Extreme Makeover
One of the tough things about growing up is accepting that sometimes things just aren’t fair. We don’t think it’s fair for instance, that when the last glaciers receded, the Town of Hunter got Kaaterskill and Platte Cloves, two of the most spectacular geographic features in the whole State, plus Stony Clove Notch too. Now we’re not making a big deal about something that happened twelve thousand years ago. But what’s fair between neighboring towns and counties is an honest issue when the two largest ski areas in the region, Hunter & Windham, suddenly start talking like their poor stepsister Belleayre has become a huge threat to their future. Of course, they could be right.
But when Greene County’s legislature recently called for a moratorium on any expansion of Belleayre pending an independent review of its impact on THEIR communities, we found that very odd. You see for years, that county’s town supervisors plus others from Delaware County and even from Shandaken, have worked hard to insure that NO economic review of what’s proposed for Belleayre Mountain ever takes place. They’ve done this through the Coalition of Watershed Towns, filing briefs in the Belleayre Resort’s review which insist that “Community Character,” the one and only place where economic impacts on the region CAN be reviewed, is not a legitimate sphere of inquiry concerning what happens at Belleayre. And the goal these public officials have all shared with developer Dean Gitter is to make sure no one’s EVER going to analyze his project’s economic impacts before the state makes decisions about it. So far they’ve been successful; no such review has happened in six years and nothing suggests it will. You’ll recall that in the final minutes of the Pataki administration, DEC overruled their own judge and eliminated those subjects as issues to be examined further. We figured by the end of Governor Spitzer’s first month in office that situation would have been corrected. That however, doesn’t seem to be the case.
So why, one’s tempted to ask, are these major issues of fairness, of public review and particularly of public funding for Belleayre resurfacing just now? Actually the answer’s simple. According to BMSC sources this past spring, the prospect of a taxpayer-funded “Extreme Makover” for Belleayre now appears to be increasingly coupled with a massive, perhaps $400 million commitment of private capital from Gitter and Marriot or whomever he’s selling to, all atop the same mountain as $40-some million in conjoined new infrastructure from State coffiers. Such a joint public and private co-venture could easily leapfrog little Belleayre into the region’s premier ski-destination. So if that’s really the issue - we think it is - then the Greene County folks certainly have a point about fairness: Gitter’s and the state’s financial gain would almost certainly come at some cost to them. One of their arguments, that public money shouldn’t be floating the expansion of a public ski facility, is basically specious. But the inferential question, why is an enormous outlay of taxpayer dollars apparently now proposed to subsidize the largest private real estate development in the region’s history, that’s a question that’s at minimum, a fair one. And the Extreme Makeover proposed for the state-owned parts of the development begs yet another question. In the TV version, it’s great that deserving families get a beautiful new house but what pays for it is the hundreds of millions in appliances and furnishings that Sears, its primary sponsor sells. So who benefits is transparent, it’s one family in need plus Sear’s stockholders. But in the Belleayre scenario, who benefits is less clear. Sure, more visitors are good for the local economy but they’d come at a direct cost paid only by us locals. If Route 28, say, becomes a 4-lane highway, or if what’s currently proposed as tax renumeration from the resort stays as it is, those could be huge problems for us. But neither we nor the Green County folks will ever know unless these issues are independently reviewed. The SEQRA process of course, is the appropriate place for that. The problem with it is that DEC is both the regulatory agency and the apparent co-applicant.
So as has become usual, where things stand is up in the air. But here’s our suggestions. First, we call on DEC and Commissioner Grannis to finally rule on the appeal filed this past January, and to restore the issues of Community Character to the list of those slated for adjudication. This would provide Greene County the fair hearing on the joint Belleayre Resort and BMSC expansion they’re concerned about. But it would also do the same for Shandaken and Ulster County, something we believe SEQRA guarantees us as the project’s host community.
Second, we call on the Coalition of Watershed Towns – in theory our collective political voice here in the Watershed – to withdraw their brief to DEC arguing against any Community Character review for the resort project. We further ask that they henceforth either take reasonable positions or stay out entirely of arguments they don’t truly seem to understand.
Third, we call on our county’s legislators and other reasonable people not to respond at all to a somewhat confused gesture from those who represent Hunter and Windham. If our county wishes as we hope they do, to support Belleayre’s expansion, we encourage them to do so irrespective of any joint venture prospects that principally profit multinational corporations at an unknown cost to county residents.
Fourth and finally, we call on Governor Spitzer and his staff to continue attempting to facilitate a negotiated solution to the resort issue as far as possible. But we also respectfully remind them that their primary job in doing so is the enforcement of SEQRA and not its circumvention. We’d like to think they know that, but only time will tell. BP