In late 1968, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller created the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks (TSC), instructing it “to review in depth the problems of the area” and to make recommendations for new legislation that would effectively “chart the future of the Adirondacks.”Footnote 1 The problems, Rockefeller and many other Adirondack observers agreed, stemmed principally from the surging numbers of recreational visitors from northeastern cities who traveled to this vast, wooded region of 6 million acres—an area as large as all of neighboring Vermont—and its 2,800 lakes and ponds, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, and more than 40 above-tree-line peaks interspersed with many dozens of rural towns. A postwar recreational building boom—the product of metropolitan residents’ increasing affluence, leisure time, and mobility—had arrived in full force in the Adirondacks and other northeastern woods and mountains after emerging earlier at the region’s seashores and bays.
Rockefeller’s Temporary Study Commission might have seemed an innocuous and uncertain response to the Adirondacks’ development pressures, but it proved to be a decisive jumpstart to a policymaking process marked by several milestones: in 1971 Governor Rockefeller pushed through the state legislature a TSC-written bill that created the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) with powerful authorities over all of the Adirondacks’ vast checkerboard of public and private lands; in 1972 the governor signed off on APA-designed rules for all publicly owned Adirondack land; and in May 1973, Rockefeller secured another sweeping, hard-fought legislative victory that approved intensely controversial APA-written regulations for all the region’s privately owned land.
Collectively, these measures created among the most ambitious, enduring environmental land-use reforms in modern American history: an environmentally focused, regionally conceived and administered regulatory system that transformed all aspects of future Adirondack development. Nelson Rockefeller’s extraordinary power, ambition, and eagerness to experiment with creative new government institutions pushed Adirondack reform efforts further than those in most other states and localities that were similarly eager to seize the land-use reform moment. Initiatives in this period in the Lake Tahoe region, straddling California and Nevada, and in the Pinelands region in central New Jersey were among the only others remotely comparable in scale and approach.Footnote 2 Yet the implementation of the new Adirondack regulatory system during the mid- and late 1970s proved problematic and often unpopular, and these two very different but intertwined Adirondack stories, one about creating land-use reforms and the other about implementing them, helped to reveal essential contours of American environmental liberalism during the 1970s—its evolutions and internal tensions, its potential and limitations.
Adirondack reform’s creation years provide insight first into the distinctiveness of the late 1960s and early 1970s and, second, into why a historic outpouring of state and local land-use reform efforts around the United States emerged in this period and was not matched in breadth and ambition before or since.Footnote 3 The confluence of factors shaping policymaking in upstate New York were illustrative of those driving many land-use reform initiatives around the country during these key years that would give shape to environmental liberalism: the emergence of new, promising, but as-yet largely untested environmental ideas; bipartisan coalitions of Democratic and Republican policymakers who backed these reform efforts; policymakers’ confidence in the ability of data-informed expertise to fashion creative new government interventions to serve the broad public interest as they understood it; propitious political timing in the late 1960s and early 1970s when still-hot real estate markets combined with a suddenly powerful, seemingly ubiquitous national awareness of the need to better protect the country’s environment to create a strong sense of political urgency and possibility just before the darker economic times of the 1970s fully took hold and before much national or regional anti-environmental opposition had organized yet.Footnote 4 This combination of factors produced uniquely strong political tailwinds that enabled reform.
Implementation of land-use reforms in the Adirondacks during the 1970s also provided an early, revealing window onto challenges and conflicts that American environmental management programs would encounter, ultimately halting environmental liberalism’s political momentum and partly circumscribing its policy achievements. Various stakeholders in the Adirondacks struggled to understand, navigate, or appreciate new bureaucratic processes designed to enforce multiple, complex, and sometimes subjective goals. Shaped by a tangle of political and legal constraints and practical administrative responsibilities, the APA’s environmental management generated organized opposition and less tangible but pervasive grievance from the political right and left. Local government officials, large developers, and some local property owners protested the existence of the APA or angrily critiqued the agency’s decisions and environmental priorities. Meanwhile, wilderness advocates, outdoor recreation enthusiasts, and other environmental liberals also grew disenchanted by and distrustful of the new land-use reform bureaucracy—coming to believe it too compromising in its support of environmental goals. In response, by the mid- and late 1970s environmental activists increasingly focused their energies on establishing and strengthening advocacy organizations, nonprofit land trusts, and legal initiatives designed to pressure government from the outside or do the work it was not doing.Footnote 5 Shorn of the liberal optimism and strong economic conditions that inspired reform a decade earlier, the new land-use system became an unloved bureaucratic battleground endlessly struggling to balance deep, longstanding differences in interests and visions among a variety of different Adirondack groups.
