Court Decision on ACR Rezoning in Tupper Lake is Appealed;
Issues Deserve Appellate Division’s Attention

Tupper Lake, NY –  The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks and more than thirty area landowners have appealed Supreme Court Judge David Demarest’s November, 2007 decision that the Town of Tupper Lake’s rezoning of over 6,200 acres was exempt from review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR). The Town’s rezoning was done in September, 2006 to facilitate the proposed Adirondack Club and Resort. The appeal was filed last week with the Appellate Division, Third Department, in Albany.  

Tupper Lake, NY –  The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks and more than thirty area landowners have appealed Supreme Court Judge David Demarest’s November, 2007 decision that the Town of Tupper Lake’s rezoning of over 6,200 acres was exempt from review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR). The Town’s rezoning was done in September, 2006 to facilitate the proposed Adirondack Club and Resort. The appeal was filed last week with the Appellate Division, Third Department, in Albany.  

The appeal reasserts that the Town, in approving its Local Law No. 2 of 2006, failed to properly subject the rezoning to a required full evaluation under SEQR. The Town Board classified the rezoning as a Type II action under SEQR, when it actually is a Type I action, obligating the Town to perform a full SEQR review of its actions.

Rezoning more than 25 acres of land is a Type I Action under SEQR. However, the Town designated its rezoning of more than 6,200 acres as a Type II Action not subject to further environmental review, and deemed it to have no potential significant adverse environmental impacts. Furthermore, the Town Board made no attempt to conduct the coordinated review among the numerous involved agencies that is required for a Type I action.  

The parties to the lawsuit are asking the Appellate Division to reverse the prior decision, and to set aside the Town Board’s approval of Local Law No. 2 and the Town’s SEQR decision.

 “We enter this appeal because the Town failed to faithfully comply with the law,” said David Gibson, executive director of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks. “The proposed Adirondack Club and Resort, if built as planned, will have vast regional as well as local impacts on the Town and Village of Tupper Lake. Given this, we simply must expect that a local government will do everything required by law to subject a rezoning that facilitates such a proposal to proper scrutiny.”

“The role of the Adirondack Park Agency in this project does not replace town government's obligations to evaluate impacts on this community and its environment,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks.
The Town’s own consultant, the Hudson Group, had advised the Town in August, 2006 not to rezone the property until the applicant, Preserve Associates, had satisfied a number of conditions related to the property’s on-site wastewater treatment, market research, fiscal impacts and impacts on neighbors, traffic and parking. The Joint Town-Village Planning Board endorsed these recommendations and forwarded them to the Town Board, which ignored a number of them in rezoning the properties.

The groups and individuals taking the appeal are being represented by John Caffry of Caffry & Flower, Attorneys at Law, in Glens Falls.
2008 
CONTACT: AFPA:
David Gibson,
518.377.1452,
Ext 1
or
Dan Plumley,
518-576-4430
RCPA: Michael Washburn,
518-891-1002, Ext. 16