Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: We are live. Great. We are reconvening our morning meeting with John Davis from the Adirondack Council. Welcome. Thanks for coming over.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: Thank you, representative Sheldon. It's an honor to have the opportunity to speak to this important committee. You may be able to tell from my disheveled appearance, I'm really a bit more comfortable in the forest than in a committee meeting, but I'll do my best. The closest I've come to testifying to an elected body like this, I think, is during the Adirondack Council each year has an Adirondack Park lobby day, February, in Adirondack Council, which I've joined a number of times. There, I get chance to talk one on one with legislators, but I haven't had an opportunity like this in front of a committee. So thank you for this. I also was a little less prepared than I should have been with this slideshow. It's going to be a general look at what rewilding our region is meaning, it might mean in the future, and I will try to emphasize lessons from Adirondack Park where I do much of my work. As representative Sheldon mentioned, I'm essentially the wildlife advocate. Technically, my title is rewilding advocate the Addison Council. The Addison Council is a member supported group, about 20,000 members, in Elizabethtown, New York, with offices in Albany, Elizabethtown, Kean Valley and Saranac Lake. We are an advocacy and an education group, and our mission is to protect the wild character and ecological integrity of Adirondack Park. And if what I says interests you, if you see the benefit of learning more about Adirondack Park, I heard you at some point invite over our executive director, Rocky Aguirre, or conservation director, Jackie Bowen. They are truly experts on Adirondack Park. I'm more in the ecological realm, they're very knowledgeable, and the political realm is in addition. Part of what I want to suggest today is that rewilding has already begun in the Northeastern United States. As all of you probably know, much of our region was deforested a century, century and a half ago. Most of it is forested again. And with the return of the forest and the implementation of wildlife protection laws, much of our wildlife has returned. So if this term rewilding sounds scary to many of I urge you to realize it's already happening, and it's a wonderful success story, but it's far from complete. I like to make the case that Adirondack Park is where rewilding began. That term rewilding was coined by Dave Foreman, a great wilderness champion in the Western United States, my conservation mentor in the West. His simple definition for rewilding when he coined the term about thirty years ago was wilderness recovery. Now Tom Butler, who's a Vermonter and one of my lifelong friends, gave another simple definition for rewilding more recently. He called it helping nature heal. I think that's about as good an explanation of what we mean by rewilding as anything. And I argued that Adirondack Park, in a sense, is where rewilding began because it's one of the first large scale efforts to set land aside and let it be wild, let it recover, let it express itself. Let it be self willed land was actually a term that Dave Foreman often used when talking about rewilding. As Zach mentioned in his wonderful presentation, I heartily endorse all that Zach just said to you. What was I going to with that? Yeah, Adirondack Park has in place more than The Adirondack Park has been in place for more than a century. During that period, more and more of the land within the 6,000,000 acre Adirondack Park, just across the lake in Northern New York, has been purchased and protected by the state as forest preserved lands. At this point, Adirondack Park, again, 6,000,000 acres of size, roughly the size of Vermont, is about 2,800,000 acres forest preserve, about 3,200,000 acres private land. The private lands have various levels of zoning. The strongest zoning is the so called resource management lands where you need on average 42 and a half acres per dwelling, and the most lenient zoning well, hamlets essentially govern themselves. The Adirondack Park Agency, the governing body with considerable say when development happens, essentially lets hamlets decide their own development patterns. So, if a family proposes to build a house within a hamlet, it does not usually have the APA does not have jurisdiction over that too. So at this point, Adirondack Park, again, about 6,000,000 acres in size, about the size of a month. 2,800,000 acres, forest preserve about 3.2 private land with most of that in resource management and second most in rural use, where it's eight and a half acre zoning, and then lesser amounts in the more lenient zoning. But as my Adirondack conservation mentor, Gary Randorff, warned decades ago, though that sounds like tight zoning, actually a full build out scenario in Adirondack Park could mean hundreds of thousands of new homes. So it's important not only for the Adirondack Park agency to enforce the existing zoning, it's also important for the state to get timberland easements, the working forest lands within the Adirondack Park. It's important for land trusts to continue buying and conserving land, often with continuing logging timber easements, but often also with forever wild protection. So you could say that in Adirondack Park, about three and a half million acres enjoy strong protection, and most of the rest is open to various forms of extraction. So rewilding, you could say, began in Adirondack Park, but it's far from a finished story. I mentioned Dave Foreman a moment ago. If you wanna read one book on what rewilding means, I recommend his landmark work, rewilding North America, came out about he wrote it about twenty years ago. He was in the process of updating it when, tragically, he died a few years ago. We some of us are wondering about trying to revive that effort to do a second edition somehow. In that book, he he presented this very coarse scale map of what we wilding North America might mean. These swaths represent areas where it makes sense to concentrate our ecological restoration and protection efforts. He is not writing off the rest of the continent. He's not saying give up on the Great Plains, give up on the Gulf Coast, not that at all. But he's saying these areas, these broad swaths, which generally follow mountain ranges and the Arctic Royal Tundra