Creating Reform
By the late 1960s, the tension between increasing recreational tourism and preserving the qualities that attracted those visitors was difficult to ignore. Leisure travel to the Adirondacks and other northeastern mountains was hardly a new phenomenon in the postwar period. A steadily growing number and range of visitors had been venturing to the woods for well more than a century in pursuit of scenic beauty, health, tranquility, outdoor recreation, entertainment, and summer social scenes—traveling first by steamboat and horse-drawn carriage, then by railroad, and eventually in automobiles. The Adirondacks had long served as a cherished recreation destination: for the grand hotels and “great camps” that served wealthy families like Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Whitney beginning in the nineteenth century; for an expanding middle class after World War I; and for the modest Olympic Games at Lake Placid in 1932. But the tourism boom, starting after World War II and accelerating in the 1960s, proved different in both scale and kind. The absolute number of visitors exploded like never before. Local officials paved and widened rural roads, and entrepreneurs built gas stations, motels, restaurants, and other roadside necessities. Developers hastily built projects on frequently thin, rocky-soiled mountainsides and the fragile shores of waterways. As jeeps, snowmobiles, motorboats, and float planes proliferated, the mechanization of outdoor recreation transformed the sounds and experiences of the woods.Footnote 6
This postwar recreation boom exposed the inadequacy of existing policy approaches. Rockefeller’s long-standing pro-growth inclinations previously translated into a fusion of development and conservation in rural regions of New York like the Adirondacks.Footnote 7 Initiatives during the first decade of his governorship had produced unprecedented rates of road construction, tourism promotion, and state park creation.Footnote 8 But old solutions no longer seemed capable of addressing the new scale of growth-related problems. Most obviously, Rockefeller had already launched the most expensive state open-space acquisition program in the country, but it could not provide nearly enough money to preserve significant expanses of Adirondack land threatened by late 1960s development pressures. And the state possessed virtually no regulatory authority over the private lands that then constituted about 60 percent of the Adirondack Park that the legislature had created more than a half century earlier, while only a handful of the 107 municipalities in the Adirondacks had created comprehensive land-use regulations.
Conceiving Reform: Expertise, the Environment, and State Power
It was in this policy vacuum that Governor Rockefeller followed a favored approach to pragmatic problem-solving by establishing the Temporary Study Commission in 1968. Throughout his career Rockefeller surrounded himself with experts empowered to collect data, consult with stakeholders, and fashion creative policy solutions. Rockefeller placed the TSC in the executive office, personally appointed commission members, and gave it both a substantial budget and a broad mandate to think boldly about the state’s possible roles in the Adirondacks. As longtime APA and TSC staff member George Davis would later remember, the governor’s questions to the commission “were general enough they could have included anything the commission wanted to study.”Footnote 9
The TSC’s work provided a foundation upon which everything about future Adirondack land-use policy would be based. Over the more than four years from the TSC’s founding through the completion of the private-land plan, TSC and then APA staff—which included experts in planning, natural resources, recreation, and economics—compiled comprehensive information about Adirondack land, water, and wildlife as well as its people, towns, and economy. Key staff spent significant time in the field exploring every major tract of public and private land, and frequent meetings were held with consultants, state agencies, local officials, and an advisory panel composed of various Adirondack interests.
Staff brought together this unprecedented collection of information with a set of newly emerging ideas best articulated by Scottish-born landscape architect Ian McHarg in the seminal 1969 book Design with Nature.Footnote 10 Land-use decisions should emerge from a holistic, regional lens, staff concluded. Public and private lands should be considered in tandem, as a single, collective Adirondack Park. This approach led directly to the most distinctive and controversial element of the whole Adirondack undertaking: the creation of a permanent, independent agency to oversee planning and regulation for the entire region. The APA would usurp most local governments’ land-use authorities over private lands and also create the plans and rules for the public lands (which the state Department of Environmental Conservation would administer). A second core approach was the placing of natural resources at the center of all planning and policy. The TSC and then the APA emphasized the importance of the ecological and aesthetic values of the Adirondack Park and, following Design with Nature’s lead, based its understanding of what kinds of development and activities should go where on the natural carrying capacities of different Adirondack landscapes.
Once created, the APA fused together its data and ideas into separate public- and private-land plans that used traditional zoning and regulatory methods toward path-breaking environmental goals. Staff created the public-land plan first. They placed all public lands into one of nine classifications based on ecological characteristics and existing use patterns. About half of public lands were designated as wilderness areas, with rules codifying the spirit of a century-old “forever wild” Adirondack state law and largely following the specifics of the federal wilderness system created in 1964. Man-made interventions like cabins and roads would be removed, and only low-impact, nonmotorized activities like hiking, snowshoeing, and fishing would be allowed in these most pristine natural areas. These designations and rules provided an historic boost to wilderness advocates; the newly designated Adirondack wilderness areas instantly accounted for 85 percent of the total for the whole northeastern United States. Yet the plan also sought to accommodate a variety of long-standing recreational activities not permitted in wilderness areas. Planners classified most of the remaining public lands as “wild forest,” where some more intensive uses would be permitted. The plan allowed for fire towers and hunting structures and permitted the use of trucks and snowmobiles on a limited number of designated, usually already-existing, roads and trails. This State Land Master Plan only required the governor’s approval to take effect, and Rockefeller signed off on it in 1972 with relatively little immediate controversy.Footnote 11
Next, the APA focused on generating a plan for the nearly four million privately owned acres in Adirondack Park. Given the many thousands of landowners with stakes in this plan’s details and the fact that the state legislature would have to approve it, this undertaking proved much more politically troublesome. Conceptually, the private-land plan followed the same Design with Nature principles: it sought to direct development to where natural resources could best sustain it and where development already existed. Development would be limited in sensitive and remote areas, where provision of local government services was difficult, and in scenic vistas, especially those near public lands.
