Human services provision in the Adirondacks is an important indicator to look at.  Given the high seasonal unemployment and the comparatively low incomes throughout the Park, it is safe to assume that there are many people within the Park who could benefit from human services programs.  The two indicators which I have focused on are Drug and Alcohol Abuse Programs and Food Stamp Programs.  I felt these two categories were very important to look are as they give a good indication of two very important aspects of human health.  Both indicators also give an idea as to how many people are in need are receiving the assistance that is available to them.  There is great room for improvement in the provision of both programs.  Whether there is a lack of education about programs available or a lack of funding, there needs to be a thorough analysis of how large the gap between provision and need is.

My major suggestion for future data collection would be to collect data in a manner that allows for the parts of counties within the part to be separated out of the entire county data set.  This would provide a more complete picture of the state of Human Services in the Park, and would help in better providing for appropriate program capacities.  In addition, it would be useful to cross-analyze data that is relevant to the data on Human Services.  For example, when looking at the number of households on Food Stamps, it would be helpful to know the number of households below the poverty line, or the number of households that are eligible for Food Stamps.  When I was going through the Food Stamp data I could not help but wonder home many people in the Park are eligible for Food Stamps but don’t receive them.  I was slightly shocked by the small numbers of families that receive Food Stamp benefits.  Part of this shock is likely due to the fact that data is given in total numbers, not as a percentage of the population.  This is also an area where better data collection could be undertaken.

In one of the studies I looked at, there was a great deal of information presented in a very coherent manner.  The PRISMS 2005 Report was especially helpful for the Alcohol and Drug Treatment Indicator.  The information was given by county, so I decided to focus on the counties that are entirely within the Park.  There was a plethora of information having to do with youth and adult risk factors.  The information covered everything from poverty and crime rates to the number of divorces and children in foster care.  The data was presented so that each data set was compared to counties that are similar, and then compared to the NYS average.  I found this study to be especially helpful in comparing the Adirondack Counties to each other and other counties.  I recommend looking at this study if you are at all interested in substance abuse problems and treatment.

In general, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the data available for analysis.  It is important to have a complete picture of the Adirondacks, however, if any improvements in conditions of the region are to be made.

~ Marisa Riggi

Measuring technology and information infrastructure in the Adirondack Park at first seemed like a dry subject, and one that we had already covered in our interviews during the second weekend visit.  It seemed we all knew that broadband internet access was lacking, and cell phone coverage was spotty.  To an outsider or visitor, this can seem quaint and charming, a taste of what life was like 10 years ago.  Remember dial-up internet?  Lack of information access can add an element of rural Adirondack charm to a vacation – however, the situation is less quaint for year-round residents.

In fact, imagine if you had to live with dial-up internet today.  Or without your cell phone.  Personally, I would freak out.  Professionally, I would also feel enormously handicapped, as do the businesses of the Adirondacks.  It’s important to recognize the drag on economic development of all kinds that the lack of modern information technology creates in the Adirondacks.  There are even areas of the park where dial-up internet is not available.  This means that even if a company or organization has a plan to bring jobs to the region by starting a business, it may be unable or very difficult to, for example, do email marketing, maintain a Facebook account, use internet-based bookkeeping, or reach employees by cell phone.

Similarly, although I was unable to find specific information about information technology in Adirondack schools, the lack of infrastructure has negative impacts beyond the current economy.  If today’s students do not grow up learning to navigate the internet, build web pages, and research online, they will be dealt a real setback in the modern job market no matter where they end up.  Information technology is creating the well-paid jobs of the future, and the skills to perform those jobs are now being taught at an early age.  Adirondack students deserve the opportunity to compete on a level playing field with the rest of New York’s children.