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I wanna close the windows.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: These are where we could, in the near term, relatively easily

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Have a pause for the snowblower to if we're closing the windows down here, you might close those. It would help with the sound, I think.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Back, slide's up.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: The whole square screen right here. So, obviously, here in Vermont and where I live in Adirondack Park, we are in what Dave in this map calls the Eastern Wildway. His original name was actually the Eastern Or Atlantic Megalinkage, and some of us kidded Dave that Megalinkage sounds like a giant sausage, not like a big wildlife corridor. So he changed the name to Continental Wildways, and we're in the Eastern 1, or the Atlantic Appalachian Adirondack proposed wildway. These wildways would be a mix of private public lands. These are not about moving people. They're not about moving towns. They are about giving landowners strong incentives for good private land stewardship, urging farmers to use wildlife friendly practices, providing economic subsidies so that landowners can afford to do the right thing, and where possible, increasing and expanding public wildlands, creating more national parks, creating more wilderness areas, but especially in the East, even in the West, to a considerable degree. For the foreseeable future, these wild waves will be largely in the East mostly private land. So, we're not talking about moving people. We're just talking about trying to do the best we can for our wild neighbors in these especially important parts of North America. I mentioned that rewilding has already begun. The beaver, as you all know, has returned from very small numbers a century plus ago. It's a keystone species where beavers thrive, biological diversity is enhanced, beaver flows and beaver ponds are good habitat for butterflies and dragonflies and a whole suite of other species that would not be so abundant, were we lacking beavers in our forests. What my friend, Ron Suttle, in that Wildlands Network a decade ago started an exercise to try to figure out what an Eastern Wildway would look like on a map, and that is to identify the most important ecological areas. Again, so in this map, the yellow are wildlife corridors, green are proposed wildlife corridors, the green are proposed wild cores. These are largely private land. They would remain largely private land. Much of this land is in forestry. Much of that land would remain in forestry. But these are areas that through science by the Nature Conservancy, Wildlands Network and other groups, these have been identified as critically important areas. Interestingly, when Ron Sutherland started this mapping exercise, he was aware of the goal of protecting at least 50% of lands and waters in each region and in each continent by 2050, the so called fiftyfifty goal. He was aware of that, but he did not plug in that as a goal in his map. What he did is gather the data sets to determine what would we need to protect on the ground through conservation easements, through voluntary agreements with landlords, through public wild lands expansion. What would we need to protect to conserve the full range of biological diversity? Interestingly, it ends up being about half of the Eastern United States. Now in this map, you see where I live, Adirondack Park is one big green blob. That's obviously a simplification. There are sizable towns in Adirondack Park. I drive to them regularly. Saranac Lake is, as you know, is a good sized town. So that green blob, Adirondack Park, is not meant to suggest that the roads and towns there are gonna disappear. It's meant to suggest this is an ecologically critical area, and it deserves conservationist continued attention and increased attention. Another success story, fishers, of course, are back on the landscape. If any of you have trouble with porcupines, they can be vexing neighbors at times, chewing tires and the like. This is your friend. Fishers are the most effective predators of porcupines in our woods. Bobcats apparently occasionally take them. If we are fortunate enough to someday regain catamounts, cougars on the ground, they will effectively prey on porcupines. Now we really need to protect wildways, wildlife corridors, at all scales from local to global. And I give particular attention to regional and continental scale wildways in my work. One of the most regionally important is the connection between Adirondack Park, just across the lake again, Northwest to Algonquin Park. So, it's A to A connection, Algonquin to Adirondack or Adirondack to Algonquin. If we are fortunate enough someday to have wolves recolonize on their own, this is probably how they would come back in our weekend. And that may occasionally be happening already, as some of you probably heard or read a year and a half or so ago, maybe even two years ago now, a wolf was shot in Elsido County, New York. Or, yeah, a wolf was shot. A hunter thought he was shooting a coyote, which is legal. That's another issue I won't get into, but it's entirely legal. There's several months a year to shoot coyotes anytime you want in New York. I think there should be some restrictions on that, but I won't get into that right now. Anyway, the hunter thought he was shooting a coyote. He had it measured. Turned out, cooperated with researchers, thankfully. He was a very, very helpful hunter. He cooperated with researchers. It was later determined through genetic testing it was a wolf, probably of Great Lakes origin, which suggests a very long dispersal event. This was a male wolf, about 85 pounds, considerably bigger. Our Eastern coyotes are big, but they're not that big. Anyway, this connection, A to A, is regionally and even continentally important. This is just a typical scene from A to A. This is a curiously named Gulf Stream in Western Adirondack Park. A local wildlife corridor where I spend much of my time, I live in this one. Spit Rock Wildway, you've all seen it probably from the ferry if you've been on. If you take the Essex to Charlotte or the Charlotte to Essex ferry, that hilly landmass you see on the Norks North on the New York side as you're crossing toward Essex, that's Split Rock Wild Forest. It's the anchor, the biggest protected block in Split Rock Wildway. Split Rock Wildway is a very diverse wildlife corridor linking Lake Champlain and its valley with the high peaks to the West. The point of this map in part, though, is to show in protecting wildlife corridors really all over this country, but especially in the East where most of the land is in private hands and much of it's in small and medium sized parcels, as Dave Foreman likes to say, it's like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. You have a picture of the puzzle on the box, but actually putting the pieces in place involves many individuals, many families, many groups, many agencies. You use a whole host of different tools, different sorts of designations, but the goal is to do the best we possibly can for wildlife all across these lands and keep that ecological connection vibrant between Lake Champlain and the high peaks to the West. And in Split Rock Wildway, those of us involved in it on a daily basis tend to think we need to protect at least 20,000 acres. And of that, we've protected about 7,000 acres to a high level and then smaller amounts to a lesser level. So we are a good part of the way there. This is an Eastern Coyote, and as you can see, it's sizable. One of the reasons that I, as a rewilding advocate, do openly support cougar recovery in the Northeast United States, I also support wolf recovery. The Adirondack Council cautiously supports these goals, but wants considerable science done to support those goals, and a whole lot of public education. There's no point in putting these animals back out of the ground if they're just going to be shot, run over, or trapped. So I believe we should consider eventually, after considerable public education, an active cougar reintroduction effort. But with wolves, I think it may make sense to protect the wildlife corridors that would allow them to move back in on their own and then hope they do so. Partly because with cougars, the long dispersers are almost always males. With wolves, sometimes the females disperse, sometimes I think even couples will occasionally disperse together. So there is a higher likelihood that natural recolonization could bring that large carnivore back to our