Adirondack Park Agency

The Adirondack Park Agency (APA) was created in 1971 by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a governmental agency that performs long-range planning for the future of the Adirondack Park. It oversees development plans of private land-owners as well as activities within the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Development by private owners must be reviewed to determine if their plan is compatible with the park. The agency is headquartered in Ray Brook, New York.

From its inception in 1892, the six-million-acre (24,000 km²) Adirondack Park, which is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky, and Everglades National Parks combined, has been a battleground between those who would preserve wilderness and proponents of the development rights of property owners. The Adirondack Park Agency was created in an attempt to settle many of these longstanding issues. It has been controversial from the outset.

The Adirondack Park is unique in that more than half of the land in the park is privately held. The APA was formed in response to a perceived threat to the integrity of the privately held portion, which, at the time, was in the hands of only a few hundred owners. The completion of the Adirondack Northway in 1967 drastically increased the pressure brought by developers for second home developments. The agency's first task was to create a master plan, followed by a zoning map and land use plan. This zoning map breaks the park up into different sections, and the land use that will be allowed on that particular piece of land is determined by the classification that it is given. The classifications are broken up into two sections, private land classification, and state land classification. Private land classifications are the most controversial because they determine what people can do on their own land. The different classifications for private land include hamlet, low-intensity use, moderate intensity use, rural use, resource management use, and industrial use. Citizens living in the park believe that much of the land is incorrectly classified. This is partly because the entire 6 million acres were classified in only eight months. A land classification can be changed through the APA, but it is a long process. Many argue that the whole map should be remade.

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