Forest Preserve (New York)

's Forest Preserve comprises almost all the lands owned by the state of New York within the Adirondack and Catskill parks. It is managed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
, the Forest Preserve covers nearly 3 million acres, about 61% of all land managed by DEC. Around 2.7 million acres are in the Adirondacks while are in the Catskills.
Article XIV of the state constitution requires the Forest Preserve to "be forever kept as wild forest lands", thus providing the highest degree of protection of wild lands in any state. A constitutional amendment would be required to transfer any of this land to another owner or lessee. A later amendment to Article XIV also made the lands important parts of water supply networks in the state, particularly New York City's, by allowing 3% of the total lands to be flooded for the construction of reservoirs.
The establishment of the Forest Preserve in the 19th century was motivated primarily by economic considerations. Over time, its importance to recreation, tourism, and conservation came to be seen.

Origins

Adirondacks

In 1865, George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, which made the connection between deforestation and desertification. In the years that followed, New York's business community began to fear that erosion from unchecked logging in the Adirondacks could silt up the Erie Canal and eliminate the state's economic advantage.
Image:Adirondack and Catskill Parks Locator.svg|300px|thumb|left|The Adirondack and Catskill parks within New York, delineated by the Blue Line
Five years later, surveyor Verplanck Colvin was said to have had the idea for a park while viewing the Adirondacks from the summit of Seward Mountain. He wrote to his superiors in Albany, who appointed him to a committee to study the problem.
In 1882, businessmen began lobbying the legislature in earnest. The Forest Preserve Act was passed three years later, prohibiting logging on state-owned land.

Catskills

Later that year, Ulster County's representatives in the Assembly were trying to get the county out of a crushing property tax debt a court had ruled they owed the state. Their solution was to convey some of the land on which they owed the taxes, mostly around Slide Mountain to the state.
The Catskills had actually been considered when the Forest Preserve legislation was first passed, but Harvard botanist Charles Sprague Sargent had visited them and reported back to the legislature that it was not worth the effort as its streams did not appreciably affect the state's navigable waterways. However, an amended version of the bill was passed, after many deals and compromises among members, that added lands in Ulster, Sullivan and Greene counties to those eligible for Forest Preserve status.
One side effect of this deal is that the state pays all local and county property taxes on the Forest Preserve as if it were a commercial landowner. This has helped many local governments remain solvent as they have very little economic assets other than forest resources.

Article XIV

To manage the land, the state had created a Forest Commission, making New York second only to California in having a state-level forestry agency. Most of its members were either openly or covertly connected to timber interests, however, and routinely approved dodges around the legislation to make sure logging would continue. In 1893 the legislature retroactively approved many of these practices by giving the commission the right to sell timber from the lands and trade them as it saw fit.
It seemed the Forest Preserve now existed only on paper. But the following year New York held a constitutional convention, and the language of the law was written into the new state constitution with added words to close every loophole the Forest Commission had found.
This section, Article VII of the 1894 constitution, is often referred to as the "forever wild" section even though those two words do not appear next to each other in the text.
Since amending New York's constitution is a deliberately cumbersome process that requires the approval of both Assembly and Senate in successive sessions of the legislature, followed by public approval at the next general election, this put a severe damper on any efforts by the Forest Commission to placate the loggers while still claiming to be honoring the law.
Nonetheless, they would try. The new provision barely survived an attempt to gut it two years later when they again prevailed upon the legislature to approve an amendment requiring the state to "manage the land in accordance with sound timber management principles." Voters resoundingly rejected it, however, and the principle of a "forever wild" Forest Preserve has remained inviolate in New York State to this day.
Since then, over 2,000 amendments to Article XIV have been introduced in the legislature. Of those, only 28 have made it to the ballot, and only 20 have passed. Many of those have been otherwise routine land transfers that enabled the construction or expansion of public cemeteries or airports. Others have allowed for the construction and continued maintenance of reservoirs and highways. The most significant change was a pair of amendments that created the ski centers at Belleayre in the Catskills and Gore and Whiteface in the Adirondacks. The latter includes a toll road to the summit as well.
Subsections were later added to allow the construction of reservoirs and make certain that use of the land remained free to the public beyond any reasonable fee the state could charge for a particular activity.