area. And Eastern coyotes now are sizable. They do have some wolf like tendencies. They do occasionally hunt in packs. They do occasionally take deer. They have interbred wolves. So that somewhat muddies the waters with the large carnivore situation. So my feeling is with large canids, let them sort it out. Protect the land. Hope that the biggest dogs will move back in. And if wolves actually did move back in, we'd have fewer coyotes, which by the way, would be good for our health because I'll get into this a little bit more later, but I believe very strongly we as individuals and our families would actually be safer if we had large carnivores back in our forests, because with the case of the wolf, wolves tend to chase away, occasionally even eat coyotes, but they don't bother with foxes, generally. They don't see foxes as competitors. They do see coyotes as competitors. Coyotes see foxes as competitors and tend to outcompete them. Foxes are the most efficient predators of rodents. Lyme disease is a much, much bigger threat to public safety than carnivores would be. Also, large carnivores, there would be fewer deer motor vehicle collisions. So you can actually make a public safety argument for large carnivore recovery. But again, my feeling is much education is needed, and then we should study the feasibility of actively restoring cougars with rules. Let's hope they will come back on their own. Think for that to work, though, I think we do need to give coyotes some level of protection, because it's very difficult to distinguish, even for experts, at a distance. It's difficult to distinguish coyotes from wolves. A big coyote looks a whole lot like a wolf. If there's essentially an open killing season on coyotes, there's not much likelihood of successful wolf recolonancy. This is another key wild way. The link between Adirondack Park and Vermont's Green Mountains is probably strongest in the Southern Lake Champlain Valley. Here, I'm on Bald Mountain with Jerry Jenkins, one of the best botanists in our region and the founder of the Northern Forest Atlas Project, which I highly recommend. Any of you interested in natural history, look up Northern Forest Atlas project. So that's Jerry on the left, Jamie Phillips, the president of Eddie Foundation in the middle who's been a hero in saving land in Spit Rock Wild Way, and Jennifer Essex, another Vermonter, Vermont conservation leader on the right. We're standing on Bald Mountain, protected by the Nature Conservancy on the Vermont side of the Southern Lake Champlain Valley Key Wild Way linking Adirondack Park with the Green Mountains. This is here in Vermont on the Catamount Trail, a couple of conservation conservation friends of mine. You can't quite see the the symbol in that sign, but that's the Catamount Trail. Again, have catamounts on our trail signs, on our jerseys, on our hats, but we don't actually have the great cats in our forest, and I believe we should. This is another key regionally important habitat connection or Wildway, the Cold Hollow to Canada connection or the Northern Green Mountains connection. This is the view from top of Belvedere Mountain. Probably some of you have been there looking up into Canada. Another key part of rewilding is making our roads more permeable to human infrastructure in general, but particularly busy roads, making them more permeable to wildlife movement. This is the Israel River next to Bowman Divide, one of the places we most urgently need safe wildlife process. We need underpasses and ideally eventually overpasses on route to just north of the Presidential Range where many animals are killed. That's an increasingly busy highway. You've probably all driven it. A lot of traffic there, much of it's big trucks which cannot stop if there's an animal on the road. Moose are getting hit. Lynx are trying to cross here, not very often successfully. We desperately need a wildlife crossing or multiple wildlife crossings here. We need them all over our region. Vermont is actually probably the most progressive state in the Northeast in terms of getting wildlife crossings in place. Much good work has been done here by VDOT and cooperating groups, but we need that to be happening all over our region. This is one of the highest priorities. Bowman Divide north of the Presidential Range, New Hampshire. In thinking about rewilding and thinking about protecting and restoring our natural heritage, big visions can really inspire. One of the best big vision rewilding ideas out there is the proposed Maine Woods National Park. This is map that shows where it would be. It would surround the existing Baxter State Park, and it would be about three and a half million acres in size. It would be a world class national park. If you've paddled the Allagash, you've been in part of the proposal. If you've been in Baxter Park, you've been there. A great vision put forth by a wonderful group called Restore the Northwoods. I urge looking up their materials as well. This is the St. Francis River where Quebec, New Brunswick and Maine come together. This is a lot like the Allagash River. If you paddle the Allagash and then go to the St. Francis River, you'll almost feel like you're on a mirror image of the same thing, but on the Canadian side. Proposed here is a three borders international peace park, another big step toward protecting natural heritage across our region. Rewilding is not just about lands, is equally about waters. Waterways are critically important for a whole host of reasons, including a number of reasons Zach just gave. But a lot of the work that could be called rewilding these days is about right sizing culverts. Culverts turn out to be a major problem, many places for fish and amphibians and other animals that need to go up and down streams. When you see a perched culvert, you are almost in effect seeing a dam. It's like a dam almost. For a small fish or a salamander, that can just be a block. May not be able to get don't really want it Well, fish can't, and salamanders often don't wanna go out on the land, so they are essentially fragmented. And fragmented populations tend to suffer from inbreeding depression and other ecological ramifications. So right sizing culverts is critically important. It's also important as a part of making our infrastructure more resilient in the face of worsening storms. So, if you see ecologists out there looking at culverts, compliment them. They're doing good work. Another area that can inspire conservation proposal, the Restigouche River in New Brunswick still has thriving Atlantic salmon runs. In thinking about rewilding, it's often useful to think about focal species. What are the animals and plants that we need to worry about most in the long term in periods of climate chaos? Atlantic salmon are one of those focal species. We've lost them, sadly, from most of our rivers. Maine still has a few rivers, the Atlantic salmon, Canada has more, but most Atlantic salmon populations are way, way down. Another critical aquatic species of concern is the American eel. We should have American eels in most of our streams. They are like salmon, they are diadrous. Like salmon, they have been badly depleted by dams, pollution, runoff, and other human related causes. In thinking about rewilding our region, we can draw inspiration also from Gaspeasy National Park in Quebec. That's where the southernmost herd of caribou still roams. It's an imperiled herd. They're barely hanging on, but they are still there. And lynx doing relative lynx are doing relatively well there. And this is near where the proposed Atlantic Appalachian Adirondack Wildway would end. That would happen in Forion National Park here where you could say the Appalachians dive into the ocean. The what the perengorms in Scotland apparently are basically the same mountain range as the Appalachians. Although Jerry Jenkins told me the other day, don't pretend that the Appalachians actually run into the ocean. It's just that those two continental masses were connected once. I will end with a a painting by my friend, Rod MacIver, who lived until recently in Vermont. Whom I almost home. I think if we do our work well as conservationists, as wildlife advocates, our children might be fortunate enough to see this great beautiful animal back on our landscape. And thank you very much for your time. I'd welcome questions if we have time.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thanks for your presentation. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit I know you've mentioned your other coworkers, but a little bit more about the why of the Adirondack Park. Why did New Yorkers commit to that?