The private-land plan translated these principles into specific rules, first by setting zoning and density categories, and second by establishing a regulatory review system designed to enforce all manner of environmental standards. The zoning provisions placed all privately owned land into one of six categories, each with different allowable building-density levels and other binding development guidelines. On one end of the density spectrum, growth in existing towns and industrial zones remained largely unrestricted. On the other end, 53 percent of private land—a total of 1.9 million acres, most of which was owned by timber companies and private clubs—was placed into the most restrictive category that allowed no more than fifteen buildings per square mile, or an average lot size of more than forty-two acres. In addition to abiding by density limits, developers now had to seek approval from the APA in order to proceed with any project deemed of “regional significance,” the definition of which depended on category. In practice, the APA assumed review powers over a large proportion of projects, and this became a critical means by which regulators enforced their ecological and aesthetic goals.Footnote 12
The Politics of Passage
Establishing the Adirondacks’ complex and controversial regulatory system in the early 1970s depended on a distinctive set of political circumstances, the first of which was the enthusiastic support of an impatient, imperious, and unapologetically ambitious liberal governor who possessed the immense political powers needed to sway a reluctant state legislature. Reform depended on Nelson Rockefeller. As George Davis explained, “Once he was sold and made up his mind that this was a popular and innovative program, that’s all there was to it. If he said let’s go with it, he was not going to accept defeat.”Footnote 13 In 1971, Rockefeller demanded the legislature take up the bill creating the APA during its spring session, then exerted significant pressures on wavering lawmakers and helped engineer a key trade with New York City legislators to win its passage just before the session’s adjournment. In the still-tougher 1973 fight over the private-land plan, Rockefeller vetoed a bill that called for a one-year delay in the plan’s consideration, remained steadfast in the face of widespread, often theatrical opposition, and personally negotiated the compromises necessary to win final approval.Footnote 14
Rockefeller championed Adirondack land-use reform so strongly in part because it aligned with his ideas about the importance of the environment. In an era of numerous prominent green Republicans like U.S. House members Pete McCloskey (California), John Saylor (Pennsylvania), and Massachusetts governor Francis Sargent, Rockefeller proudly embraced the environmentalist label, as demonstrated by the 1970, election-year publication of his (ghostwritten) book, Our Environment Can Be Saved.Footnote 15 Prior to that, he initiated significant state purchases of open space and a massive Pure Waters Program that built infrastructure to clean the state’s waterways. Environmental activists opposed to numerous highway, bridge, and power plant construction projects that Rockefeller supported never fully trusted the governor’s instincts. But Rockefeller allowed TSC and APA environmental ideas to push him further than he had yet gone. In meetings where staff presented recommendations, George Davis found Rockefeller “a very innovative man” and a “rather open-minded individual.”Footnote 16
The idea of creating a regional land-use agency with supralocal authorities similarly resonated with Rockefeller. The governor spoke often of his abiding faith in what new and reorganized public agencies could accomplish, emphasizing that federal, state, and local governments all had to embrace “creativity, imagination, and innovation in meeting the needs of the people” while eschewing institutional “rigidity” and “inertia.” The governor had already spearheaded institutional change focusing on the environment, by committing New York to participate in a new Delaware River Basin Commission federal-state compact and establishing the Department of Environmental Conservation. He followed the pattern in a range of other policy areas, including transportation (creating both the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Department of Transportation), race relations (creating a Division of Human Rights), and development (creating the New York State Urban Development Corporation). Furthermore, the Urban Development Corporation—established by the legislature in 1968 at Rockefeller’s insistence following a legendary bout of gubernatorial arm-twisting and political threats—set a recent precedent for endowing new state entities with the power to overrule long-sacred local land-use authorities.Footnote 17
Rockefeller’s critical Adirondack advocacy both reflected and was assisted by its early 1970s timing—a distinctive historical moment in which environmental and economic moods combined to create a political tailwind for reform. Environmental political energies suddenly exploding across the nation’s political landscape resulted in a wellspring of path-breaking new laws. Between 1970 and 1973 the federal government created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, to name but a few, and dozens of state governments created new laws focused on wetlands, floodplains, and other land-use regulations.Footnote 18 To Adirondack environmental advocates, the window of opportunity for establishing ambitious reform seemed particularly wide open.