Additionally, the lack of technology infrastructure affects other areas of life unrelated to jobs and the economy.  During our class we heard from Lonnie Ulrich about more than one death attributed to the lack of cell phone coverage on Adirondack roads, which prevents drivers from contacting emergency responders in the event of an accident.  This is a serious and tragic issue.  Although cell phone coverage is improving along the Northway (I-87), this can be seen as largely in the interests of Adirondack visitors rather than year-round residents.  Twisty, dark, high-speed park roads are far more dangerous than the highway, and are where the real need for cell phone coverage lies in order to save lives and improve overall public safety.

In conclusion, I think the issue of information technology, although it appears dry and technical, is actually a very significant piece of the Adirondack puzzle.  Improving the park’s access to high-speed internet and cell phone networks would go a long way towards normalizing life for year-round residents, and bringing their opportunities up to speed with the rest of the Northeast.  Although affluent visitors may be dismayed to find that their iPhones and Blackberrys can still reach them on vacation, their disappointment will be more than outweighed by the world of opportunities – economic, educational, safety, and more – that will be opened to the residents of the park, who have been shut out for so long.

~ Becca Pincus

Regional Assets can be loosely defined as anything that adds to the vitality of a region; obviously this leaves much open to interpretation.  In fact, at first I had a hard time distinguishing some of the other broad categories like education and health care from being included under this umbrella term.  According the University of Buffalo State of the Region report (http://regional-institute.buffalo.edu/sotr/index.cfm), indicators of a regions assets include things like attendance to cultural events, such as live theater, rock concerts, and symphonies.  Finding any meaningful data on attendance or general interest of citizens within the park, was challenging if not impossible given my limited tool set for research.  I’m not even sure if the necessary surveys to obtain this information have been done at all within any of the communities of the park.  Or even more importantly, are these particular parameters, more pertinent in urban, areas even relevant to the largely rural Adirondack region?  Do the relatively small towns in the park host organized events like concerts or live theater with measurable attendance?  According to some folks we talked to during our weekend trips to the park, perhaps a more meaningful survey would be to quantify the number of Conta Dances attended per year (I say this only half way jokingly!).

Considering the above situation of information available, or lack thereof, I chose to focus my research on which regional assets we absolutely know the Adirondack Park offers: Historical Places and Open Space.  There is no doubt that the majority of the park’s draw is mostly due to these two assets, and of coarse, especially the latter of the two.  As the economy continues to struggle, and populations dwindle in communities within the park, the pending success (or failure) of this “Great Experiment” remains largely dependent on the unprecedented amount of open space available.  Will tourism based on access to these “natural areas” be significant enough to sustain communities in the region? Future research might explore the most important reasons for people moving or traveling to the park.  In other words, which of the regional assets laid out in the Buffalo report will actually be meaningful for the Adirondacks?

~ Jake Kelsey

Regional equity is a measurement of fairness within a geographic location.  Fairness can be measured in such areas as race/ethnicity, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability status, and many others.  Because these topics are broad and issues of equity are difficult to quantify, I chose to focus on issues dealing with race/ethnicity.  Data regarding race/ethnicity is made available by the US Census Bureau.  The Adirondack Park is not an area known for diversity.  Therefore, determining levels of equity based on race is difficult.  The best that can be done is to examine percentages within selected populations and watch for change in the future.

Deciding on what indicators to pursue was a challenging task.  I chose to examine poverty, education, housing, and occupational equity.  To begin, I reviewed the many fact sheets provided by the US Census Bureau.  As I attempted to compare different counties throughout the park, I discovered that the lack of diversity would be an obstacle.   Census information is only made public if there is a large enough population to provide anonymity for respondents.  In many Adirondack counties, there is simply not a high enough minority population to publish data.  It was for this reason I chose to focus my efforts on Essex County.  Besides being one of the few counties with enough diversity to reveal census information, it is also one of two counties completely located within the park.

