New York governors tend to like buying land to add to the Adirondack Forest Preserve. It feeds their egos, for one thing, but as executive legacies go, land preservation is a great one - much, much better than some silly presidential library.
We'll call it Theodore Roosevelt Syndrome. Its symptoms are big, bold statements and a deep homage to nature.
Of all the recent Empire State governors, none was so smitten with TRS as George Pataki. He made it publicly known that he wanted to preserve a million acres of Adirondack forestland, and he did it, too. His 12 years as governor were one of the state's busiest periods of land acquisition ever, and he made sure he was there to take credit for every purchase and easement. Much of the groundwork for Pataki's million, however, was laid under his predecessor, Gov. Mario Cuomo, who had a bit of TRS flowing through his veins as well.
Don't confuse this syndrome with a disease; it does a lot of good. Some people are so entrenched in fighting the environmentalists, they forget that beautiful land, kept mostly in its natural state for anyone to enjoy, is a good thing.
On the other hand, some preservationists are so entrenched in adding acres, they forget how much good those tens of millions of dollars could do for a troubled society, or how much strain it's causing the taxpayers.
At this point in our ongoing saga, we New Yorkers already own plenty of land: between 45 and 50 percent of the Adirondack Park's 6 million acres. That's up from about 40 percent just a decade ago, and it also doesn't include hundreds of thousands of acres of protective easements, many of them added this past decade.
We were not sad to see the Forest Preserve grow, but now, enough is enough. Sure, there are a whole lot more beautiful tracts out there, but just like any eager buyer in a store full of goodies, at some point you have to cut yourself off. You have bills to pay first.
That's especially true if you're in the middle of a financial crisis, as our state is. It simply doesn't have enough money to pay for our current smorgasbord of government services, plus the generous wages and benefits our elected reps have committed to giving all our unionized public employees.
That's why we support a land-purchase moratorium as one of the many necessary spending cuts Gov. David Paterson included in his 2010-11 Executive Budget.
"There is no end date for the moratorium, but we expect that when state finances permit, the open space conservation program will resume," Yancy Roy, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, told The Associated Press. That makes sense to us, but while there are nice things about returning to the glory days of buying land, we remind the state that even when the fiscal outlook brightens, it might be better to ease New York's tax burden, which is among the nation's heaviest. Just as oil crises lead people to adopt more healthy long-term driving habits, financial crises should lead people to make their spending habits more sustainable.
If the state doesn't cut its wants as well as some needs, it won't be able to pay its bills, as almost happened at the end of 2009, or else it will keep driving up the taxes that are already dragging down its hopes of economic recovery.
There is also the fact that the DEC, which manages the Forest Preserve, is already stretched too thinly to even make unit management plans for it. Why add more when you can't stay on top of what you have?
Plus, if the state doesn't buy these desired tracts - specifically the 14,600-acre Follensby Park near Tupper Lake and a 65,000-acre chunk of the former Finch, Pruyn timberlands near Newcomb -they will still be well protected, better so than if they had campers, hikers, paddlers, mountain bikers and ATVers from the general public all over them. Those parcels are owned by The Nature Conservancy, which continues to do excellent work, not only in natural protection but also in working out easements with local governments and residents in the Adirondacks.
The down side is that we must take advantage of the Conservancy, which strained its budget in paying $110 million for Finch, Pruyn's 161,000 acres. It had hoped, but never been promised, that the state would buy some of that.
But the choice between a wealthy, healthy nonprofit group and a bleeding state with 19.5 million residents is easy. The Conservancy, a few months after it bought the Finch lands, bought Follensby Park for $16 million. That amount, if the state had it to spend, would keep the APA's Visitor Interpretive Centers open for another three decades, given the $500,000 a year the governor says the state will save by closing them. We see no sense in closing interpretive nature preserves on one hand and buying new ones the state can't manage on the other.
Unlike governors Cuomo, Pataki and Spitzer, Gov. Paterson hopes his legacy will be renewed financial health and, perhaps, reformation of a dysfunctional and sometimes corrupt Legislature. That's more attuned to these times, and to others' needs, than a million acres of land. While we are skeptical of how much he'll be able to accomplish, we wish him, or whoever beats him in the fall election, well in achieving those goals.