At the same time, what would prove to be the last years of the extended postwar economic boom (especially prior to the first OPEC oil embargo beginning in October 1973) fostered a sense of urgency. In particular, a still-hot recreational property market allowed reform advocates to make a convincing case that massive, imminent development necessitated immediate action. “If the Adirondacks are to be saved, time is of the essence,” the TSC chair wrote in his public letter delivering the commission’s report to Rockefeller in December 1970. Rockefeller made the same argument in 1971 when he demanded the legislature take up his bill: “We have to have something . . . or the land developers are going to run away with the Adirondacks.” Several particularly large development proposals stoked the worst fears of reform supporters and generated important public attention amid the 1971 and 1973 legislative battles. Most alarmingly, a subsidiary of the notorious Arizona-based Horizon Corporation—the subject of what was then the largest land-sale fraud case in Federal Trade Commission history—had purchased 24,000 wooded acres in an unzoned section of the Adirondacks and announced plans to build upward of 10,000 houses and several dams. The scale of this proposal handed reform supporters a public relations gift—a dramatic, tangible political foil. As one APA staff member later commented: “If there had been no Horizon, we would have had to invent one.”Footnote 19
In addition to Rockefeller’s formidable political powers and distinctive political timing, political dynamics and coalitions favorable to reform also played crucial roles in pushing Adirondack land-use reforms over the line. Of particular importance was how Adirondack proposals adopted a “critical area” framework whereby the entire state considered if and how it should regulate one discrete region. Distant, scenic places like the Adirondacks were what came to mind for a lot of New Yorkers when they thought about environmental issues. Land-use reform tended to be popular when focused on others’ land and community. And for New Yorkers who were seasonal Adirondack visitors with full-time residences elsewhere, leisure and recreational connections to the landscape inclined many toward reform. Even though legislators from the Adirondacks universally opposed the creation of the APA in 1971 and the private land plan in 1973, their numbers were relatively small in a state where most of the population clustered in and near New York City and other urban areas.Footnote 20
Reform opponents found themselves still more isolated because of the narrowness of their political base within the Adirondacks. Timber companies, private clubs, and wealthy families made up the largest private landowners in the Adirondacks, and it was on their relatively undeveloped tracts that the APA sought the most restrictive regulations. But these largest landowners typically did not seek intensive development on their properties anyway and so generally avoided joining the opposition. Furthermore, the national anti-environmental property-rights organizations that would grow in influence in the 1980s and beyond were not yet in a position to provide assistance.Footnote 21
By contrast, land-use reform advocates drew broad support. National organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society joined statewide environmental groups like the Environmental Planning Lobby in backing the Adirondack measures. Particularly important were the efforts of legendary Adirondack activist Paul Schaefer to bring regional wilderness advocates (like the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks and the Friends of the Forest Preserve) into alliance with the hunters and fishermen (represented by the New York State Conservation Council). These groups’ divergent visions had clashed many times before and would again in the years to come, but at key political moments during the creation of the new Adirondack regulatory system they agreed about the importance of reform.Footnote 22
Even still, the legislative fights proved contentious. Most legislators held deep reservations about giving the state powers to usurp local land-use authority. Arguments that local officials had not been sufficiently consulted resonated widely. Compromises were necessary to secure passage of the private-land plan. Following numerous public and private meetings at which literally hundreds of specific changes were suggested, the APA wrote a new plan draft and then in final negotiations with legislative leaders Rockefeller amended the plan further to make it more politically palatable. Most distasteful to environmentalists was a significant relaxing of shoreline regulations; another important compromise increased densities in every land-use category. Still, the overwhelming heart of the private-land plan remained intact. Once the Republican governor, Democratic Senate and Assembly leaders, and downstate legislators joined together to secure the needed votes, the opposition crumbled and the legislation passed easily. In May 1973, Rockefeller signed the measure at a large bill-signing ceremony in Albany and declared: “The Adirondacks are preserved forever.” An unprecedented new era in environmental land-use had begun.Footnote 23
The Challenges of Implementation
Reform supporters’ heady optimism would not last long. The creation of the new Adirondack land-use system during the mid- and late 1970s proved problematic and sometimes unpopular as APA staff ran into the enormous challenges of implementing reforms, and strong opposition to the APA among Adirondack elected officials and a great many year-round residents grew more organized. Reform survived these particularly challenging first years. State courts upheld the APA’s authorities, and a sufficient though slim majority in the state legislature held back spirited efforts to weaken or eliminate the APA. But far from settling questions about how environmental goals should shape the future of the region, the new land-use system instead became the new focal point around which existing debates continued, evolved, and sometimes even intensified.
These early implementation years in the Adirondacks, therefore, provide a telling, representative example of the potential and perils of environmental management that highlight key paradoxes of regulatory policymaking in this era. The APA ultimately achieved a great many of reformers’ goals: vast tracts of wilderness were preserved; future development was directed away from areas where it would do the most ecological and aesthetic damage and toward where it would do the least; an extensive set of environmental standards was infused into all aspects of the planning and land-use decision making for private and public lands. However, establishing well-functioning bureaucratic procedures proved difficult and, even after the new system improved, APA decision-making regularly gave reform opponents new evidence for their arguments and also frustrated and divided environmental advocates who had once provided such strong, unified support for the creation of the APA. The APA—like so many environmental regulatory agencies of the period—could attempt to balance multiple goals with the limited tools given it by enabling legislation, but it was in no position to reconcile deep, long-standing differences in interests, visions, and values among a variety of different stakeholders in and beyond the Adirondacks. As a result, what gradually emerged by the late 1970s was a fractured political landscape of enduring discontents in which most Adirondack groups grew dissatisfied with the realities of reform.