Essex County’s race/ethnicity statistics led to another dilemma; the Adirondack Correctional Facility prisoner population.  Prisoner populations are highly diverse and prisoners are counted in the census.  They may have a significant effect on Essex County’s minority populations.  The US Census Bureau considers prisoners to be living in “group quarters”.  The total number of individuals in group quarters grossly exceeds the 700 man capacity of the prison.  Census data does not differentiate between “group quarters” and prison.  Therefore, I was unable to account for and remove prisoner population when determining percentages.  Future equity indicator projects should attempt to remove the prison population from the regional population.  Essex County’s 2000 census data revealed the following-

WHITE    BLACK    ASIAN    HISPANIC
Total Population    36848    1092          209             851
Group Quarters        1667       989            36               627

The attitudes and prejudices of the individuals living in an area play a large part in regional equity.  This is especially true in an area such as the Adirondacks where minority populations are just a small fraction of the entire population.  The information currently available does not reveal individual perceptions.   Future indicator projects should be aimed at uncovering this.  The data presented here does not help us understand how minorities are treated in everyday occurrences.  But it does give us insight into the different issues of equality within the park.

~ Mark Kolonoski

Public safety in the Adirondack Park is an important indication of the social successes of this “great experiment.”  Throughout our exposure to the different people, places, and topics of concern in the Adirondacks, I was struck by the apparent asymmetry of success.  While facing new threats from invasive species, acid deposition, and climate change, the ecology and environmental health of the region is impressive.  Although stagnant with regard to active timber management on public lands, the natural world in the Adirondack Park is thriving in its untrammeled state.

The social element of this experiment in conservation is not nearly as successful.  Conservation success appears to hinge on developmental failure.  The vitality of the rural communities in the Adirondacks has been eroding for the past 50 years.  Many indicators of social success are not encouraging in the park.  Graduating classes in high school are plummeting and the median income is dropping.

Despite these negative indications of social success, there are some encouraging facts.  By many measures, public safety is a successful component of life in the Adirondack Park.  This rural area is blessed with a low population, which often leads to less crime, but there are other indications of safety.  Traffic fatalities occur, but the per capita rate is fairly low.  When emergencies do occur, emergency services are generally quick to arrive and to transport victims to the hospital.  In other words, aside from logistical problems faced in many rural areas, emergency services are faring well in the Adirondack Park.

The future is not clear.  Much of the first responder workforce are volunteers.  As the median age in the park grows older, an important source of workers is disappearing.  Many departments are foreseeing a need to hire more paid employees, requiring a bigger budget just as revenues are shrinking.  Rural departments may be forced to join forces and provide consolidated services to a larger area.  A broader variety of emergency services may be provided, but the response time may grow as these consolidated departments are forced to close locations and move to centralized ones.

~ Dan Comerford

Planning and land use in the Adirondack Park is well-quantified due to legislation mandating the creation of the State Land Master Plan (SLMP) and the Adirondack Park Land Use Development Plan (APLUDP). These mandates were created to address sustainable development goals for the Park by attempting to define and balance wild, protected, public lands with developing, productive human communities. The Park is one of only a handful of regions on earth where industrial operations and human development operate in close proximity to large tracts of “Forever Wild” preserved ecosystems and managed natural resources. While the objective of balancing development and conservation is clear, the execution is iterative and therefore requires analysis and feedback.

The planning and land use indicators we looked at focused on data from the Office of Real Property Services (ORPS) and the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). These data sets classified Park lands according to ownership and intensity/type of use. While we summarized this data in an overall land use page, reorganization into studies of public (state-owned) and private (residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, etc.) land use might be appropriate as well. The main theme throughout the Park’s story is this balance between public and private land use.

Public lands seem to be well-documented, but private land use, especially in terms of economic activity (including agriculture, tourism, industry and commerce) may be difficult to monitor. For instance, a Park landowner could manage their own land for firewood or even building materials; a small, but meaningful economic enterprise for the rural Adirondack region. Backyard gardening does not fit into the NASS’s farming definitions, but is also significant for Park residents. These are the types of activities that go unnoticed in the land use statistics we have presented. Yet, these activities might play a significant role in improving the economic security of Park residents, especially as large industry continues to retreat from these and other rugged rural areas.

