The Private Land Use and Development Plan for the Adirondack Park – which prescribes where, and how much, development is appropriate across the Adirondack Park’s 3.4 million acres of privately-owned lands – was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in May, 1973.
The Adirondack Park Agency Act, which Rockefeller signed into law two years earlier, in 1971, articulated the idea for a living park, one that existed in fact, not just on paper.
The 1973 Adirondack Park Private Land Use plan was shaped by that idea and with its adoption, integrated every community and every landscape into a 6,000 square mile entity we now recognize as a park.
The New York State Bar Association’s Environmental & Energy Law Section will meet at the Sagamore Hotel in Bolton Landing on Lake George in Warren County, NY, on September 26 and 27.
Topics to be discussed include “The Adirondack Park and Land Use Plan at 50,” with a panel of speakers that includes:
Peter S. Paine, Jr, appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to the APA in 1971 and a member of the governor’s Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks, whose most important recommendation was the creation of a regional land use agency;
Richard Booth, who joined the Adirondack Park Agency in 1972 as a staff attorney and now a professor emeritus at Cornell University;
Authors Brad Edmondson and Bernard Melewski;
Curt Stager, a professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith’s College;
Claudia Braymer, deputy director of Protect the Adirondacks; and
Lake George Waterkeeper Chris Navitsky.
For information, visit nysba.org.
Illustration: Southern half of the map from the Preliminary Private Land Use and Development Plan for the Adirondack Park (1972), courtesy Union College Kelly Adirondack Center.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
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