ALBANY — By MICHAEL VIRTANEN
For sale: Secluded 92-acre, historic camp in the Adirondacks complete with recreational facilities; once home to hundreds of prisoners.
The woodsy Camp Gabriels minimum security prison 15 miles northwest of Lake Placid has 48 buildings shuttered since it lost its inmates last year as New York's prison population continued a decade-long decline.
The price? It's hard to tell. The state Office of General Services is considering two appraisals, which the state won't divulge, and comparing them to comparable real estate sales before setting a minimum bid.
"It's not a common thing to sell," said state OGS spokeswoman Heather Groll.
The central Adirondacks facility began as a sanitarium a century ago, where tuberculosis patients came to rest and breathe the clean mountain air. Nearby Paul Smith's College later used it for dormitories. In the 1980s, the state turned it into a minimum-security prison without fences. Inmates were known for their labor, helping build the elaborate ice castles at the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival, cutting downed trees with chain saws, doing jobs for local non-profits.
Now the prison is on the block, and Brighton town officials are worried that in this down economy there will be no legitimate buyers. The Town Board recently passed a resolution asking the state to postpone the October auction for two years.
"They've got 48 empty boarded-up buildings," Town Supervisor John Quenell said. "Thank goodness the security personnel are there. Without it, it would be quite a nightmare."
The Town Redevelopment Citizens' Committee has found that most potential users don't want anything that large, Quenell said. The concern is selling cheap to an underfunded bidder who won't be able to maintain it and eventually will abandon it. The supervisor said there have been a few nibbles.
The steel buildings are utilitarian, and the next owner may be stuck with a demolition job, he said.
OGS is reviewing two appraisals it will use in helping establish a starting point for the auction, Groll said. The office has not yet decided whether the auction will be live or by sealed bid, or when and where it will be held. The agency has sold land near prisons before, but never a complete campus like this, she said.
"The auction itself will show what the market will bear for the property," Groll said. "We will be offering the parcel as a whole. Any subdivision of the property following the auction would need to be approved by local governments and zoning boards."
New York operates 68 prisons that held 57,093 inmates in mid-August, down from the historic high of 71,538 in 1999.
With legislative approval, last year the Department of Correctional Services also closed Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, Camp McGregor in Saratoga County and several annexes on the grounds of higher-security prisons. Gabriels, 123 miles north of Albany, was down to about 60 inmates for its 336 beds. Nearly all the 104 staff took transfers.
The Department of Environmental Conservation took over Pharsalia. Corrections still owns the McGregor camp.
Revisions to the strict Rockefeller-era drug laws have shortened sentences and helped reduce the inmate population, especially in minimum-security facilities. Meanwhile, New York's crime rate dropped 62 percent from 1990 through 2008, according to the Department of Criminal Justice Services. Total index crimes — murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, vehicle theft — fell from 1,144,874 to 448,554.
This year, lawmakers agreed to close the Lyon Mountain minimum security prison in northern Clinton County and the minimum security part of the Butler Correctional Facility in Wayne County in western New York by Jan. 31, corrections spokeswoman Linda Foglia said. Two other northern facilities — at Ogdensburg and Mineville —were targeted for closing by the Paterson administration but kept open by legislators.
Correctional officer staffing declined from 20,299 in 2000 to about 18,580 in mid-August, Foglia said.
"There is certain irony here, in that Senator Ron Stafford got a bunch of prisons plugged into the north country, thanks to the Rockefeller drug laws, as manna from heaven for our depressed rural economies," Quenell said. "Fact is, they did squat. Here in Brighton, we had about six locals employed at Gabriels."
"Now the state has decided to leave certain unpleasant residuals from this misguided judicial experiment behind for the not-so-enriched locals to dispose of," he said.
AP-WF-08-29-10 1512GMT
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