In the name of responsible land stewardship, Kingston mayor Steve Noble convened a press conference Wednesday morning in the Wilbur neighborhood to convey his desire that the city purchase a 70-acre steep-hilled, forested land just to the west of the Twaalfskill Creek.
“It’s just a really unique parcel, and one that really does need to be preserved,” argued Noble, “and one that has very little actually buildable land based on the rugged topography.”
Noble doesn’t intend to go it alone in paying the $855,000 price tag including closing and due diligence. That’ll come as good news to the property taxpayers of Kingston — who saw taxes raised this year for the first time in a decade.
Noble said the non-profit land-conservation juggernaut Scenic Hudson intends to contribute $425,000 for the acquisition.
“We couldn’t do this,” Noble acknowledged, “without Scenic Hudson’s help.”
Comprised of seven parcels, the land buy will be of the largest open-space tract available within the Rondout Uplands, that area above the Rondout Creek which contains a significant portion of the priority natural-resource areas identified by the city’s 2019 Open Space plan for land conservation.
To date, the city has smiled on the conservation of 76 acres within the Rondout Uplands- 54 acres on Mason Hill, 12 acres along the Twaalfskill Creek and 20 acres centered around the dramatic landscape of an old limestone quarry off of Wilbur Ave called the Red Fox ravine.
None of those parcels was paid for with taxpayer money.
This will be the city’s first foray into purchasing land for conservation.
“Everything else has been done by non-profits,” said Noble.
A teaching farm
How the parcel on Mason Hill, a 54-acre tract of 48 acres of unfarmable wooded ridge and wetlands and six acres of farmland gone fallow, was purchased in March is representative of how the process of land acquisition for conservation has worked in the City of Kingston to date.
“That is the home base for the Land in Black Hands program,” said Bowden. “Our goal is to turn it into a teaching farm. [Because] people of color have been historically severed from land ownership due to discrimination and racism and things like that, we want to give folks an opportunity to be with the land, reconnect, and learn about regenerative practices, and those are the opportunities that we’re bringing to life in that space.”
That message resonated with the non-profits Nature Conservancy, the NoVo Foundation and Scenic Hudson, all of which contributed money to the purchase.
“The grant that was made to the Kingston Land Trust is part of a climate and environmental-justice initiative that we have,” said Cari Watkins-Bates, director of land conservation for Scenic Hudson. “The funds for that come from monies that were, in part, lands that we sold to the state.”
The proceeds from the land sale of what would become Sojourner Truth State Park contributed in part to that purchase. Scenic Hudson also contributed to the KLT’s purchase of the Red Fox Ravine on the adjacent hillside across Wilbur Avenue.
Having acquired the Red Fox Ravine on the adjacent hillside across Wilbur Avenue the KLT saw that an asphalt approach for a parking lot was poured, stabilized the crumbly hillside along a network of dirt paths, ordered some stairs of stone and erected a roofed wooden stage in a meadow surrounded on three sides by the soaring walls of the limestone quarry, showing just what could be done to emphasize the beauty of wilderness conserved.
Substantial Scenic Hudson money has gone to underwrite so many land purchases. Why did the organization not just purchase and manage the land itself? Scenic Hudson, on its own and in partnership has conserved over 50,000 acres across ten Hudson Valley counties.
“We all can do so much more,” Watkins-Bates explained, “when we’re working in partnership.”
City transfer tax
Noble hopes to pay for some if not all of the city’s $435,000 portion of the purchase with funds which could be made available by the passage of the community preservation fund, a local law on which city residents will vote on November 5.
“What it does,” said Noble, “is it creates a 1.25 percent property real-estate transfer tax for all properties sold in Kingston over the median Ulster County value, which currently is around [$375,000],” said Noble, “Basically high-wealth properties would then pay a transfer tax, and that would go into a fund to do open space as well as historical preservation and a variety of other uses.”
Ward 9 alder Michele Hirsch credits the enthusiasm of the Wilbur neighborhood for the land buy. One Wilbur resident has referred to her neighborhood as “nature-rich but sidewalk-poor.”
“People down there don’t have a lot of places to go and walk,” said Hirsch. “To have a place where they can go and walk and know that it is preserved definitely will just be the greatest thing ever.”
Committee okays buy
Mayor Noble’s ask unanimously passed the Finance and Audit Committee later in that evening. “In terms of taking it off the tax roll, it works out to 18 cents per person per year,” quipped committee chair Renee Scott-Childress. “So I think that’s a really important 18 cents we could spend, going around collecting pennies.”
The man the pennies will be going to, the current owner of the parcels, is motorcycle racing enthusiast Robert Iannucci, a Brooklyn developer and land speculator who can boast an impressive portfolio of landholdings along the downtown Kingston waterfront, They include the Cornell Steamboat building, the historic stone church at the foot of Wilbur Avenue known as the Fitch Building, and Island Dock, the 17-acre man-made peninsula which divides the Rondout Creek at the marina.
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