Land-rights legal group targets Adirondacks

Local News

ON THE NET

Foundation for Land and Liberty

www.landandlibertyfoundation.org

TAKING ACTION

The Foundation for Land and Liberty has taken its first step as a new nonprofit group; they are raising money. President Karen Moreau said the funds will be used to accomplish outreach and build a legal fund.

"We are now developing a website to showcase real-life situations of dealings with Adirondack Park regulation. And we are going to be raising money to develop a staff of attorneys with an advisory committee to support their cases. We plan to bring in expertise on forestry, the environmental sciences and real property — anything that would require some real knowledge and not just a slanted presentation of what the facts are," Moreau said.

The expertise and legal resource would be available to anyone who wants to go before the Adirondack Park Agency with a project plan.

"Or perhaps a business that wants to do a project in the Adirondacks," Moreau said.

The foundation's website will highlight cases of compelling public interest where local landowners have struggled in the Adirondacks.

"We want to represent that other voice," Moreau said.

"In my world, the people win over the trees."

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November 1, 2010

KIM SMITH DEDAM Press-Republican The Press Republican Mon Nov 01, 2010, 03:28 AM EDT

ALBANY — The state has a new legal resource founded to protect one of the oldest American rights.

Its motto draws from words John Adams wrote in 1790: "Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."

And much of the early focus of this group is looking to support Adirondack property owners' rights and their land-use issues through regulation under the State Land Master Plan.

The Foundation for Land and Liberty formally opened for business recently with an inaugural online presence.

Founding attorney Karen B. Moreau said the impetus for this new nonprofit coalition will lend a voice — or at least a legal leg to stand on — to the everyday struggles of Adirondack Park residents.

"People wanted to be able to be free from tyranny," Moreau said. "It is not an extreme position that sort of tyranny is not taking place in the Adirondacks. It looks to me like the people who live and work in the Adirondacks are not being fairly represented."

Moreau said the rural population base puts the park at a disadvantage as laws are made in Albany, while much of the rest of New York holds only a dim view of what landowners in the Adirondacks face.

The small number of votes in State Legislature plus the high-profile work of environmental groups often stacks the decks against rural landowners, Moreau said.

"The system isn't working. The pendulum has swung so far in favor of elimination of the native Adirondacker, in favor of this Forever Wild preservation philosophy, to the point where land-use decisions are working against the people. We need to make sure the rest of the state knows how policies coming out of Albany are impacting the rural park population."

An attorney from the Hudson Valley, Moreau said her first experience with land-use rights came early, barely out of law school, when the state started looking to build the Hudson River Valley Greenway.

Part of that preservation would have cut through her family's farm on the Hudson River.

"Myself and a number of other property owners attended all the public hearings and joined together to make sure the law that was actually passed made clear they could not use eminent domain to take property for aesthetic purposes."

Moreau describes herself as a "country lawyer" from the Albany area, where she owns a farm and a woodlot.

Eight years ago, as an assistant counsel for the Senate Republican Majority, Moreau developed legal expertise in agriculture and rural economic development, recreation and tourism and real property taxation.

"The work put me in touch with many people that would come in from the Adirondacks to talk about their issues and concerns," she said.

And there she met attorney Dennis Phillips, a co-founder of Foundation for Land and Liberty, also very active in representing private property owners; as well as Robert Slacke, former Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner under Gov. Hugh Carey and owner of Fort William Henry resort in Lake George.

"The three of us are founding board members," Moreau said. "The foundation officially formed this summer. We are a statewide organization and will be naming other board members from other part of the state."

What John Adams said as the nation was being formed still holds true today, Moreau said.

"If people can't feel secure in perhaps their most significant investment in life — a cabin, a farm, a purchase that is part of their dream — if they can't participate and have due process before governmental agencies, if they cannot feel secure in that, then we do not have liberty."