“There’s something in the water in the Hudson Valley that turns you into a conservationist.” So says Garrison native Erik Kulleseid, who spent his final day as the commissioner of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation (OPRHP) on February 29. He’ll be taking a six-week vacation before settling in on April 15 as the new president and chief executive officer of the Open Space Institute (OSI), replacing the retiring Kim Elliman. “I haven’t had six weeks off since I was 25,” notes Kulleseid, now 60.
That youthful break came in between graduating from Stanford Law School and going to work as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, LLP. He only stayed there for two years, however. “The dream was to work for an international law firm and live in Paris,” he says, but quickly discovered, “That was not my path.”
Kulleseid, you see, had grown up getting that conservationist factor into his blood, “on top of Canada Hill in Garrison. It’s now part of Hudson Highlands State Park, and the Appalachian Trail runs right nearby. For fun, I used to strike off into the woods, make up kingdoms and have adventures.” It was in the 1980s, when large parcels of former estates owned by such Westchester patrician families as the Osborns and Fishes began to be broken up for sale and development, that he first developed an awareness of the importance of land conservation, he recounts.
In 1992, Kulleseid decided to go back to school — the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, to be precise. He’d already been to Yale once, for a BA in History. He topped off his JD with a Master’s in Forestry and Nonprofit Finance, setting his course for a long career in negotiating deals for public preservation of threatened landscapes.
Another Yalie, Rose Harvey, had an interest in Garrison: At the Trust for Public Land (TPL), she steered the downscaling of a proposed major development of a parcel across the road from the Franciscan monastery Graymoor. She took Kulleseid on as a project manager at TPL in 1994, and he ended up staying there for 12 years, becoming the New York State program director.
His biggest transaction in the mid-Hudson during that period was the acquisition of the 5,000-acre Lundy estate in Wawarsing, which eventually became part of the Minnewaska State Park Preserve. He was also part of the TPL team that helped mediate settlement of the Awosting Reserve dispute in Gardiner in 2006, working with OSI to acquire the 2,500-acre parcel. Instead of a golf course and 349 luxury homes being built on the Shawangunk Ridge, that land is now also part of Minnewaska, permanently protected.
Kulleseid went to work for OPRHP for the first time in 2007, as deputy commissioner for open space protection. A highlight of that three-year stint was leading the state team overseeing conversion of the abandoned Poughkeepsie/Highland railroad bridge into the Walkway over the Hudson State Historic Park. But in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it wasn’t a great time to try to get capital-intensive projects accomplished at the state level. Budgets were being slashed and employees laid off; allocations for land acquisition came to a standstill; the very fabric of the state agency was becoming threadbare. So, in 2010, he went to work for OSI, co-founding the Alliance for New York State Parks with former State Council of Parks chair Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky and former OPRHP commissioner Carol Ash.
That project eventually was renamed OSI’s Parks and Policy Program, and Kulleseid became senior vice president. Over the next eight years, Kulleseid used his project management and fundraising expertise to the tune of $30 million in private and public monies to support state park improvements and expand recreational access. Here in Ulster County, Kulleseid became a familiar face at ribbon-cuttings for major trail improvements such as the Rosendale Trestle in 2013 and New Paltz’s River-to-Ridge Trail in 2018. The new Visitors’ Center at Minnewaska, opened in 2019, was also his baby, along with ten miles’ worth of ongoing trail improvements in that park.
Other Hudson Valley park improvement projects that happened on Kulleseid’s watch at OSI included overhauling the Canopus Beach/Winter Park Complex at Fahnestock State Park in Putnam County and upgrading the Thacher Park Visitor Center in Albany County. Statewide, his biggest project was the Jones Beach State Park Revitalization Plan, which sparked a $65 million commitment from governor Andrew Cuomo. Kulleseid also raised millions to improve the Humphrey Nature Center at Letchworth State Park in western New York and the cultural center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park in Harlem. Under his supervision, OSI also produced the Pulse of the Parks series of visitor demographic studies for seven state parks: Jones Beach, Harriman, Walkway over the Hudson, Fahnestock, Bear Mountain, Minnewaska and Sunken Meadow.
