Park’s local governments give historic Adironack land deal mixed reviews
The last forty-eight hours have seen a series of strong statements, pro and con, for the 69,000 acre land deal signed Sunday by Governor Andrew Cuomo. One of the most interesting conversations is happening within local government.
At least three prominent local officials have come out in support of the $47 million dollar deal, including Essex County chair Randy Douglas and Minerva town supervisor Sue Montgomery Corey, both Democrats.
The official press release also included positive comments from North Hudson town supervisor Ronald Moore.
“The Boreas Ponds tract could be a big draw for people to hike, fish, hunt, and camp. It is a truly magnificent area that will at some point be open to the public,” he said.
But the Park’s two big local government groups — the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board and the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages have both issued strongly worded statements opposing the deal.
The Review Board calls the deal “unprecedented in its overall fiscal irresponsibility,” while AATV president Brian Towers suggested that the land effort would put “a boot across our necks.”
Towers described the deal as continuing “a long history of questionable land acquisition supported by extreme environmentalists and ignorance of the fragile Adirondack Park economy.”
The differing views here continue a long debate within local government over the Finch Pruyn project. Many communities negotiated closely with the Nature Conservancy, and arranged side deals allowing them to purchase land for local projects.
When the Finch Pruyn effort was unveiled in 2007, not a single town voted to exercise the veto-power that communities hold over projects funded through the Environmental Protection Fund.
But later, after the AATV and the Review Board began campaigning to revise the deal, some communities passed resolutions calling for the land purchase to be scaled back or canceled.
Tags: adirondacks, land use, politics
Walker, the problem with your example is that it is only good for the guy with the woodlot and his neighbor with the truck garden. What if they each have two children? Now you have four people and only two businesses,and so on. What then?
There’s a page on Sustainability, with a section titled decoupling environmental degradation and economic growth, but that’s mostly talking about avoiding problems associated with growth. It says “While conventional economics is concerned largely with economic growth and the efficient allocation of resources, ecological economics has the explicit goal of sustainable scale (rather than continual growth), fair distribution and efficient allocation, in that order.” I don’t see anything saying that “you need to have some growth.”
Seems to me that if we could achieve zero population growth, there is no substantial reason that we could not achieve a sound, stable economy without growth. Other than maybe greed.
Anyone?
Sorry, Larry, I didn’t see your post when I wrote mine.
If they each have two children, everything’s fine– that’s zero population growth. It only looks like growth when you look at it short term. Looked at generation-to-generation, the population stays unchanged. It’s only when couples producing more than two children aren’t balanced by couples producing fewer than two children that you have a problem.
To play it out in the example, my daughter inherits my woodlot, and your son marries her. Your daughter inherits your truck farm, and my son marries her. Since we inherited our places from parents who each had only two children, everything works out fine. Obviously not quite real life, but we’re talking theory here.
Anyway, the links in my previous post are claiming that it might be possible to have growth with sustainability. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I was just taking issue with Paul’s assertion that sustainability itself requires growth.
There’s merit in your theory, Walker, particularly when coupled with zero population growth. In that case, growth could be realized as “improvement” for all and not constantly increasing “consumption.”
In theory sure. But since we live in a economy (for better or worse) based on money (same goes for a socialist or communist society) growth is required. This isn’t a bad explanation:
“If the economy doesn’t grow the financial system will collapse.
The main reason for this is to do with how money is created. As we have seen new money is created by banks and is loaned into existence. Somebody needs to pay back that money, but with interest. And that is where the problem lies. Nearly all the money in circulation (97%) is loaned into existence. We need to pay this back, but with interest. Where does this interest come from? To pay back the interest we need to take out more loans, that also carry interest, etc. In other words: the total money supply needs to grow continuously.”
That is just how it works, ask any economist liberal or conservative and you will get a similar explanation. You can grow slowly but you still have to grow.
This PBS series “The Ascent of Money” covers this very well:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascentofmoney/
It seems like you should not need growth in the economy but you do. It doesn’t have to grow in the Adirondacks but it has to grow somewhere.
Why does more money have to be created?
Walker, I am serious watch the PBS program. It explains this well and really helped me undersand the concept and I have an MBA. Your “theory” could work in a system not based on money (or barter or a similar concept) but that is not how it works in most places. Here is the key point, if you can find someone who wants to give out money for nothing than give me a call!
Um, the Federal Reserve.