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: It's almost a miracle that we have that New York has its two great parks, Catskill and Adirondack Park, where the public lands are fully protected by constitution. It is the the the forest preserve lands, 2,800,000 acres in Adirondack Park, and I think about 300,000 acres in Catskill Park are constitutionally protected. They are protected from development. They are protected from logging. This was done more than a century ago largely for water treatment reasons. It was actually New York City business New York City business people who realized if we are to have clean water and navigable waterways for moving goods and for providing drinking water for our town and city residents. We need to protect the uplands. We need to protect the forested uplands. And that's largely why Adirondack And Catskill Parks were created. I like to say that Adirondack Park is where rewilding began. That's maybe a little bit of a stretch because it might be disingenuous to say that they were created to protect wildlife. I like to believe that some of the founders of these parks did care greatly about wildlife, but it was largely about water quality and watershed protection. And these parks have been enormously successful. New York City has good drinking water because of Catskill Park, in large part. And in New York, even to do You probably know, there are ski areas on state lands in Adirondack And Catskill Parks that would seem a violation of that constitutional amendment. It would be, except there amendments to the amendment passed by the New York State voters. So if the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, which has jurisdiction over state lands in the Adirondack And Catskill Parks, if they want to put in a parking lot for a trailhead, if it involves more than de minimis cutting of trees, they actually have to take it to the legislature, ask the legislature pass a bill to successive sessions, and then it has to go to the voters. So it's a very strong level of protection. In some ways, the forest preserve lands of New York's Adirondack And Catskill Parks enjoy the highest levels of protection of almost any public lands. I do wanna add though, there's a misconception that recreation is limited on public lands. Zach addressed this. I'll address it again. Public lands at Adirondack And Catskill Parks are open for hunting, fishing, and even trapping. So a wide range of recreation uses is allowed and even encouraged. Is snowmobiling on forest preserved lands at Adirondack And Caskill Parks. It's limited to designated trails, but there is snowmobiling allowed on some trails and there are thousands of miles of hiking trails. Now, the Adirondack And Caskill Parks are magnets for tourism. We occasionally get grumbling from residents of what we call the North Country, the larger part of Northern New York, including Adirondack Park, that we get all these tourists coming and they're not paying taxes toward the parks. They're having occasionally surfaced arguments, we should be charging admission to Adirondack Park the way Yellowstone charges. But I think most business people in Adirondack Park don't want that because they know, no, we're not Yeah. We're paying taxes toward the parks and folks from Quebec and Ohio are not, but they're paying for lodging. They're paying for restaurants. They're paying for gear. And there have been studies looking at the economies of towns inside Adirondack Park and comparing them to economies outside of the Adirondack Park. And I don't know any specifics. I can think of a couple studies. I believe both of them showed that on average, the town economies within Adirondack Park are stronger than the town economies in rural areas outside the park. So the parks are an economic benefit as well as an ecological benefit.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: So you mentioned a couple of times the need for a lot of education when we're considering predator reintroduction. Do you have a vision for the other side of that? What does that look like, like coexistence with predators in the Northeast?

