IN RESPONSE TO CATSKILL MOUNTAINKEEPER’S CALL FOR BALANCE

(Published by HV1 August 23, 2023)

We welcome Catskill Mountainkeeper's Executive Director’s letter to the editor dated August 16 where he calls upon our communities to find a balance between development and environmental conservation. However, he and many other well-intentioned people and environmental groups all too often frame any and all development in life-threatening existential terms, while offering little accommodation to local human and community development needs. Mountainkeeper says they want balance, but what they outline espouses the need to protect and conserve as much land as possible, limit most development, and rely on some unspecified thing to maintain our local economy. 

That “unspecified thing” is clearly more ’tourism’. While our local tourism industry is doing great, it too comes at a cost - more visitors, more traffic, more hotels, resorts and restaurants, and amusements, and more second home-owners and short-term rentals - things Mountainkeeper said they don’t want. When tourism-related developments are proposed, they are often opposed - glamping sites, resorts, hotels, retreats, and campgrounds have all met resistance for various reasons, often led by conservation groups.

Although we will not delve into specific development proposals mentioned in Mountainkeeper's letter, we will point out that developers, by law, work with local planning and zoning boards and governments, get input from communities through public hearings and community outreach and hear from groups just like the Catskill Mountainkeeper. And they do respond, accommodate, and adjust their applications to concerns and new insights all the time. 

Mountainkeeper's letter and activist work often use fear-mongering, and sensationalize every proposed development's scope and impact - tapping into people’s instinctive resistance to change in general. These anxieties are leveraged to promote an aggressive ‘land conservation’ agenda. Their activist success leaves communities with few sustainable economic opportunities, aside from tourism, and results in limited tax revenue sources and increasingly expensive housing costs.  

From our perspective, there is little 'balance’ in Mountiankeeper's message. And their message comes across to the public unambiguously - development of any kind is unwanted here; it will be obstructed in any way legally possible; and we will send a message to all would-be investors and developers - you are not welcome. For locals in need of affordable, working-class housing, services, and income, their message intentionally or not comes across as sacrificing local's real human needs in favor of a global environmental mission.  

While fortunately there has been an uptick in developer interest in Ulster and Sullivan in the last few years, it is not assured as there are other places to invest. Limiting growth leaves us increasingly reliant on government support, or worse, dependent upon genuinely bad development proposals.

What we need is more listening to each other - our concerns, needs, and goals. There is plenty of overlap and consensus if we seek them out. There are no ‘draw-bridges or walls’ that can stop newcomers arriving, or stop young adults from leaving. But what we can do is plan together, and work in good faith to build a better future. The Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation and Ulster Strong welcome an approach that will result in balancing the needs of people and our ecosystems.

Mike Oates

President & CEO

Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation

Meagan P. Bianco

Director of Community Engagement
Ulster Strong