Creating and Improving the Bureaucracy
Creating a well-functioning program of private land use was one of the things mostly within the APA’s control. Yet this process generated enormous challenges. Inexperience and poor preparation contributed significantly to early problems. Early APA staff had backgrounds mostly in environmental planning; none had experience as regulators. As a result, they simply were not ready for what lay ahead. As George Davis explained, when the private land plan took effect on August 1, 1973—less than three months after the legislature approved it—“we discovered we didn’t have a plan for implementing all of this. When a landowner came into the office to propose something on his land, we didn’t even have a form for him to complete. We did not know what we wanted to ask him. The guy wants to do something on his land, and now the law says he has to go through us. We can’t just tell him to come back next month. We were so geared toward getting this plan through the legislature that we hadn’t focused on implementing it.”Footnote 24
Imperfect enforcement tools and a poor sense of public relations also caused early implementation problems. Under its enabling legislation, the APA could only pursue criminal charges—not civil penalties—against those who violated regulations. The APA kicked up mini-firestorms of bad publicity when the first criminal zoning violations it issued were not to large-scale, out-of-state developers but rather to one man employed as a state forest ranger and to another who led a Boy Scout troop just heading out on an expedition. As an early APA executive director later assessed this initial period: “Staff was young, enthusiastic, and dedicated, but they made mistakes. They were green, and the agency act was over their heads, overwhelming, and in trying to establish an agency presence, staff were occasionally overbearing.”Footnote 25
The APA’s approach was not just a function of inexperience, however, it was in part a self-conscious policy tactic. APA staff members wanted to firmly establish their rule-making authority, so initially they reviewed applications even for small projects very deliberately and held builders to the letter of the regulations. They “wanted to let it be known that we were in earnest,” early APA counsel Gordon Davis explained. “We were afraid of being nickeled and dimed to death.” The review processes they established represented a crucial new opportunity to improve the quality and siting of development. Before issuing building permits regulators asked developers to provide extensive information about the impacts of construction on soil, water and air quality, aesthetics, traffic, and local taxes. This sometimes necessitated developers hiring hydrologists, soil scientists, engineers, and geologists as well as the lawyers, architects, and planners who could prepare and present the findings. Regulators often responded to applications with requests for follow-up information, and the permits they issued after the extensive, time-consuming back-and-forth might come attached with conditions for design improvements, including the relocation or reduction in number of buildings, changing the type of sewage disposal, and increasing the setback from lakes and roads.Footnote 26
While APA staff viewed this careful review of project applications as a hard-fought-for, necessary environmental due diligence, for many developers the review process both raised the costs of building and—especially given how short-staffed APA offices were throughout the 1970s—delayed development. Large builders complained that under the new regulations even relatively standard projects took at least a year to get through the permitting process compared to just a few months previously.Footnote 27
Adirondack builders’ growing frustrations were further compounded by their sense that APA staff’s assessments of environmental and other permit criteria were confusing and subjective. Especially in these early years, regulators regularly updated and evolved permit criteria—a sensible response, in staff’s view, which allowed them to learn from their experience. But to builders the rules seemed to be constantly changing and arbitrary. Adding to their sense of grievance was how regulators combined quantitative, scientific environmental standards with qualitative, aesthetic judgments. In one case, a developer hoping to build a resort lodge and hundreds of houses on a former dairy farm outside of Lake Placid effectively proved that the flat, cleared, deep-soiled tract had the physical carrying capacity to absorb the environmental impacts of the proposal. But the APA upheld the zoning classification that allowed only thirty units on the land largely because the area was nestled near the scenic, publicly owned High Peaks region. Decisions like this led one former APA executive director to conclude that frustration with the agency emerged in large part from the “subjective administration of permits by the agency and a failure to develop clear standards and criteria for agency actions.”Footnote 28
Improving the land-use bureaucracy soon became a political priority. Nelson Rockefeller resigned the governorship in December 1973 and was sworn in as vice president of the United States in December 1974; recently elected Democratic governor Hugh Carey supported the APA but wanted it to function more effectively. So Carey appointed Robert Flacke, a businessman and Democratic town supervisor from Lake George, as chairman of the APA and directed him to improve the APA’s relations with local officials and individual landowners coming before the agency. Flacke was a reform supporter, but one attuned to the challenges of implementation: “Together these regulations constitute the most comprehensive and enlightened system of land use controls anywhere in the United States,” he said. “But we have also got the makings of a regulatory nightmare.” Flacke quickly pushed the agency to streamline application procedures, and the average processing time declined by more than half. He sought to create an “empathetic and compassionate type of enforcement” policy and worked with the state legislature to secure APA authority to assess civil penalties instead of only the controversial criminal penalties. Flacke’s APA worked to improve public relations by meeting frequently with local leaders, admitting and correcting mistakes, and providing the public more user-friendly versions of the agency’s rules and procedures. The APA also set up a toll-free phone number and opened additional offices to increase its accessibility.Footnote 29
In addition to improved bureaucratic processes, the substantive outlook of the APA evolved some as well. In particular, Flacke pushed the agency to focus more on local economic issues and the livelihood of year-round local residents. Monthly economic reports became a staple of commissioners’ meetings, and the APA played an active role in the Adirondack/North Country Economic Council. In its 1977 Annual Report, the APA proudly quoted a Plattsburgh Press Republican editorial, which noted that “not too long ago, the Adirondack Park Agency was continually criticized for not doing enough to help the local economy.” Now, however, the newspaper approved of the new approach: “The Agency is realizing that it can both protect the region and help it economically. While the concern for the environment is still predominant, the Agency is very definitely changing its emphasis toward economic improvement.”Footnote 30
Oppositional Politics
These efforts to improve and evolve the APA during Commissioner Flacke’s tenure from 1975 to 1978 proved both profoundly inadequate and critically important. On the one hand, more efficient and effective bureaucratic procedures helped very little in tamping down a period of inflamed oppositional politics led by those who fundamentally disagreed with the existence of the APA and its environment-focused approach to land-use management. On the other hand, those bureaucratic improvements played an important role in preserving the support the APA needed to survive this period of greatest political vulnerability and that assured its lasting institutional presence and power.