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: Thank you for mentioning that, Representative Sheldon. So there was a classic paper on rewilding written by Michael Hsuley and Vid Noss that was published in Wild Earth, which, by the way, was run out of Richmond, Vermont decades ago. That classic paper on rewilding spoke about the three cores, carnivores, and connectivity. Those are sort of the basic components. You big wild core areas protected by wildlife corridors and including the full suite of native species, including large carnivores, which are ecologically very important. Without large carnivores, you tend to get over browsing of the forest. The forest products industry, in my opinion, should support large carnivore recovery because in some places to the south of here, our forests are almost literally being browsed the to ground. Not the big trees, of course, but the saplings and seedlings are being eaten by overly abundant deer. The herbivores are overly abundant because they don't have their predators anymore. And human hunting can help, but human hunting is usually managed in such a way that it does not really effectively control the numbers of herbivores. So I've got off on a tangent. I'm sorry, Representative Sheldon. So you're asking about Oh, yeah. So there should be a If Vee Doss and Michael Hoyt were writing that paper now, they would add a fourth maybe a fifth also. They might add climate. They would almost certainly add coexistence. So those three basic ingredients, large cores, wildlife corridors, large carnivores, we will not achieve large carnivore recovery unless people are willing to coexist with these animals. If people don't want pumas and wolves on the ground, they're not going be here because they're pretty easy to shoot. It's not actually easy without the help of hounds or other hunting assistance. But with hounds, with drones, it would be pretty easy to track down and find any pumas or wolves in the area if they were unwanted. That's why the education is so important. We must, I believe as a society, should be willing to coexist with all our wild neighbors. And there's no question about it. Catamounts were native to Vermont. Wolves were native to Vermont. They probably were critically important in keeping deer and beaver and other herbivore numbers in check. Interestingly, I see often in the forest, especially on the Adirondack side, beavers that are trimming or taking down trees, trimming trees 50 yards, even a 100 yards from the water. You wouldn't see that if wolves were around. Would probably beavers are critical habitat enhancing species, but they can be a nuisance for landowners. They'd be less so if we had wolves. Wolves around, the beavers would be staying much nearer the waterways because they would be vulnerable to predation. Anyway, so coexistence, absolutely. You could say that's a fourth pillar of rewilding is coexistence. We must be willing to coexist with our wild neighbors, and they won't be here.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I have one more, and then I'll see if others do. But New York's ahead of us in having a state wildlands designation process through their constitution. If you were starting from scratch and trying to get a state wildland designation process, what are the lessons learned, or how would you improve?

