By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer
June 04, 2008 06:32 am
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ELIZABETHTOWN -- Nine environmental groups have joined forces to support legal protection of tax payments on Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserve land.
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A legal decision in Chautauqua County last year ordered New York to cease tax payments on all state-owned land until they are made fair and equal.
The case, brought by Arkwright Town Supervisor John Dillenburg III, is under appeal but has raised serious concern among Adirondack towns, where much of the land is preserved by law in the State Constitution.
The Dillenburg case goes before the Supreme Court Appellate Division in Rochester next September.
On Tuesday, the court granted permission for the Adirondack Council, Adirondack Landowners Association, Adirondack Mountain Club, Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, Audubon New York, Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, Open Space Conservancy and Residents' Committee to Protect the Adirondacks to file a joint amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in support of continued tax payments, said John Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council.
"At stake is more than $70 million in annual property-tax payments to 92 towns, 12 counties and dozens of school districts in the Adirondack Park alone, on 2.7 million acres of constitutionally protected New York State Forest Preserve."
Each group included a statement in the 38-page brief, compiled by Albany attorney Marc S. Gerstman, former chief counsel for the Department of Environmental Conservation.
AFFECTS LAND PURCHASES
The Dillenburg decision, Gerstman says in the brief, has already had a "chilling effect" on additional land acquisitions, with some towns, he said -- specifically naming the Town of Essex -- exercising veto authority to prevent the state from buying more land for addition to the Adirondack Park.
Gerstman crafts his legal argument around 1886 legislation where New York waived "sovereign immunity for taxation" on state lands, pointing to ancient documents that considered the forests "great natural reservoirs" of drinking water for large populations to the south.
"There appears to be no precedent in federal or state law that mandates a state to waive sovereign immunity for taxation purposes," he wrote.
"Once waived, it is up to the local taxing authority to assess and collect taxes on state lands."
Gerstman also takes issue with the "piecemeal" or "jumbled" approach to state-land taxation alleged by Dillenburg.
"The Equal Protection Clause does not require that a state address all aspects of a social problem at once. Reform may take one step at a time, addressing itself to the phase of the problem which seems the most acute."
SEPARATE ISSUES
The Town of Arkwright is not in the Adirondack or Catskill parks, Gerstman notes.
The 2,190 acres of State Wildlife Management Area in Arkwright that do not receive state tax payments are not preserved by the Article 14 "forever wild" law in state constitution, and "there is no conceivable scenario under which the number of visitors to Arkwright remotely approaches the number of annual visitors who frequent the Catskill and Adirondack Preserves."
The green groups look to long-standing preservation to exempt the northern parks from any fallout from the Dillenburg decision.
"It was inappropriate for the lower court in this case to lump the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserves in with other state forest lands," said Neil Woodworth, Adirondack Mountain Club executive director.
"The payments on Forest Preserve lands have been upheld by New York's courts over the past 122 years."
kdedam@pressrepublican.com
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