Anger with the APA took many dramatic forms. Among the often-told tales from this period that evolved into the stuff of local legend: the anonymous vandals who dumped truck-loads of manure onto APA property in the dark of night; the man apprehended in the process of trying to set fire to the APA’s headquarters by a surprised staffer working late; the sixty-year-old woman who dropped an APA officer to the ground with a powerful uppercut as he tried to deliver papers for her signature.Footnote 31 Beyond individual acts of frustration, an increasingly well-organized opposition challenged the APA’s regulations and the agency’s very existence. Opponents pursued two simultaneous strategies: a legal one seeking to curtail APA powers in the courts and a grassroots one attempting to pressure the state legislature into abolishing or significantly weakening the APA. Though both of these strategies ultimately failed, the depth and breadth of ongoing fights fostered a hostile political environment that made implementing land-use reform appreciably more difficult.
A mostly unorganized set of Adirondack developers spearheaded the legal opposition. They launched a spate of lawsuits in the first few years after the private land plan’s creation in 1973, though they did not like the results. Among the most important rulings, state courts agreed that regulators possessed authority to review applications based on cumulative environmental impacts that entire projects created rather than on narrower, engineering and permit-by-permit grounds. And the New York State Supreme Court upheld the APA’s authority to establish and enforce regulations on purely aesthetic grounds; because the APA’s mandate is to oversee a “unique and natural area” the court decided that such a regulation was not arbitrary or unreasonable. Opponents’ unambiguous defeats in the courts affirmed the legal basis for Adirondack reform.Footnote 32
Grassroots opposition to the APA proved more public and protracted. At its center were Tony D’Elia, an aggrieved Loon Lake vacation-home developer, and Ruth Newberry, a North Country widow of a millionaire discount-store owner, who in 1975 launched the League for Adirondack Citizens’ Rights, the self-proclaimed “voice of the oppressed people of the park.” The League began by holding a series of boisterous, well-attended public meetings around the region, each featuring testimony by individuals ensnarled in APA red tape. As additional prominent figures joined the League’s leadership—a newspaper editor, some elected officials, more real-estate men—new tactics and momentum fed off each other. The League developed a campaign asking private organizations and villages, towns, and counties in the Adirondacks to approve a common resolution calling for the abolishment or replacement of the APA; almost one hundred governments quickly signed on, along with dozens of private groups consisting of local businessmen, religious organizations, and unions. To publicize its activities and grievances, the League started a newsletter and then a newspaper—the Adirondack Defender—with a circulation in the tens of thousands. It developed an activist network designed to alert thousands of supporters about protest events. The League educated, worked with, and pressured local governments to refuse APA requests to develop land-use plans in accordance with the agency’s guidelines. And it campaigned vigorously against local officials with the temerity to express even tepid support for the APA.Footnote 33
This “Adirondacks rebellion”—as D’Elia entitled his 1979 memoir—thrived by tapping into and fostering intertwined discontents with government based on class and geographic roots. Anti-APA activists connected their goals and actions to Revolutionary War–era heroes. The League called one iteration of its activist network the “Minute Men” and railed against “regulation without representation.” The March 1976 first issue of the Adirondack Defender hailed Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (published exactly two hundred years earlier) as a role model and included a mission statement declaring: “This publication is being distributed to American citizens who are again being oppressed, this time by the Adirondack Park Agency, instead of King George. This publication is dedicated to regaining the freedom and rights the people of the Adirondacks have lost.”Footnote 34 In Adirondack Rebellion, D’Elia repeatedly sketched stark contrasts between “the rich, politically-powerful social elite and the poor, politically weak Adirondack people.”Footnote 35 Some of this was disingenuous; many conservative anti-APA leaders were affluent themselves. Still, a great many year-round residents shared a sense that wealthy, powerful, downstate conservationists were imposing their will on the Adirondacks, and observant activists angrily drew attention to the fact that a large proportion of the first wave of APA staffers possessed few long-standing Adirondack roots.Footnote 36
All of this widespread organizing against the APA created tangible challenges for regulators. APA attempts to work closely with local officials proved difficult when many municipalities had signed the League’s anti-APA resolution. In addition, League tactics sometimes expressly aimed to debilitate administrative processes. In 1977, the League launched Operation Survival, a campaign to embarrass the APA by flooding it with so many zoning variance applications—more than three hundred in just one two-week period, almost as many as had been filed the entire previous year—that the agency’s review system would collapse.Footnote 37
The APA survived this flood of paperwork, which was just one part of a multipronged 1977 campaign that turned out to be opponents’ best—but still ultimately unsuccessful—chance to defeat or defang the agency in Albany. When just such a bill—drafted by two prominent Adirondack legislators—passed the Senate, a Democratic-controlled Assembly let it die in the Environmental Conservation Committee chaired by a lawmaker representing the Bronx. The APA’s ongoing bureaucratic improvements had played a vital role in generating needed legislative goodwill when it needed it most.Footnote 38 Shortly thereafter, even one of the APA’s toughest critics, the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board, concurred that as a result of agency changes “the heated controversy which marked the early years of the Agency has been calmed.”Footnote 39
Enduring Discontents
The combination of administrative improvements and legal and legislative victories assured the future existence of the Adirondack Park Agency and succeeded in dissipating some of the most venomous political conflicts. But the agency continued to generate controversy and inspire a still-wide set of grievances in the years to come. What emerged following the APA’s birth and abbreviated youth was an early-onset yet long-lasting middle age—one in which seemingly everyone harbored enduring discontents about Adirondack land use as a wide range of regional interest groups and a slowly shifting slate of APA and DEC leadership and staff battled it out with each other and with governors and legislators over incremental changes to priorities, plans, and budgets. This unglamorous, uncertain, unsatisfying outcome was the product of the frustrations inherent in the APA’s administrative mandate and the difficulty in reconciling a wide range of Adirondack visions and interests.
