Adirondack Wild Comments on 30 by 30

Adirondack Wild Comments on 30 by 30

The New York State Draft Strategies and Methods for Conserving Thirty Percent of New York Lands and Waters by 2030 (hereafter “30 x 30”), introduced in early July 2024, is an outstanding first step in an effort to achieve a daunting objective in just 5 years.

Adirondack Wild recognizes and thanks the State Legislature, Governor Hochul, and her staff for making this legislative initiative a high priority, for recognizing the critical climate, ecological, and open space purposes of the legislation, for embracing these as a priority within state government, and for getting the Draft Strategies out on schedule.

We also compliment NYS DEC and OPRHP staff who have dedicated themselves to this task so far, including the taxing work of combing through a complex set of existing data sets to establish a reasonably reliable baseline of current information showing that, at present, approximately 22 % of the state, or 7,640,000 acres are protected in some fashion. This baseline is necessary information from which to evaluate progress towards 30 x 30.

Adirondack Wild’s comments on the Draft Strategies and Methods follow.

Recognize how far we have come: However steep the climb towards 30 x 30, New York State is in an enviable position compared with other states. Because the NYS goals coincide with the same national goal, our Draft should mention our state’s advantages.

The Forest Preserve: For example, among the 50 states our Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve is the sole example of permanent, constitutionally required forest protection, in the process safeguarding wilderness values, great watersheds, and headwaters for clean water, sequestering and storing millions of tons of carbon, to say nothing of the vast ecological, recreational and community benefits of an accessible, interconnected, taxable preserve.

The Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve deserves more attention than it currently receives in the Draft Strategies. The preserve provides the bulk of our state’s permanent land protection in large blocks of wildland. Because they are permanently protected under Article XIV, these lands are consistently available for spiritual renewal and recreation while maturing under the influence of natural processes. Thus, they support wilderness values, unique ecosystems, rich assemblages of species, and structural characteristics missing from more intensively managed landscapes. They also remove and permanently store vast quantities of carbon and enhance resilience to the stresses of a changing climate. In this Draft the Forest Preserve should be viewed as a central component of the 30 x 30 program because it addresses so many needs, problems, and opportunities simultaneously.

New York’s Forest Preserve, State Forests, State Parks and other protected areas add up to 66% of the state’s 30 by 30 goal. The remaining one-third, or about 3 million acres, must be conserved in just five short years to achieve the goal.

Integration with the Statewide Open Space Conservation Plan: Since 1992, the Open Space Plan has set the priorities and sifted, selected, and tested practical strategies for adding to the preserve and to other open spaces with regional advice from local advisory committees. The Draft strategies could do a better job at describing how the 30 x 30 Strategies and Open Space Plan will work together synergistically.

If the Open Space Plan is, as described, a “blueprint” for the state’s role in open space protection, it also includes key strategies for accomplishing 30 x 30. Beyond the specific high priority projects listed in the Plan are policy recommendations that can guide 30 x 30, such as land, river, and wildlife corridors.

The Open Space Plan has long recommended the conservation of critical mountain, valley, and waterway corridors necessary for habitat connectivity which, once protected, would also add significantly to 30 x 30 goals. Examples of such corridors include the Split Rock Wildway between Lake Champlain and the High Peaks Wilderness, the Black River corridor in the western Adirondacks, the Pennsylvania Wilds to Adirondack Park, and Algonquin Park to Adirondack Park (A2A), among others. The Draft should focus on these corridors as a strategy.

Careful attention to lands adjacent to existing public lands and available for purchase of fee or easement from willing sellers would round out existing holdings to their natural boundaries and increase habitat connectivity, buffering, and climate resiliency. Enhancement of existing public lands should also be considered a significant strategy for the 30 x 30 program.

Also, the Open Space Plan stresses the need for reform of the Forest Tax Law, 480a. The Draft Strategies should also emphasize that the 386,000 private acres enrolled statewide in 480a represents a shrinking number due to the program’s narrow forest management and forest harvesting requirements. As the Open Space Plan states, there is great potential for a much broader forest tax program to enroll hundreds of thousands of acres of new private forest lands, qualifying for 30 x 30 while also providing tax incentives to prevent forest conversion, and foster water quality, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration benefits.

To quote the Region 5 Open Space Regional Advisory Committee (2016 report), “the ineffectiveness of the forest tax law has reduced the ability of landowners to hold and manage forest lands. This has resulted not only in the loss of open space but has increased the costs to the State to protect open space. Lands that could have remained open space as working forests under private ownership have been purchased in fee or easement at significant costs to the State and its taxpayers. The Committee requests that the State act now to fix the forest tax law…using the following strategies:

• Simplify State oversight responsibilities. Consider using forest certification programs as a surrogate for state approved plans;
• Include certain other undeveloped open space lands, such as wetlands, shorelines and wildlife habitat which are not exclusively devoted to forest management purposes;
• Encourage more private landowners to convey conservation easements through targeted inducements under the State’s income tax laws, including income tax credits for donations of conservation easements and for real estate taxes paid on lands protected by such easements;
• Ensure any program is revenue neutral to municipalities; and
• Maintain a balanced program of tax benefits and landowner accountability that incentivizes long term sound stewardship of private forest lands.”

