An Article 78 lawsuit against Gardiner’s Town Board and its building inspector/code enforcement officer Bruce Terwilliger was dismissed by Ulster County Supreme Court Judge Kevin Bryant on June 6. The legal action had been filed by Camilla Bradley of the Awosting Club in the wake of a February decision by the board rejecting the Awosting Club’s campground application “defective and incomplete.”
Located at 50 Camp Ridge Road at the foot of the Shawangunk cliffs, the Awosting Club property was once home to a Girl Scout camp known as Camp Ridge-Ho. It was acquired in the 1970s by John Atwater Bradley, adjoining a larger parcel that he unsuccessfully tried to turn into a luxury housing development, sparking what came to be called the Save the Ridge campaign. In 2006 the Open Space Institute and the Trust for Public Land acquired the property and then sold it to New York State. That acreage, known as the Awosting Reserve, is now part of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve.
The Bradley family held onto the parcel now called the Awosting Club. In recent years John Bradley’s daughter Camilla rebuilt the long-neglected tent platforms along the Palmaghatt Kill, topped them with domed structures and rented them out to “glampers” year-round. In 2020, local activists including the Friends of the Shawangunks alerted Gardiner officials of unpermitted construction in progress on the tent sites, fearing environmental damage to the mountain stream and sensitive talus slope habitats nearby. Visits to the site by Gardiner code enforcement officers triggered a long standoff in which documents that the town requested failed to materialize: a site-plan application, a campground license application, an Environmental Assessment Form, a map showing location of the campsites relative to the boundaries of the protected zoning districts.
Bradley argued that the campground was a “preexisting nonconforming use” that should be “grandfathered in,” and that no permits were necessary. The Town Board retained attorney David N. Yaffe of Hamburger, Maxson & Yaffe, LLP, specifically to examine the finer details of the application and the portions of the town code that apply to the situation. Yaffe’s analysis refuted the claim of grandfathered status on the basis of the rentals having been “subsequently voluntarily discontinued for at least one year.” The new domes being semi-permanent and equipped for year-round use meant that they can’t be considered a preexisting use, according to Yaffe. The Town Board ruled that the Awosting Club no longer falls under the town’s definition of a “campground,” but is rather a “lodging facility,” and that the domes were “illegally erected without authorization and required permits.”
Bradley responded with the Article 78 petition, but the court upheld the town’s position on the matter. According to an announcement just released by town supervisor Marybeth Majestic, “Petitioner Camilla Bradley was chastised by Judge Bryant for filing the instant Article 78, which, in essence, asked the court to interject itself into this administrative process prior to the board having an opportunity to evaluate and make determinations on a complete application.”
Join the family! 