Administrative policymaking on state-owned Adirondack lands provides one revealing window onto this era of enduring discontents. Public-land policy seemed an easier task, since there would be no major fights with the state legislature, no private landowners with which to contend, and no local politicians chaffing at their usurped land-use authority. However, even here persistent and confounding conflicts frustrated nearly everyone. Central to these public-land disputes were Adirondack Wilderness Areas, which were supposed to be free of nearly all man-made structures and motorized activities. The Department of Environmental Conservation did not approve construction of new structures or new motorized uses, but neither did DEC do very much—as it was supposed to—to remove the many existing structures like ranger cabins, roads, fire towers, and tent platforms that the state and private users had built over the decades or to enforce the ban on motorboats, snowmobiles, and floatplanes. As a result, the APA and wilderness advocates battled the DEC over its management practices for years to come.
Part of the DEC’s recalcitrance stemmed from its desire to avoid confronting long-time, often year-round Adirondack users who had grown accustomed to using these structures and motorized vehicles. Another important reason for DEC inaction was its lack of enthusiasm for the wilderness regulations in the first place. Most DEC staff’s background and approach differed markedly from the APA staff that had written the State Land Master Plan (SLMP). While much of the APA staff was young and recently trained in new, often interdisciplinary environmental ideas and focused in particular on wilderness management, DEC staff tended to be long-time employees of the old Conservation Department (before its consolidation into the DEC in 1970), traditionally trained in either forestry or wildlife, and predominantly focused on logging, fishing, and hunting concerns that coexisted uneasily with many APA ideas and policies. Furthermore, DEC staff resented how little they had been consulted in the creation of the SLMP, and they bristled at how they perceived the upstart APA to be dictating policy over lands they had long administered. The result was “tension verging on actual conflict” between the two agencies, as one close observer described it. Making implementation matters still more complicated, the DEC experienced frequent leadership changes (it had five different Commissioners during the 1970s), and it maintained a decentralized structure of fiercely independent regional offices that differed among themselves in land management approaches and practices.Footnote 40
The web of grievances about private-land policies proved similarly intractable but was even more complex in nature. Property-rights activists, developers, and local government officials on the one hand and environmental advocates on the other hand found much about the APA with which to disagree: specific APA zoning and permitting decisions (and the regulators making those decisions); patterns in APA decision making; the specifics of state laws defining the APA’s mandate; the broader type of administrative intervention the APA represented.
