On this page our job is basically twofold; to share our perspectives with you, and to advocate on behalf of all of our readers, the residents, taxpayers, and property owners of the towns and region we serve. This week it falls on us to comment on two developments, the federal government’s decision to continue to let the City drink our water without filtering it, and on recent events concerning the ongoing Belleayre Resort negotiations.
First the FAD renewal. This was a forgone conclusion, as our political leadership in the watershed, both the increasingly irrelevant Coalition of Watershed Towns and others, chose to not even contest it. For reasons we’ve often shared with you, we generally favor anything that protects water quality here, believing our interests both economic and in the quality of our lives and our environment are all served in kind and in parallel with the quality of the City’s water. But the conclusion of this process does confirm that our regional influence continues to diminish, and solely from our growing lack of any political will to exert it.
We do however, support the FAD renewal, though we believe the surprise announcement it’s for 10 years, not 5, means that DEP’s accountability to us, the people of the watershed, is effectively diminished by at least half. We also believe that within that timeframe the watershed will be providing for 14 million, not 9 million New Yorkers, as Long Island’s sources will be shortly deemed unusable. With the State soon taking over final regulatory authority from EPA, this process should be streamlined considerably.
In other news regarding streamlined processes, many of us have heard the rumors over the past several weeks of “a done deal” orchestrated through the Governor’s office on the proposed Belleayre Resort project. Lacking formal confirmation, we would never report such a development as news, which it’s not. But since it seems one need only ask anyone who works at Belleayre Mountain or rides the chairlift there these days to hear updates from what we thought were top-secret negotiations in progress, we hardly feel like anything we could pass along to you constitutes some sort of state secret. Generally when sensitive information is intentionally leaked, it’s to help serve someone’s agenda. We’re all familiar with this spin cycle, and some of what’s been reported in regional papers of late has been replete with it. Also in our view, inaccurate.
We haven’t seen the maps illustrating the purported deal, as many other people in our area who weren’t supposed to see them apparently have. But apart from the developer’s new maps which are said to detail a massive state-funded expansion of Belleayre, integrating it with the proposed resort and with a newly rebuilt Highmount Ski Center, other details have also surfaced, including word of a local press conference by Governor Spitzer purportedly scheduled for mid-May. We want to be very clear we don’t know if any of this is true or not. So far as we know there is no deal between the parties, talks are ongoing, and until DEC or the Governor’s office says otherwise, that is where things stand.
Last December we said we’d welcome a fast-track resolution through such talks, if what it meant was a project on a scale acceptable to our community and fair to our taxpayers. We said that because we believed the SEQRA process was in place and because we saw and still see, our then Governor-elect as a champion and protector of New York State’s laws. At the same time we voiced concern that our community’s interests might not be represented in private talks as they would be under adjudication in an open and public permitting process. Whether we were right to be concerned about such a turn of events, it’s too early to say. Our assumption continues to be that if a deal is reached, any proposal would then be re-presented to DEC for a full SEQRA review.
For over six years, we have expressed confidence that the SEQRA process would yield an acceptable outcome to those of us who live here and would be directly impacted. Ultimately we felt, it would reflect a reduced-scale compromise project, sufficient to mitigate potential problems like traffic, community character impacts, effects on our local water supplies, and so on. That we believe, is where a responsible resolution under the SEQRA process is headed, whether for some new plan or for the old. If the extra-SEQRA process is also headed there, we wholeheartedly support that too.
If it’s true that a major rebuild of the Belleayre Mountain Ski Center is in our future, that would be amazingly good news for the towns of the 28 corridor.
At the same time there’s no question that such a project, integrated with and in conjunction with the proposed resort, does legally require a joint and combined SEQRA review. That’s mandated both directly, under SEQRA, and under the state’s broader Environmental Conservation Law. This joint review is precisely what some of the involved parties have been seeking for years, though under Pataki’s DEC, the state consistently refused to release its future plans for the mountain, making a mandated joint review impossible. We doubt whether such attitudes will continue under a Spitzer administration, and particularly under DEC’s new leadership. And we stand ready to welcome whatever deal may emerge, or if it doesn’t, whatever resolution our state’s laws hold for the project’s future.
BP