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: I have not studied this bill that's actually discussed, and I'm not actually authorized to endorse bills in any other state, so I won't. But I will say, it sounds to me like a very intelligent bill. It sounds to me like it would be several large steps in a very good direction. I do believe that generally conservation biologists really have clustered around this idea if we wanna avert the extinction crisis. And by the way, the extinction crisis is not just about loss of species. It's about losses of diversity at all levels. And in our region, it's more a matter of population losses than species. We're not actually gonna lose Most of the charismatic birds and carnivores are not on the verge of extinction, but they have already been extirpated from many areas. Losses of population, ecologically speaking, can be just as damaging as losses of species. We have lost many populations in our region. So, I think the sorts of things that Zach was talking about would be very positive measures. It is easier to protect wild lands on public land. We all own I don't own your Vermont public lands. I do co own your national forest with the rest of you. I co own the forest preserve lands in New York with other New Yorkers. We have a say. As Zach said, public lands are very democratic. It does make sense to try to get to these goals, which are very ambitious but very ecologically important, 30% by 2030, 50% by 2050. The easiest big steps to take will be protecting our public lands. So I think that's a very, very positive step. I think, this gets into a very sticky topic, and I don't dare go far into it. But I believe that one of the fundamental challenges for land conservation in our region is high property taxes. In my opinion, and I'm not really speaking as an Adirondack Council representative here, I'm speaking more as a landowner. I own 55 acres, actually protected by a forever wild easement held by Northeast Wilderness Trust, but I still pay full property taxes on it. And it's expensive. It's a significant fraction of my income every year. I get no break for conserving the land. And landowners all over our region are under heavy pressure to subdivide their land for development or to liquidate the timber because property taxes are so high. I don't believe in the long run we should base local services on land ownership. So I don't know how I mean, I don't know how most effectively to address this challenge, but I think it does need to be recognized that landowners are under a lot of economic pressure because of high property taxes, and that sometimes those pressures make land conservation difficult. Now, conservation easements can benefit a landowner economically. It's very important to understand that landowners who donate a conservation easement to a land trust or to a government agency can get a tax break. In New York, you have do actually, I shouldn't say I get no break. I do get a break. So in New York, there's something called the conservation easement tax credit whereby a fourth of your state income tax No, no, that's not right. A fourth of your property tax bill will be rebated from your state income tax. So there is a partial refund for having that conservation easement. But it's really, if you do the math, if I had done the math twenty five years ago when I put this conservation easement in place, I wanted to save the land. But if I had been motivated primarily by economic considerations, or if I was trying to put kids through college and was under a lot of stress, I was not. But if I had been then, I would have realized much as I wanna do this easement. It's not that the way to get money from this land is it had big trees, it still has big trees, would have been to log it. So, I think that wild lands legislation you've been talking about sounds very positive to me. In the long run, I think we ought to be exploring how do we make land conservation not just affordable, but even profitable for landowners. I think we need to figure out ways to pay landowners for protecting forests that provide ecosystem services. Don't know the equation, but I think that is an absolutely essential part of conserving enough of our landscape to provide for all the benefits that wild places provide.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Members have questions. Representative Pritchard.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. So you spoke of, you know, the Adirondack Park and Pascoes being constitutionally protected The state lands they're in. Yes. Which I think is a great thing. Are the uses, the current uses that you mentioned some hunting, fishing, trapping. Yep. Are they also constitutionally protected within that? And and if they're not, do you feel they should be?

