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2005 Open Space Conservation Plan

Comments from The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks

prepared for the Public Hearing at Saratoga Spa State Park, November 30, 2005

An Open Space Conservation Plan for NYS remains one of the best tools available to any state for advancing the needs of our citizenry for protected and well safeguarded and stewarded lands and waters. NYS should remain proud of its achievements in this fourth revision of the original plan.

However, tonight we offer the following critique in the hope of contributing to further improvements in the Open Space Conservation Plan.

Environmental Protection Fund: $150 million in total annual EPF funding, including just $40 million for open space protection statewide is very inadequate. The Open Space Plan is nearly 500 pages long, yet NYS can only deliver significantly less than $2 per person to pay for the annual overall environmental needs of the state, much less for the open space resources that this plan aspires to address. The EPF needs $300 million this budget year, a doubling of the current budget allocation, which is still a fraction of the real annual need. It should claim a significantly larger share of the real estate transfer tax than currently.

Stewardship: EPF money for the wise stewardship of State Lands and Conservation Easements in this state fall woefully short of what is needed. The current year’s allocation of $6.5 million is split between two agencies. This is half of former Stewardship EPF allocations. Moreover, the use of the small amount available needs to be carefully allocated. These funds should not be used to draft Unit Management Plans which continue to be driven largely by recreational demands and not by ecological integrity or landscape concerns. These UMPs should be developed by annual budgetary allocations and staffing of the NYS DEC.

We applaud the following statement on page 326 of the Draft Plan: “DEC’s ability to implement an ecosystem management approach to protect and manage natural resources for maximum public benefit requires comprehensive inventories of those natural resources, which are being undertaken with EPF resources.”

Given shortfalls in funds, personnel and professional training, DEC should not be expected to undertake comprehensive natural resource inventories, but should rely on well coordinated partnerships – as well as its own internal resources - to undertake this work, such as the GIS Consortium which provides DEC foresters and land managers with an accessible set of diverse natural resource based data layers which inform sound management recommendations.

This version of the Open Space Plan should establish a vision for the management of Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve and other important state land holding by applying principles of ecological integrity and the linking of ecologically important landscapes together – in other words, providing crucial connectivity between ecologically significant landscapes. It currently fails to do this in any significant way.

For example, a Major Resource Area within the Adirondack Park that had been notably listed in the 2002 Plan has been eliminated from the 2005 Open Space Plan. It spans across DEC Regions 5 and 6, across the Adirondack Park. This is the Low Elevation Boreal Area of the Adirondack Park, a crucial outlier and connector to boreal zones in the Northern Forest and in neighboring Canada. This ecosystem has landscape forms, trees, plants and animals associated with it which, taken as a whole, are rare not only in the northeastern United States, but across the nation. The circumpolar boreal zone and its unique habitats are threatened with changing climate and land use pressures here and across the globe.

The 2005 Open Space Plan should not ignore this important resource category from the 2002 plan. The Low Elevation Boreal Biome of the Adirondack Park is 250,000 acres in size. In 2002, the Plan recommended protection of more Low Elevation Boreal through a combination of state and private conservation ownership. Private owners already own and steward more than 60,000 acres of this rare habitat, and the State of New York has acquired more than 15,000 acres.

The entire Adirondack Park should be listed as a Major Resource Area. It was in previous plans. Its omission is a significant one. The public and private lands of the Adirondack Park must be administered and managed with far more vision, consistency and coordination than it has been to date. Its administration should be mission driven. The absence of an Adirondack Park listing within the 2005 Statewide Open Space Plan suggest that NYS is satisfied with the current and prolonged fragmentation of leadership, policy and poorly coordinated practices throughout the 6 million acres. We are confident that is not the case.

Conservation Easements: The 2005 Plan inadequately treats easements and reforms that are needed and, in fact, legally required. For instance, Article 49 of the ECL – the conservation easement law – requires regulations that have yet to go into effect 22 years after the law was enacted. DEC must create regulations that implement the Conservation Easement law.

We applaud the recommendations for stricter appraisal certification and training requirements and stricter standards for monitoring, enforcement and penalty requirements for charitable donations of conservation easements. However, the State of New York must reform its own easement standards and practices and show private land trusts the direction they need to go in as well. For example,

DEC still lacks a formal easement registry. The current informal registry maintained by the Bureau of Real Property needs significant strengthening.
Easement terms need some standardization and a public process whereby the public can better scrutinize the public benefits of a given easement. These are just two examples of needed reforms.

In addition, easement negotiation and stewardship should not be recreation-driven in all cases, but also steered in certain directions by principles of ecological integrity and by landscape-scale conservation concepts.

Finally, while protection, funding and stewardship of open space resources are given top billing in this plan, it remains deficient without a staffing plan to implement it. In short, there is no staff allocation and budgetary plan to implement the 2005 Open Space Plan. Since 2003, DEC staffing as a whole has been reduced by more than 300 and in the Office of Natural Resources and key divisions responsible for implementing this plan, such as the Division of Lands and Forests, by more than several dozen. The lofty goals of the 2002 plan are not being implemented as a result of these serious budgetary reductions, and the more ambitious 2005 goals will not be either. Staffing issues cry out for discussion within the Open Space Conservation Plan.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment at these important public hearings.

David H. Gibson
Executive Director