A Turn We Can Live With
We view with a healthy respect for established state law the findings of Judge Wissler in the matter of the Belleayre Resort review. For all its complexity, its message was simple: In New York, the public interest matters as much as private ones, and if something’s going to impact us all, one needs to be able to explain HOW, fully answering all reasonable questions. When that happens, decisions can get made and things can move forward. And when it doesn’t happen decisions also get made, in this case a decision to compel far better answers than have been provided so far. It’s part of a process that for more than a generation has worked reasonably well. Projects green-lighted under it break ground all the time. Although we’ve expressed concerns about it in the past, we’ve said here for years we believed in the Belleayre Resort’s SEQRA process and Judge Wissler’s rulings have affirmed that trust. We think they should for most people, it’s what governments and regulatory processes are for.
Our faith in the process used to be shared - championed actually until 2004 when he changed his mind about it- by Crossroads Ventures’ Dean Gitter. One can argue as he now does that the whole SEQRA process is broken and needs to be fixed. One can go to the media to call one’s fellow participants “bastards,” “jihadists,” “hired assasins,” “neo-socialist carpetbaggers” or even “pointy headed nerds” from cyberspace. Hey, it’s America, one can say almost anything and some people repeatedly do. And while such talk may serve some purpose, it doesn’t affect the SEQRA process, the point of which is to get information so things can be weighed, measured, and determined on balance and on their merits.
So what’s really happened? In a nutshell a judge has reviewed, with great detail and clarity, the largest SEQRA filing in the state’s history. He determined that Crossroads’ answers to the big questions about its project are - there’s no other honest way to put this - substantially inadequate under state law. Inadequate? After all that money spent? That’s not for us but for the judge to decide. Still, we were less surprised than most by the outcome. As the only newspaper actually present for the project’s Issues Conference last year, we reported exactly what happened back then but we’ll recap it now to help cut to the chase:
Five parties participated but two dominated: Crossroads and the Catskill Preservation Coalition. Their two brilliant lawyers led two teams of expert witnesses presenting complex data and explaining their conclusions. Judge Wissler followed every detail offered by every witness, asking questions consistently showing his clear understanding of each issue and position raised. The teams of experts however, were wildly, sometimes embarrassingly mismatched. The only way to describe it was like a debate between the Students team and the Professors team, and the Professors team were CPC’s witnesses. Had Crossroads well-paid consultants done the quality of work required, perhaps only a few of the major issues might be going forward to adjudication next year. Instead, all of the significant ones are.
Does any of this mean the end of the road for the Belleayre Resort? No, of course not. It’s the inspiring vista of return on investment that drives this process and the sums involved in continuing don’t appear to be, for Crossroads’ backers, really very significant ones. It’s not as if Crossroads was actually going to lay out $300 or $400 million to build the place; that’s an issue for Marriot or Hilton or Caesar’s or whoever actually buys the permit package if it becomes available. No, these “permitting costs” ARE the developer’s capital investment, along with some extra to cover land purchases, marketing costs like small inns & restaurants, that kind of thing.
So our predictions: 1. There will be no statewide reconsideration of SEQRA in the foreseeable future, even if Gitter, former legislative chairman Ward Todd, UCDC’s Chester Straub, and State Senator John Bonacic all stamp their feet at the same time. No one in the state seems to think such a thing is worth talking about, except those dissatisfied with this one recent ruling. 2. The Coalition of Watershed Towns, once and potentially still a major political force, will cease to be one if it continues it apparent course of trying to suppress adjudication of the project’s impact on its communities. 3. The MOA with the City will not disintegrate even if Delaware County, where fully 15% of the project is proposed to be sited, withdraws from it in protest over this and other unrelated issues with the DEP.The four other counties will figure out what to do with Delaware’s hefty annual share of the city’s funding pie.
Then there’s the town of Shandaken where the only safe predictions are that nobody wants to hear about this anymore, that those in power, pre-election, will try and pocket their wedding ring to the project and those out of power will try not to point out they were justified all along in seeking answers to the resort’s many unanswered questions. Counting ourselves among those who view a smaller version of the project, built on the Wildacres site as basically desirable, we’re delighted the judge has now mandated actual consideration of alternatives like that, and determined that Crossroads’ position since 1999, “it’s all or nothing”, actually violates SEQRA’s requirements.
To us, what this ruling means is a solution CAN be found that Shandaken can live with. And the fact that the pitiful tax package offered the town will also be adjudicated as part of Community Character means that we needn’t settle for what our current supervisor deems a good tax deal. So despite the newly extended time-frame, we will it seems eventually get the answers we need and maybe move forward with a project that most people can support. If that can happen, we’ll be the first to propose a statue for Judge Wissler. .

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