Acquisition of new Forest Preserve land

Blue Line

In 1902, when Article XIV was more a matter of settled law, the legislature realized it had to delimit where Forest Preserve would be acquired. Accordingly, that year the Adirondack Park was defined in terms of the counties and towns within it.
Two years later, the Catskill Park followed suit. However, it was delineated not solely in terms of pre-existing political boundaries but instead through a combination of those and old survey lot lines, streams and railroad rights-of-way. That proved to be a more effective and politically viable method, and accordingly the Adirondack Park Blue Line was redrawn shortly afterwards following the Catskills' example.
The park boundaries became known as the Blue Line since they were drawn, as they have been ever since, in blue ink on state maps.
While it takes only a simple majority vote of the legislature to amend either Blue Line to add land to the park, any diminution requires that two successive legislative sessions approve, consistent with the process for amending the constitution without the public vote.
Both parks have grown considerably since being created. The Catskill Park reached its present size in the late 1950s; the Adirondack Park did not cover its current domain until the early 1970s.

Methods of land acquisition

While many of the original holdings came from tax foreclosures, over time the state bought huge tracts, aided by bond issues approved by the public. One in the late 1920s proved to be of particular value as the state was able to acquire a great deal of property at minimal prices due to the Great Depression. At that time the state's Parks Council bought the land and left management to the then-Conservation Commission.
The state could also theoretically use its power of eminent domain to acquire Forest Preserve, but in practice it has rarely resorted to this.
For the time being, the state is not seeking to expand the Forest Preserve as actively as it has in past years, since many of the most desired properties have been acquired. However, it remains publicly committed to working with any willing seller.

Land classifications within the Forest Preserve

and environmental awareness grew in the later years of the 20th century. Recreational use of the Forest Preserve began to rise to new levels, and newer methods of outdoor recreation became popular. These two factors led to a widespread realization that it was no long enough to simply rely on the language of Article XIV and the state's Conservation Law and the court decisions and administrative opinions that relied on them.
The Conservation Department became DEC in 1970. One of its new tasks was to implement more contemporary land management practices. But administration of the state land in both parks was split between different regional offices, and it was hard to get them both following the same principles since they did not communicate much.
There was also no serious planning involved. New trails were created, or allowed to be created by outside parties, with little thought to their environmental impact or regional role. Camping was permitted anywhere, and some of the sensitive alpine environments in the Adirondack High Peaks were showing the effects.
Two temporary state commissions set up to consider the future course of the Adirondacks and Catskills in the early 1970s both strongly recommended that master plans be created for state lands in both parks. They also called for classifying the large tracts of state land as either wilderness areas or wild forest, depending on the degree of previous human impact and the level of recreational use they could sustain. Both of these were ultimately adopted, along with intensive use area and administrative use area designations for smaller parcels.
Land use in the Adirondack Park is subject to the rules and zoning regulations of the sometimes-controversial Adirondack Park Agency. Even the state Department of Environmental Conservation must get APA approval of its management plans for the Forest Preserve.
In the Adirondacks, several additional classifications exist due to the more diverse character of lands in the extensive area of the park: primitive area; canoe area; travel corridor; wild, scenic, and recreational rivers; and historic area.
But there is no corresponding agency for the Catskills and as a rule the practical impact of living within Blue Line is minor. Since the mid-1960s the state has regulated commercial highway signage within them in a manner similar to the federal Highway Beautification Act and tries to use a distinctive, rustic gold-on-brown color scheme for all its own signage within them.
The original Forest Preserve legislation assigned the state the primary role in controlling forest fires within the parks, a great relief to many towns within it then as steam locomotives and illegal logging were causing numerous remote fires. DEC still has that status in what the law calls "fire towns," which include every town entirely or partially within the parks. Fires have become much less widespread than they used to be, however, thanks to a better-educated public and state oversight.
The Catskill Park is also the only place within the state's "Southern Zone" where hunters do not have to wear their deer tags in the woods.