Inside the Green Lobby

The Fight to Save the Adirondack Park

Bernard C. Melewski

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781438486680, 9781438486697
• eBook ISBN: 9781438486703
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XXI

A veteran environmental lobbyist reveals the behind-the-scenes struggles to address threats to the future of New York's Adirondack Park.

Finalist in the 2023 National Indie Excellence® Awards in the Political Category

Inside the Green Lobby recounts the behind-the-scenes efforts, both at the State Capitol in Albany and the halls of Congress, of a lobbyist for a major environmental advocacy group. Bernard C. Melewski worked to save the six-million acre Adirondack Park from twin threats to its future: the devastating damage from acid rain and the sudden breakup of massive private land holdings that had been intact for almost one hundred years. Starting with the political uproar ignited by the recommendations of New York Governor Mario Cuomo's 1990 Adirondack Park Commission, and the rejection by the public of a new environmental bond act, Inside the Green Lobby documents the events that led to the sudden acquisition by New York State of tens of thousands of acres within the park that the public now enjoys. From strategy sessions with lobbyists to private meetings with legislators, governors, members of Congress, and even the President of the United States, Melewski recounts engaging and entertaining stories that introduce how environmental advocates successfully pursue legislative and policy change.

CHAPTER 1

THE LAND CAMPAIGN

It was early 1990, and Dan Plumley and I had just settled into our seats. The train was gathering speed when Dan leaned down and pulled something out of his well-tooled cowboy boot.

“What ’ya got there?” I asked.

“The report from the Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century.”

“How did you get that?”

“I pried open a box with my penknife and hid one in my boot,” he nonchalantly replied.

“Holy shit!” I said. My mind flashed back to Dan asking the way to the men’s room and then going off alone, past the high stack of boxed reports.

Dan and I were headed to New York City for my first meeting with the Board of Directors of my new employer, the Adirondack Council. Dan had previously been the sole government liaison for the Council. I was the new guy, taking charge of lobbying at the state Capitol. Dan would now focus on the review of development projects pending before the Adirondack Park Agency.

On the way to the Albany train station, Dan had suggested we stop by the offices of the Commission on the Adirondack Park. Governor Mario M. Cuomo had created it the previous year because, he said, large land sales in the Adirondack Park threatened to bring on “an era of unbridled land speculation and unwarranted development.” The Commission’s work had been completed with the printing of its report The Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century.¹

Dan introduced me to several Commission staffers who were cleaning out their desks before returning to their other lives. In a corner, stacked four-high, were cardboard boxes full of the completed but not yet distributed report containing the panel’s recommendations. Cuomo had asked Commission Chairman Peter A. A. Berle to delay its public release. That delay had extended to several weeks, and now the lease on the rented Commission offices was about to expire.

The report was obviously going to be a topic of conversation at our board meeting, and our visit to the Commission was aimed at finding something new to tell the directors. We enjoyed a nice chat with the remaining staffers. They said they would love to tell us what was in their report, but could not. They hoped for a public unveiling in the next few business days.

Now, thanks to Dan, I held a copy in my hand. “You ought to read this before we get in,” he said. (See figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1. Cover of the Commission Report. Source: author, public domain.

Rumors had been swirling ahead of the report’s release, particularly in the Adirondack Park’s hamlets and small communities, about who was really in charge of the Commission’s work. Chief among the theories was that control of the Commission lay in the hands of the environmental community, particularly the Adirondack Council. This conclusion followed from the common belief that rich people from New York City—“flatlanders,” as the locals called them—dominated the Council, leading the Council to care only about maintaining a wilderness playground, not working in the interests of local residents. Fueling these suspicions were the undeniable links between the Council and the Commission. George D. Davis, executive director of the Commission had just completed the research necessary for the Adirondack Council’s multivolume 2020 Vision document. In it, the Council had proposed that the state acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of privately held land in the Park “to secure and complete the Adirondack Wilderness System.”

The Commission’s chairman, Peter Berle, also brought strong environmental credentials. At the time of his appointment, he was president of the National Audubon Society. He was also a former Commissioner of the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). As a member of the New York State Assembly, in 1973 he had led a successful effort to pass comprehensive legislation regulating development in the Adirondacks that had been proposed by the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks.

