by Dave Gibson
Proposed six years ago, the sprawling 6,400-acre Adirondack Club and Resort (ACR) near Tupper Lake remains on paper one of the most serious threats to the Adirondacks in 40 years of Adirondack Park Agency (APA) history. Its650 luxury homes and condos would require expensive new services on lands which today are logged, hunted and fished.
Most of the ACR is proposed on private lands zoned least appropriate for intense development, and reserved for forestry, agriculture and open space recreation. Thus, ACR has Park-wide implications. It would also place development on steep slopes and damage small streams entering Tupper Lake. On a landscape scale, it would break up habitats connecting the High Peaks Wilderness Area tithe east with the Bog River Wilderness to the west. In sum, ACR would fragment the great northern hardwood forests of the park and foul its pure waters, the very foundations forth region’s economy.
ACR was originally justified as great camps and ski-in, ski-out condos whose owners would financially support reopening the Big Tupper Ski Area on Mt. Morris, and provide tax benefit to Tupper Lake. This justification has been proven false. The applicant has pushed ski center operations out by four years, refuses today for infrastructure up front and offers payments in lieu of taxes, not taxes in full. The application would end all forest management, and all leases for hunting and fishing.
The long-delayed public hearing could start in January-February 2011,and last many months. As a newly reestablished organization devoted to safeguarding, extending and educating about all wild lands, Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserves now fully engaged. We applied for and received party status this fall. We will work in coalition with dozens of concerned citizens in Tupper Lake, swell as with other groups to present hearing record that will compel therapy to reject ACR, and hopefully convince the applicant to submit an alternative design that makes more environmental and economic sense. Fundamental goals that Adirondack Wild will seek to explore at the hearing include:
• understanding and protecting area habitats
• protecting large blocks of forest
• clustering homes to reduce sprawl
• reducing road construction another threats to water.
This testimony will be relevant elsewhere, and provide reasons why the APA Act should be changed to make this type of speculative development illegal.
We thank the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter for its partnership and initial small grant. We look forward to working with Chapter leaders and members in the months ahead.
What You Can Do
The Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter’s participation in the ACR issue was approved by the Chapter ExCom in 2007. The developer’s application remained dormant at the Adirondack Park Agency until recently. The Chapter’s Adirondack Committee is working jointly with Adirondack Wild on this issue. Adirondack Wild needs to raise thousands of dollars for legal advice and experts in habitat assessment and alternative design that could make ACR compatible with human and wild neighbors. To get involved:
• Follow Adirondack Wild at www.adirondackwild.org.
• Call or e-mail Dan Plumley or David Gibson at dplumley@adirondackwild.org, dgibson@adirondackwild.org; 518-637-2385, or 518-469-4081.