Why I Helped Found
AdkAction.org
By Phil Wolff
Many of you reading this will know me.
I was a member of the North Elba planning and town boards, a town justice for 16
years and chief of staff of the 1980 Winter Olympics.
I’m a founder and past president of the Olympic Museum in
Lake Placid. I
made my first visit to Saranac Lake in 1928 and fell in love with the
mountains and lakes. When I
graduated from Cornell in 1938, I moved to Saranac Lake and established a landscape business.
My wife Elsie and I raised three children in
Saranac
Lake, living first in Raybrook near the
greenhouses we built and then on Lake Kiwassa in a house I designed, cut timber
for and built with the help of my sons.
I’m a 46’er and have canoed most of the lakes and streams of the
Adirondacks.
I’m fully retired now and live part of the year in San Diego, but I return to
Kiwassa each summer to that same house we built, now owned by my son
Dave. I’m an Adirondacker by choice, not birth and my heart is still
there, always will be.
What you may not know about me is that I’m the
treasurer of a new citizen action group called AdkAction.org.
You may wonder why a 92-year-old fellow who could be sitting with
his feet up, or dancing at our retirement community, would get involved
in such a thing. Those who
know me know I can’t sit with my feet up for long, so I want you to know
why I’ve taken an active role and why you should.
One day years ago when I was working in my flower
shop, an old friend in town on vacation dropped by for a chat.
I began to complain that I figured I was toiling for about 60
cents an hour. He replied
that he worked for 50 weeks a year just for the privilege of spending
two weeks in the Adirondacks and that I had all its priceless bounty
available year-round right outside my door.
Some of us forget how lucky we are to live in the
midst of one of the greatest wilderness parks in the United States –
whether as fulltime residents bound here by our jobs or as seasonal
residents drawn here by our hearts.
We also sometimes forget that as resident Adirondackers we are
its custodians. We have an
obligation to protect and preserve the beauty and environment we all
love. Our obligations
extend beyond our own property boundaries because what we do there can
have an impact on our neighbors and on the waters that we share with all
New Yorkers.
The Adirondacks are a unique place where ownership
is shared between individuals and the people of the State of New York.
All we have to do is look at historic photos of a clear cut and
burned landscape to remember why we now have rules and regulations to
protect this special place.
It is our elected representatives who forge these rules and regulations.
I helped found AdkAction.org to influence those
elected representatives and urge them to support regulations that we
feel will best protect the Adirondacks.
We discussed the key issues facing
Adirondack property owners.
We decided to create a questionnaire that other property owners
could use to help us prioritize problems we should work on.
The number of folks who responded confirmed my opinion that the
woods are full of concerned people who love what we have and who will
get involved to protect and improve our beloved land.
So AdkAction.org was born.
You need to know that this organization is totally
non-partisan. We are
Republicans and Democrats and Independents.
And we are about equally divided between fulltime local residents
and seasonal residents. We
are for the Adirondacks, its communities and its people.
It’s time we moved past who’s a local and who’s a “seasonal
resident.” The way I feel
about it is we’re all Adirondackers with the best interests of the
region at heart. We all
have a stake in our future here and a responsibility to make it a good
one. The sooner we realize that and start working together, the faster
we’ll make progress.
Adk.org is trying hard to be a completely
democratic and open organization.
Survey responses tell us positions we should support.
The issues our members have assigned top priority so far include:
tax reform, including caps on property taxes during the same
ownership; better land use and water quality regulations and
enforcement; fair assessment procedures; consolidation of overlapping
village town and county services; comprehensive planning before
development; correct assessment of state lands so that the state is
paying its fair share and not overburdening private Adirondack
taxpayers; alternative funding for education instead of local property
taxes, etc. You will find the full list on line.
These are only some of the issues we will work on.
Solutions to these problems will require the help of villages and towns,
the county and state, and you.
It will take thinking people working together for a common cause.
AdkAction.org can be a leader on many of these issues. All of us
can help by writing letters, talking to our friends and neighbors and
providing financial support to competent people at election time.
Your first step is answering the questionnaire on line at
www.AdkAction.org.
AdkAction.org plans to support its first candidates
in this spring’s school board and village elections. In the future, we
plan to support candidates in the jurisdictions included in the Saranac Lake,
Lake Placid and Tupper Lake school districts – and maybe some day throughout
the Adirondacks. We think there are a
lot of good people out there who might be willing to run for office if
they knew they could count on help getting their message across, and
others who might need help seeking reelection.
You may be wondering who will select the candidates AdkAction
will support. That will be
done by a steering committee just elected by our members.
Chosen for our first steering committee were Lee Keet, Dick
Kibben, Jim Schoff, Marsha Stanley and Dave Wolff. You can find their
biographies at www.AdkAction.org.
You can send an email to info@adkaction.org if you would like to
ask for our support as a candidate or if you have someone to suggest.
I’ve spent more than 70 years of my life working to
make the
Adirondacks a better place.
I think AdkAction.org has exciting potential. With your help, it
will grow and work for the area’s best interests for the next 70 years.