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: That's a very interesting question. I no. I don't believe they are. I think it is a matter of custom and culture that in New York, is just assumed whose state lands are open to hunting, fishing, and trapping. I don't think that's in the constitution, but I assume that's another reason to, at some point, bring in my superiors from the Adirondack Council. There are folks on the Addison Council staff that could answer that. And actually, if you wanna send me a note later or give me your address, I can look that up for you. I believe the answer is no, but I'm not sure about that.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Do you think they should be?

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: admit I have trouble with trapping in this time. Think that it does That's why I'm asking. Yeah. So, I'm not here to argue against trapping, but I think some conservationists would not be comfortable having mandate to allow state lands to remain open to trapping. They are open to trapping. There's no push to change that so far as I know. I don't think it's gonna change. I don't think the DEC wants it to change, but I don't know that I would wanna see that enshrined in the constitution. And I'm speaking as an individual there.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: So here's where I'm going with this, because this is one of my biggest concerns with this, of a lot of these present uses that are occurring. It's a public plan. It it it the public should be allowed a variety of uses. And talked a little bit with Zach about went over all these uses. And, you know, your conversation with the wolves and cougars, a part of it would be came up. You had a concern for them being shot. So now we've got trapping that we we don't really think should be. Now, well, now that we have wolves and cougars, maybe we shouldn't have hunting. And this is this is a concern I have. Mhmm. And it's a big concern.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: Okay. And I think it's a

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: pretty valid concern.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: I should emphasize though, my answer there was more as an individual. The that add council is largely comprised of sportsmen and women. Much of our staff hunts and fishes. I don't know if any are trapping currently. There's nobody on our staff, nobody on our board that is pushing to change the openness of Today. The Yeah.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Other questions? Representative Austin?