And finally, Commission member, Harold A. Jerry Jr., then a member of the State Public Service Commission, had also served been as executive director of that first Commission, established by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. His reputation for strongly held environmental beliefs could be seen in the earlier Commission’s conclusions, including the antidevelopment recommendations that Peter Berle had later shepherded into law. Jerry, who owned land inside the Park near the village of Speculator, was also a member of the Adirondack Council’s board and an unabashed advocate of protecting both private and public lands in the Park.

Over the next two hours aboard the train, I ignored the lovely views of the Hudson River as I pored over the Commission’s still-secret recommendations on the future of the Park.

I found political land mines throughout the document.

“You know, they are going to piss off a lot of people with this,” I told Dan. “They have two hundred and forty-five recommendations in the ninety-six-page report and no priorities. The proposals touch almost everyone that lives, works, or visits the Park, and not necessarily in a good way.”

The recommendations ranged from sweeping all of the state agencies operating inside the Park into one consolidated Adirondack Park Administration to a plan for removing abandoned cars from the roadsides.

Most notably of concern, the Commission called for the following:

•An immediate moratorium on any new development in the Park,

•Increasing state control over the use of private lands,

•Expanding the Park into adjacent private lands, and

•Imposing new fees and taxes.

As the train rattled on, I made a list of all the people who might hate the recommendations. It was impressively long: developers; motel owners; people with shoreline lots; and people who owned boats, snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, jet skis, or recreational vehicles, not to mention local government officials, large landowners and the forest products industry. You might even add the governor of New York to the list. Cuomo was preparing to run for a third term in 1990, and annoying large numbers of people was probably not in his campaign plan.

The report urged that all the Commission’s recommendations be considered as a package and not individually, because “pulling a single thread could unravel the whole sweater.”

If that was the case, this thing was going nowhere. I had seen lots of legislation fail in Albany not because the main thrust of the bill was a bad idea, but because the bill collected so many opponents, each with their own minor problem. At the Capitol we called it the Lilliputian effect after the tiny characters who tied down the “giant” in the Jonathan Swift novel Gulliver’s Travels.

MINORITY REPORT

Our directors were shocked to discover that I could report exactly what the Commission was about to recommend. (I didn’t tell them how I knew.) No one was more surprised than Harold Jerry, who confirmed my summary in general terms.

It wasn’t clear if Jerry was more upset with the governor, who was being blamed in the media for delaying the release of the troublesome report, or me, for telling the board that I thought it was going to be a public relations disaster.

I didn’t know it that day, but Jerry was aware of another looming problem. He knew what Bob Flacke was about to do.

Robert F. Flacke was another member of the Commission. He owned a resort on Lake George inside the Adirondack Park and had enjoyed a successful career in politics and government. He had risen from a local elected office to be the appointed chairman of the Adirondack Park Agency, which oversaw development inside the Park, and then Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation succeeding Peter Berle. Flacke had returned to the private sector to run his lakeside hotel before his appointment to Cuomo’s commission.

Flacke was a burly former football player who I knew from many meetings during his tenure at the DEC.

The consensus among environmentalists who dealt with Flacke in that job was that he “just didn’t get it.” He seemed to like talking to me, however, often commenting that “You don’t bullshit me.” Apparently, I was also one of the few environmental lobbyists who didn’t yell at him.

One time, he invited me into his office for a “man-to-man” session prior to a larger meeting with the environmental community.

“You think I don’t know what you guys are really after—but I do!” he said.

Years of experience had taught me to respond in deadpan fashion.

“How so?” I replied.

“I’ve been reading this, and it is very clear to me now.”

He waved a book at me. After a pass or two past my face, I saw the title: What Environmentalists Want.

Unable to muster a better reply, I just said, “You got me now, Bob.”

He seemed satisfied with that response.

Flacke (nobody in the environmental community called him by his first name) was also famous for his temper. His nickname was “Thermometer Bob,” because you could watch the red color rising on his neck as he got more and more upset in most meetings I was in with him. I always expected him to suffer a stroke right before my eyes.

