Back To The Future

Odd as it may seem, the biggest thing effecting Shandaken at this moment has nothing to do with a draft Comprehensive Plan for the town. What more important and that's happening in real time is the environmental review of the Belleayre Resort project. Within a few days the lead agency in that review, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, should be making a determination as to the "completeness" of the materials submitted to them on December 20. Prior to that submission, Crossroads Ventures had been working for seven months both adding to, and making changes to the original DEIS submitted in January 2002 at the request of DEC. Those changes are all now in. DEC may choose to seek additional ones or it may not, if it deems that Crossroads has adequately addressed those issues where it believed new information was required. If that’s the case, the agency will accept the submission as “complete”, the word “draft” will drop from the document, and it will become the largest Environmental Impact Statement ever proposed and accepted for review in New York State's history.

What's next? The EIS will have a public comment period that will begin immediately upon the determination of its completeness. The public comment period will be quite brief; from 30 to 60 days. During this time, DEC will be accepting comments from other involved agencies such as New York City’s DEP and the Town of Shandaken Planning Board. It will also be accepting comments from the public at large, and from locally, regionally, and nationally interested parties.

What's particularly problematical at this moment is that there’s still absolutely no funding mechanism in place for Shandaken’s planning board to actually do any kind of review on the town’s behalf. Nothing, no money, and it’s not by accident. There's been a fee schedule in place for such project review since the early 90s, but nobody’s even talked about using it. Back in '99, Crossroads and the town signed an agreement specifically to cover these costs, but Crossroads believes they’re not bound by it, and so hasn't paid. The town government, not wishing to be perceived as hostile, hasn’t sued to enforce that agreement. And so discussions continue about a possible new fee schedule while the clock runs out. It’s almost a moot point now. Because if the EIS Comment Period begins in the coming weeks, there’s simply no time for the town to find, hire, and get any work done at all from its potential consultants before the SEQRA clock runs out. By simply stalling on payment terms for our planning board’s review costs, Crossroads has all but managed to insure that there won’t be any SEQRA review by our planning board prior to DEC’s decision on the project.

In the end, DEC will make a determination. We believe they'll do their best to be fair to the interests of all concerned. Like everyone else, we’ve no idea what the outcome will be. Thus far it's been difficult to read any kind of predisposition on the part of the agency. While they did request extensive revisions of the DEIS, they’ve also been quite accommodating to the developer in some ways, such as asking for relatively little money for their review costs, far less than the State’s entitled to under SEQRA law. There’s certainly an irony about this in light of the State’s financial situation. We have a $2 billion deficit this year despite unusually creative bookkeeping, and at this time the Governor’s projecting an $8 billion deficit for next year. Our State’s clearly got some massive financial problems, which we can probably expect to impact us locally, in a variety of ways from school taxes to roads to whatever’s left of the state’s “safety net” for low income people.

We hope the State's budget problems don't end up compromising DEC's ability to review the Belleayre Resort as thoroughly as it needs to. We'd like to think it won't because we have in this State a DEC Commissioner, Erin Crotty, who understands the project's significance better than anyone who’s ever held that position before her possibly could. A native of our region and formerly the Governor's representative to the Catskill Watershed Corporation, Commissioner Crotty knows our local and regional issues very well, and clearly grasps the issues of the project’s scale and potential impact.

We have faith in the agency and its determination to handle the review properly. But we also understand that neither it, nor its commissioner, operates outside the sphere of State politics, and that while DEC might be dealing the cards, the Governor is the house. On the other hand, political as the call may be, in the immortal words of Tip O’Neil, all politics is local.