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Yes. We have a bill of creating a feasibility study to look at cougar reintroduction, and there was a conference this summer at UVM about reintroducing the cougar and the final paragraph from the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department said that they recommend that a feasibility study on mountain lion reintroduction in Vermont in the Northeast should not be undertaken until area universities have conducted and published additional original peer reviewed research on this topic specific to the Northeast. This additional research should be conducted by multiple independent research groups and supported by multiple independent funders. I'm just wondering if you've read the study, and if you haven't, if you would be willing to read it.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: I'd be, I haven't.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: And then just respond to what you agree with or

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: I'd be happy to, yeah. I read some of the papers that Panthera has put out, but not all of them. They put out quite a few. I think they're all all the ones I've read are very convincing, but I've not read all of them. So I would be happy to be the Okay. And I know some of the folks there, so I can look that up.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Great. And you'll leave your email? Yes.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: Yeah. I should have that up there. I'll leave that. Thank you. And actually, just one more thing on your good point. Let's remember, though, and you know this first, private land most private lands are posted. Most private lands are not open to hunting, fishing, and trapping.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Aren't public These are public lands.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: Right. But my point is, whereas hunters, fishers, and trappers already have access to the vast bulk of public lands, they don't have access to private lands. So

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: That's why we have public lands. People don't have access to go biking, hiking, camping. These are all uses that are important.

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: It seems to me we are both suggesting that public lands are beneficial.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Absolutely. No argument from me on that.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Alright, thanks so much for your presentation. Thank

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: you. Members,

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: we are not going to come back this afternoon after the Governor's State of the State, but that's at 02:00 this afternoon. To remind everyone, it's at two and the speaker has asked us all to be on the floor at least at 01:45 by 01:45 for the Governor's presentation. So be there on time. It definitely helps. We'll have a lot of them. The public will be coming in, single point of entry, all that stuff. If we can be in and settled, it helps everybody. And then tomorrow, we're gonna joint hearing with the Senate Natural Resources Committee in Room 11 at 09:00. Two different topics, one the Land Use Review Board and then a report back from a consultant that looked at the bottle bill. So just shared areas of interest and sharing resources with Senate Natural on those topics. Could you In the morning. On

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: the land use, could you just speak a little bit are we going to be talking about?

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Land use review board that we set up in Act 181 a couple of years ago will be reporting to us on their progress. There's five new professional board members. Only been working for a year, and so we asked them to do a lot. So we're going to get where are you now, and then also a deeper dive into one of their deliverables, which is a report on the appeals process. An overview of the many topics from the chair and the executive director of that Land Use Review Board, and then a presentation from one of the board members on the appeals report that she was the primary lead on. We'll get more into that tomorrow. Then in the afternoon tomorrow, we're gonna have deputy commissioner Neil Kamen in to continue talking about water topics and the high level review of the DC miscellaneous bill, having Michael O'Grady in on Friday morning to walk us through that bill. That's your upcoming week? Is that a

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: new bill? It'll be a new bill. And

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: we've added committee discussion after Neil's presentation on Thursday afternoon. So, an opportunity to have a public community committee conversation if members. With that, we will be adjourned for the day. Anybody have any sense right now?

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Committee discussion is just wide open. Anybody want to talk about anything?

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: No, mean, just like your priorities for the session. Response to testimony we've taken? Thoughts for testimony you want to hear?

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Yeah. I appreciate your patience.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: With that, we're adjourned.

[Representative Christopher "Chris" Pritchard (Member)]: Appreciate it.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Appreciate the lack of respect for concerns with side conversations representative, Pritchard. What the facts?

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: We're still alive, Chris.

[Representative Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: We're still alive and wrapping

[John Davis (Rewilding Advocate, Adirondack Council)]: up together.