ALBANY — The Adirondack Park Agency rejected a proposal by the state Department of Environmental Conservation to allow commercial floatplanes to continue using Lows Lake for up to 10 years under a permit system.
By a 6-5 vote Friday, APA commissioners found DEC's plan to be "inconsistent" with the state land master plan.
"The agency encouraged DEC to reevaluate their proposal, inviting submission of a plan that would be more in keeping with the Lows Lake Primitive Area management goals," APA said in a press release.
Lows Lake, which straddles the border between Hamilton and St. Lawrence counties, has a surface area of 3,122 acres, making it the 14th largest lake in the Adirondack Park. It is also a prominent feature on the Bog River-Lows Lake wilderness canoe routes. Most of the lake's shoreline is state-owned, and the lake is wholly within the Adirondack Forest Preserve. There are a few private holdings on the lake, including the Sabattis Boy Scout camp, whose owners are entitled to operate motorboats.
Sometime before 1990, non-native bass were introduced illegally into Lows Lake, attracting sport fishermen and floatplanes, which were rare on the lake until the mid-1990s.
In May, DEC proposed to allow floatplanes continued access to Lows Lake for 10 years. Plane operators would have had to acquire a permit, and their access to the lake would be limited by timing, location and frequency. The permit system would have remained in place for a decade or until the elimination of private motorboat rights on the lake, whichever came first. The proposal had postponed a total ban on floatplane access to the lake that was supposed to begin at the start of 2008.
"DEC's proposal to continue floatplane access at Lows Lake for a fixed period of time on a limited basis was an effort to reconcile the competing interests that often characterize issues in the Adirondack Park," said Maureen Wren, DEC spokeswoman. "This approach seemed appropriate given the lack of viable alternatives, the importance of this business to the communities and the continuation of other motorized uses on the lake, and is consistent with our view that there is a place for both community growth and natural resource protection in the Adirondack Park."
DEC now will review its options.
"We are pleased that the APA board has invited us to submit a compromise proposal, which the DEC plans to do," Ms. Wren said. "As it develops, we will continue to work with the APA and stakeholder groups to balance all considerations."
She added that floatplanes "won't be banned until we promulgate new regulations that could prohibit them." The Jan. 1, 2008, deadline for floatplane access to Lows Lake is in the Bog River Flow Complex Unit Management Plan. Such plans establish goals for managing a particular area as "primitive" or "wilderness," but do not carry the same weight as a regulation or a law.
In May, four environmental groups — Adirondack Mountain Club, or ADK, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, the Residents' Committee to Protect the Adirondacks and the Sierra Club — sued DEC over the lack of an outright floatplane ban. At the time, DEC maintained that litigation was premature as APA had not yet ruled on the 10-year permit plan.
