Adirondack population, land use reviewed at Local Government Day

LAKE PLACID — An eye-opening Adirondack survey drew a standing-room-only crowd at Local Government Day.

The annual event, organized by the Adirondack Park Agency, drew nearly 300 town officials and land-use planners.

For two years, researchers coordinated by Adirondack North Country Association and the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages have visited 103 communities in the park and interviewed officials in an attempt to paint a statistically sound picture of park demographics, facts and figures.

Only 13 towns did not participate, some not wholly within Adirondack boundaries.

Arietta Town Planner Brad Dake conceived of the project and launched it through the Adirondack North Country Association with a $93,000 grant from the Department of State.

Dake and Jim Martin, a land-use consultant from the LA Group, presented first highlights to local officials this week.

OLDER POPULATION
There are 132,807 residents in the Adirondacks, a number holding steady since 2000.

The median age is 43, most similar to the age of the western coast of Florida and older than the U.S. average age 35.

Researchers attribute the older population to "in-migration" of people 40 to 50 years old who built a successful career elsewhere, then moved to the Adirondacks, where housing is less expensive.

Over the same time, young adults ages 19 to 30 left the region in record numbers, the survey showed on charts with a canyon-sized drop offsetting the influx of people.

"The age and population thing has an immense impact on everything about the park," Dake said.

Growth ring
Numbers show a ring of growth and youth around the park that is clustered near urban centers of Plattsburgh in the northeast, Malone in the northwest and Queensbury, Saratoga and Lake George in the south.

And while property values and incomes skew higher on the park's edge, most aspects of towns inside the Blue Line (park boundaries) closely resemble their Adirondack counterparts.

STUDENT DECLINE
Decline in school enrollment is "one of the most alarming considerations we've uncovered," Martin said.

The park includes 61 school districts — 28 wholly within the Blue Line — and a total of 17,895 students.

Since 1970, the number of students has dropped 31 percent from 20,166.

The number of teachers grew 43 percent, the survey found, from 1,362 teachers in 1970 to 1,946 teachers in 2006.

It cost an average of $1,422 to educate an Adirondack student in 1970 and $17,626 in 2006.

DEBT MEASURE
The median combined household income inside the Blue Line is $43,852, with government jobs — mostly prisons — supplying large amounts of employment, upwards of 44.2 percent in Franklin County's park towns.

The survey pitted income data against housing prices, revealing areas, largely in the central Adirondacks, where debt-to-income ratios do not support normal bank requirements for mortgage approval (maximum 31 percent of household income).

LAND USE
There are 143,000 parcels of land encompassing 6,619,139 Adirondack acres, 76 percent of which are wild, forested or in conservation agreements, either state-owned or private.

There are 642,995 acres in residential use — 355,182 owned by people with zip codes in the Adirondacks and 287,813 owned by people from outside the park.

Some 62,177 Adirondack acres are in agricultural use, and only 11,452 acres — 0.2 percent of the land — is in industrial use, compared to a national average 20 percent.

So far, the survey has not compared parcel data against classification in the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, which could potentially mark impacts of land-use regulation.

The plethora of information was gathered and knitted together from DEC records, Office of Real Property Services data, APA maps and census data, among other sources, Martin said.

The Adirondack Park Regional Assessment Project is contained in three volumes. Each town that contributed to the survey will receive an eight-page demographic profile of their community.

The final work will be available mid-April online at: http://aatvny.org/content

E-mail Kim Smith Dedam at: kdedam@pressrepublican.com