For those harboring fundamental, long-standing objections to the APA’s existence, the agency’s efforts to improve its bureaucratic processes solved nothing. When Tony D’Elia heard APA Chairman Flacke’s promises of change, D’Elia wrote: “We didn’t believe him . . . and as events transpired . . . we were justified in this non-belief.” Similarly, long-time APA opponents like the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board regularly directed fulsome public invective at specific regulatory decisions and decision-makers and publicized their recommendations for legislative changes to narrow and weaken APA powers.Footnote 41
Meanwhile, environmental advocates derided the APA’s evolutions at least as vigorously, becoming increasingly suspicious and even disdainful of the APA in this period. Whereas the Temporary Study Commission and the first years of the APA were widely seen as friendly to wilderness and ecological concerns, beginning in the Flacke years (1975–78) perceptions changed. Environmentalists supported the APA in legislative and legal battles against conservative opponents, but otherwise many grew profoundly disenchanted. To them, Flacke’s interest in taking economic and political considerations into account when making land-use decisions amounted to a betrayal and a defeat. “Flacke did not want to weaken the law, but he wanted to be more accommodating,” explained Dick Persico, the APA’s executive director during Flacke’s tenure as commissioner. “That only made him suspect by the environmentalists.”Footnote 42
After devoting six years to the TSC and APA, George Davis—the man responsible for developing so many of the APA’s key reforms—became so dispirited by Flacke’s leadership that he left the agency in 1976 to become the executive director of an advocacy group, the Wilderness Society, explaining in his letter of resignation that he had “witnessed an increasing number of decisions . . . that seemed to indicate a growing divergence from those principles and purposes that I thought were embodied in the original agency concept.” Harold Jerry, another of the original TSC and APA reformers, also bemoaned “a continual process of compromising” in these years and left the APA to take on the post of chairman of another advocacy group, the Adirondack Council, to pursue Adirondack environmental advocacy from outside government. Still more bluntly, long-time APA staffer Robert Glennon later wrote that Flacke’s tenure “marked the beginning of the decline of the APA”—a period from which, he argued, “the agency never recovered.”Footnote 43
These individuals’ frustrations reflected the larger transformation of the relationship between environmentalists and government agencies in the Adirondacks. Beginning in the late 1970s, and picking up momentum during the 1980s and beyond, organizations like the Adirondack Council, the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks took on a frequently adversarial role—alternately organizing grassroots activities, lobbying government officials, suing, and threatening litigation in service of various environmental goals. In other ways, the Adirondacks’ various environmental groups also increasingly took on critical work they believed government agencies were either unable or unwilling to do effectively—things like setting up nonprofit land trusts to purchase open space, working with the forest industry to create conservation easements restricting future development on their large tracts of private land, and generating new visions for the future of the Adirondack Park.Footnote 44
Environmental advocates’ conflicts with each other also contributed to an increasingly fractured political landscape. For example, the Sierra Club split from the Adirondack Council over approaches to 1980 Lake Placid Olympics development proposals; the siting and design of the ski jumps—what would become the tallest structures in the entire Adirondacks—were just the most visible of many controversial proposals that Olympic organizers brought before the APA and which environmental advocates debated. And disagreements between hunting and fishing clubs and environmental groups that had temporarily dissipated in the late 1960s and early 1970s resurfaced, with the former believing that wilderness advocates were “trying to freeze sportsmen out of the Adirondack Park.”Footnote 45
Similar to conservative opponents of the APA, frustrated environmentalists singled out the inadequacy of the state laws. The most troubling specific provision concerned the strength and scope of shoreline regulations—the area that Rockefeller had compromised with legislative leaders most on to get the 1973 private land plan passed; as a result, the APA did not possess the authority to restrict development at the edges of rivers, lakes, and ponds nearly as much as virtually any environmentalist (and most APA regulators themselves) believed necessary.Footnote 46 More fundamentally, over time many environmentalists gradually grew dissatisfied with the APA’s primary mandate to improve and geographically focus growth, not to stop it. Over 135 miles of roads and sixty-five miles of shoreline were developed in the two decades after 1973, and in 1992 the park had 62 percent more dwellings than it had in 1967. For those who emphasized either the aesthetic importance of unbroken forests or the ecological damage such development precipitated, the political triumphs of the early 1970s came to seem inadequate.Footnote 47
The ideologically broad range of frustrations with the Adirondack regulatory regime emerged in part from the specifics of state laws and how administrators implemented them. However, the enduring discontents also stemmed from what no sets of laws or regulators could possibly transcend—the difficulty of reconciling quite different goals for the Adirondacks, as well as contrasting beliefs about who should get to decide those goals. Many environmentalists’ beliefs that wilderness was for quiet contemplation, spiritual rejuvenation, and ecological sustainability coexisted uneasily with others’ experience of the Adirondacks as a place of sometimes noisy, infrastructure-dependent outdoor recreation, and for the woods and towns as a place to work and make money. Still more irreconcilable was a vision of the Adirondacks as a statewide resource that should be managed by statewide interests and institutions and a vision of the Adirondacks as a place where local residents and their representatives should make their own land-use decisions like most everywhere else. Political differences that emerged from a range of economic, recreational, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific values—and the question of who gets to choose among them—underlay Adirondack land-use reform’s difficult, unsatisfying journey.Footnote 48
Conclusion
The emergence and evolution of land-use reform in the Adirondacks provides revealing insights into the character and lasting import of 1970s-era American environmental liberalism. The early-1970s creation moment was distinctive—a brief period when the emergence of ambitious new environmental ideas overlapped both with liberal reformers’ confidence and political power and with an about-to-disappear sense that robust postwar economic growth required and could fiscally support new policy approaches. Environmental liberalism in the Adirondacks and around the country extended the program of Great Society–era state building a handful of important additional years and created enduring institutions. Later, the challenges of implementation during the mid- and late 1970s inspired and later contended with very different political moods and perspectives. Trying to make the bureaucratic processes work satisfied just about nobody.
The legacy of this decade, though, is that central elements of both periods long endured. The institution (the Adirondack Park Agency) and key ideas (regional regulation of public and private lands with environmental values in the foreground) from the early 1970s would coexist with the right and left’s various frustrations and discontents of the mid- and late 1970s in similar forms for decades to come. The capacious environmental liberalism of the 1970s established long-lasting policy and political patterns, even as its multiple, ambitious goals for the public good became clouded and compromised in the fraught space of governance.