To his credit, Flacke held himself in check and was civil to all, even though his neck sometimes gave away his true feelings. There was one memorable exception. He was a guest at an Environmental Planning Lobby reception, when he got into a heated argument with a citizen advocate from Syracuse. Partygoers claimed a physical altercation had ensued and Bob had lifted the other fellow off the ground—by his neck. All I saw was a commotion. Later, I defended Flacke to my colleagues—I had always found the other guy to be a pain in the ass. No one disagreed with me on that point.

Now Flacke was on the Governor’s commission, and our paths were crossing again.

Whether by coincidence or design, Flacke took advantage of the delay in the release of the commission majority’s findings to issue his own “minority report.” The “Flacke Report,” as it came to be known, undermined most of the recommendations supported by the majority.

Flack wrote, “The Commission bases its conclusions and recommendations largely on a premise that a development crisis exists in the Adirondack Park, when it does not.” He contended that the supposed development crisis “is mostly the creation of an unfortunately effective, massive campaign by the Commission’s main support group, the Adirondack Council.”

He said the law governing the Adirondack Park Agency was “still one of the most stringent in the nation.” He argued that improvements could easily be made within the existing administrative network, and that “there is absolutely no need for a one-year moratorium on land use and development in the Park.” Flacke offered forty-four recommendations of his own, including new legislative commissions, studies and agency audits intended to challenge the assumptions in the commission’s report.²

Bob would later predict that economic opportunities for residents of the communities in the Park would be crippled if the recommendations of the commission were adopted, leaving them only the prospect of “selling trinkets to tourists by the roadside.”

Many people are surprised to learn that there are more than 100 towns, villages, and hamlets with more than 130,000 residents inside the Park. This is because of its huge size and unique makeup. Within its six million acres, more than one-fifth of the state’s total footprint, lies a checkerboard of public and private lands in roughly equal proportions.³ Despite proposals over its 100-year history to redefine the Park’s boundaries to exclude human settlements, it has remained a sprawling political and biological experiment in compatibility between humans and the wild.

This coexistence has always created tensions between conservation and development. After proposals for extensive residential development were announced and his brother Laurance continued to press the governor and others to create a national park in the region, Governor Rockefeller named the first blue-ribbon commission on the Park’s future in 1968. The Commission’s report, released in 1970, led Rockefeller to ask the legislature to impose new controls on land use and development in the Park, and within a few months the sweeping measure was enacted. It created a new entity, the Adirondack Park Agency, and gave it the authority to impose new controls over the use and development of most of the public and private land in the park. The APA’s powers superseded the zoning authority that had been held, though seldom exercised, by the local governments.

Adirondack residents resented the new agency deeply. Most of them lived in communities with no zoning or land-use controls, and seemingly overnight they found themselves subject to oversight by a state authority that they perceived had the power to decide whether someone could subdivide his or her own property or build a boathouse next to the lake.

Feeling powerless in the face of what they saw as an overbearing intrusion into their lives by “flatlanders,” residents put up fierce resistance. They dumped manure at the APA’s door and emptied their guns at state vehicles. An arson attempt against the agency’s headquarters was famously thwarted by a staff member, a former football player, who made a saving tackle in the agency’s darkened hallway.

Most Adirondackers would learn to tolerate the APA over the next twenty years, but they never grew to like it. Their resentment floated just below the surface like a mine in a harbor, capable of exploding if something hit it hard enough. And Flacke’s minority report hit it hard.

Despite the dreams of Chairman Berle and others, history would not repeat itself. The 1990 legislative session ended without any action on the Berle Commission’s report.

A BUCKET OF SNAKES

Fifty years ago, one of the biggest driving forces for the first commission on the future of the Adirondacks was a proposal by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Land Campaign
• Chapter 2 The Bowler Boys
• Chapter 3 New York’s Big Secret
• Chapter 4 The Canal Canary Sings
• Chapter 5 The Prison in the Park
• Chapter 6 Mary-Arthur and Me
• Chapter 7 Well, I’ll Be Damned
• Chapter 8 Timber Rustlers
• Chapter 9 The New Chairman
• Chapter 10 Year of the Moose
• Chapter 11 The Air Campaign
• Chapter 12 The Art of Lobbying
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover