
Members deserve and the law demands that they have their questions and concerns addressed, even if that means calling up an applicant and having the time clocks suspended until those concerns are addressed; and even if that demands an occasional, adjudicatory, evidentiary public hearing.