During that same period when he was at OSI, Kulleseid’s old mentor at TPL, Rose Harvey, was heading up OPRHP. When she decided to step down at the end of 2018, Kulleseid’s name was on the shortlist of possible replacements, and “Governor Cuomo invited me to join the team as commissioner,” he says. In early 2019 he took up the state post.
Having learned the hard way in his earlier stint at the state agency that “the infrastructure at Parks was in jeopardy” anytime the economy cooled down, Kulleseid made it his primary mission to rebuild OPRHP’s capital budget. Advocacy, rather than negotiating land deals, was now the name of the game. “A huge amount of time was invested in building the case for funding the agency and rebuilding staff,” he says. He found a “champion” for the environment in Kathy Hochul, who replaced Cuomo as governor in 2021. “She’s one of the few people who can go toe-to-toe with me on knowledge of state parks,” Kulleseid says.
But once again, he had unwittingly picked a particularly challenging time to switch jobs. Spring 2020 brought the COVID pandemic, along with social distancing restrictions and an unprecedented upsurge in park use by people desperate for outdoor activity. Accessibility then became a higher priority at OPRHP, and Kulleseid’s tenure saw New York’s first-ever Autism Nature Trail established at Letchworth State Park. Major capital initiatives since 2019 included opening the new Shirley Chisholm State Park in Brooklyn, an award-winning rebuilding project at Niagara Falls State Park, the new Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center on Long Island and two new parks opened: one in Rochester and Kingston’s own Sojourner Truth State Park.
If you’ve walked the main trail along the Hudson in Sojourner Truth State Park, you’ll probably have noticed that a great deal of engineering work went into making it more resilient to erosion during major storm events. Inevitable water-level rises are now part of the planning in all work done on state parks: Shorelines need to be hardened, and culverts that used to be adequate are now too small and need to be replaced.
“Part of my job has been making sure we’re where we need to be in an age of climate change,” Kulleseid says. “OPRHP owns 320 miles of shoreline. The barrier islands of the South Shore of Long Island are all state parks. Storms are getting worse. We had forest fires at Minnewaska two years ago. Bear Mountain got eight inches of rain last summer. It was closed for two months in July of 2023. The infrastructure is at risk when rainwater is moving rocks the size of Volkswagens. And in the summer of 2012, Lake Welch in Harriman had to close due to an algal bloom. Our parks are under assault by Mother Nature.”
Besides taking preventive measures against extreme weather, OPRHP is doing its part in the state government’s push to become 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2030. It’s a teachable moment, according to Kulleseid: “Our parks got 84 million visitors last year. We have the opportunity to be models of public behavior.”
So, why leave state government now, to head back to his former employer OSI? Partly it’s because Kulleseid feels that he has made strong progress on rebuilding and revitalizing “an agency that had no capital budget” when he first left it in 2010, and is confident that it can move forward under someone else’s leadership. It’s also a matter of missing the hands-on work of “being a practitioner” in land preservation deals. “I love this job, but I’m looking forward to returning to the private sector, building up private-sector protections for public land.” he says.
Going forward, his focus will be broader, as OSI has in recent years expanded its area of concern from the Northeast to the entire Eastern Seaboard. A tradition of land protection in the Adirondacks now extends throughout the Appalachian mountain chain. He notes that South Carolina in particular is currently “where New York was 30 years ago,” in terms of development pressures. Large parcels of land formerly used as rice plantations are now being broken up. Buffer islands that protect the interior from hurricanes are being developed for housing and tourism. “The Low Country is very vulnerable,” he says.
Still, it’s clear that the Hudson Valley is where Erik Kulleseid’s heart resides. He’s especially eager to continue the process of knitting the rail-trail networks in the region together and linking them with parks, historic sites and museums. “There are huge opportunities to connect these spaces and make them more accessible,” he says. “We still have a ways to go.”
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