Integration with the Climate Act: The 30 x 30 strategies must also integrate with the 2019 Climate Act (CLCPA) that makes maximizing the carbon sequestration and storage potential in forests a key strategy for achieving goals of net zero emissions by 2050. According to the NYS Climate Action Council, the state’s 19 million acres of forest, including the Forest Preserve in the Adirondack and Catskill Parks, serve as major carbon sinks, holding 1,911 million metric tons of carbon, or ten times the amount emitted annually from all sectors. Our forests sequester over 26 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Yet, due to persistent conversion of forest cover to development and other uses, over the past decade the percentage of forest cover in the state has declined for the first time in our lifetimes. This trend must be reversed and achieving 30 x 30 goals is a key step in that reversal.

Integration with Local Land Use Planning: The draft cursorily mentions local land use planning in 30 x 30, but the state could do more to incentivize and assist local governments to include modern conservation design standards within its planning and zoning codes, whereby important resources are professionally inventoried, mapped, and legally protected from being fragmented by new development. Only then are new buildings and roadways sited in a clustered arrangement to avoid impacting those natural and cultural resources. Meanwhile, the private open space acreage inclusive of the prioritized natural resources qualify for 30 x 30 because they are newly protected open space available for timber and agriculture practices, various recreational opportunities, wildlife habitats, and riparian buffers and wetlands to reduce the impacts of storms and flooding. Conservation design that tightly links clustered development with contiguous open space plans also lowers infrastructure costs for the developer, utility providers, and the municipality.

Current Staffing: One of the steepest hurdles to accomplishing 30 x 30 are current staffing levels in DEC and OPRHP. Projects cannot be implemented efficiently and effectively without more professional staff. This significant hurdle must be addressed directly in this Draft.

We are especially concerned about stagnant staffing levels within the DEC Division of Lands and Forests and the OPRHP Environmental Management Bureau where the bulk of state responsibilities for the strategies reside. For instance, in 1996 there were 186 staff for all DEC Lands and Forest programs, including open space planning and conservation. Today there are the same number for a greatly expanded set of programs. More specifically, at the turn of the 21st century there were over 70 DEC real property professionals serving the nine NYS DEC regions and central office. Today there is just half that number. In some DEC regions, only one Real Property staff member attempts to undertake the myriad responsibilities of open space conservation, overwhelmed by just the existing priorities listed in the 2016 Open Space Conservation Plan much less the challenges presented by the updated Plan and 30 x 30.

Through approval of contracts with nonprofit land trusts and other third parties and through needed state appropriations, Governor Hochul must accelerate the hiring of more appraisers, surveyors, and other natural resource professionals to accomplish 30 x 30.

Greater Efficiencies – The Draft calls for improving efficiencies in the land protection programs and eliminating barriers to participation in these programs but fails to acknowledge the present reality. The draft states that “since 2019, DEC and OPRHP have added approximately 43,676 acres to the state’s protected lands, with 37,244 acres acquired by DEC and 6,432 acres acquired by OPRHP, respectively.” That is just 8,000 acres per year on average, whereas to reach 30 x 30 we need to conserve at least half a million acres annually. Last year, DEC added just 1,000 acres to the NYS Forest Preserve.

The Draft should squarely admit that moving at the current pace will not accomplish the job and, simultaneously, specify how the programs could be more efficient, such as:

1. Asserting Title to Open Space Projects: The state’s land protection programs have slowed to a trickle and must be streamlined. In 2022, DEC & NYS Parks acquired just 5,056 acres combined in stark contrast to the historic average of 70,000 acres each year over the 30-year history of the Environmental Protection Fund.

In addition to increasing real property staffing, another needed efficiency is systematic use of private title insurance as a means of asserting marketable title. Such a practice would be consistent with common real estate practice in virtually all other state and federal land acquisition programs. The NYS Office of Attorney General can currently use marketable insurance to assert title but refuses to do so. Instead, New York State stubbornly persists in undertaking cumbersome review of land titles, sometimes going back one hundred years or more in an attempt to prove perfect title.

This adherence to outdated practice has materially slowed down transactions and open space conservation program implementation. In addition, these lengthy periods impact the public purse due to the accrual of additional holding costs while properties are being held by land trusts or other entities. Currently there are more than 100,000 acres valued in excess of $150 million held by land trusts who wish to transfer title to the state. Under 30 x 30 these statistics are bound to grow significantly. Greater efficiencies are needed now.

2. Appraisals: The State Comptroller requires two appraisals of any open space project exceeding $300,000. DEC requires two appraisals for all its open space projects, one regional and one in central office. These are outdated practices and thresholds from an earlier era which slow the land protection program. Given today’s real estate values and the urgency of 30 x 30, the Comptroller should raise its dollar threshold for a second appraisal significantly, and the DEC should require just one appraisal in either the Central or Regional Office.

3. Establish grant programs that pay land trusts in advance for acquisitions and to incentivize land trusts to purchase and hold open space.

4. Small open space projects, as defined in law, are now limited to 200 acres valued at $420,000 or less. These numbers are severely outdated and significantly retard progress towards 30 x 30. Both the acreage and values to qualify as a small project must be significantly increased to improve efficiency and to meet 30 x 30 goals.