Small-scale, local food and energy “industries” might be making a comeback in areas like the Park and it will be important to track progress on this front. Emerging technologies – including greenhouses/bioshelters, mobile sawmills, small wind and hydropower, and gasification/pyrolysis processes – could play a role in how private landowners choose to use their piece of the Park. Changes in public land use management could help to spur such activity, while preserving the wild character of the Park; information feedback to confirm the economic benefits of such changes is essential. This would be the next frontier of sustainable development and a worthy goal on which public officials, NGOs and Park residents could focus their efforts.

~ Sam Gorton

Questions like this are at the heart of governing the Adirondacks.  How can a State mandated park of six million acres, the only one like it in the world, be adaptive and efficient while also retaining its substance and strength?  Residents and policy makers throughout New York have come to blows about the questions that impact their water sources, forested areas, recreational activities, and ability to provide bread for their families.

Data alone cannot measure the effectiveness of government in the Adirondacks.  People are constantly creating and molding government in new and unpredictable ways.  One community organizer can have as much impact as the Governor of the State, if the stakes are high enough.  How can the Governor, Executive Director of the Adirondack Park Agency, and Mr. Jones whose septic system is failing, work together to solve both the immediate and abstract issues that determine the very character of the entire region?   While personal influence and economic context are underpinnings of government in the Park, numbers can help us take a step back and see the trends over time in a more objective way.

Indicators can help us find vantage points that make seeing the big picture issues easier.  Once the big picture is viewable, long term planning can happen.  How we then go about improving collaborations, equity, and accessibility to government to build a stronger and healthier region becomes a matter of shared vision and collective political will.

~ Lydia Menendez

It is important to note that this document is the Adirondack Park Trends Analysis “Plan”, not “Report.”  The plan does not include actual data for any research area or indicator.   Instead, it recommends what indicators to look at as well as offering suggestions regarding where data about each individual indicator may be found.   These suggestions could serve as a valuable starting point for anyone committed to further research into the Adirondack indicators represented on this site.

Additionally, the writers of the Analysis Plan strongly recommended that data gathering, analysis, and maintenance be given the highest priority level, and that this continue into the future.  It is hoped, then, that at least some of the recommended data has been obtained and is on file with the Adirondack Park Agency; specifically with the Agency Planning Division.  (The Agency Planning Division was recognized as the division that would be responsible for the oversight, coordination, and maintenance of the databases.)   This data (if it exists) could prove very useful for this project since it (presumably) will have been collected at a park-wide scale.

At the very least, the Adirondack Park Trends Analysis Plan can provide those interested in furthering this Adirondack Indicators Project with a number of useful suggestions about where the look for important data.  Furthermore, if the recommendations of the Plan have been carried out since it was published in 2001, the Adirondack Park Agency may already have a wealth of data that could prove very useful to this project.  The Adirondack Park Trends Analysis Plan can be seen by clicking here.

~ Kim Hoffman

Invasive species post a huge threat to the “Forever Wild” character of the Adirondack Park.  From beech bark disease to Eurasian milfoil, invasive animals, plants, and pathogens are reshaping the Adirondack landscape: shifting the species compositions of the forests, clogging the lakefront vistas, and erasing once-familiar  trees from the park.  These invaders have already arrived, but more seem to be knocking on the door, and climate change has the potential to rock any dynamic.

Knowing that some invasives are here, and others quickly approaching, how are we to best monitor the situation?  Which indictors will alert us to threats in time to react?  Or does this naively assume that something can be done to deter the looming threats?

While writing up the summary on indicators for climate change in the Adirondacks, I was lucky to be guided by a comprehensive peer-reviewed article, “Historical Pattens and Effects of Changes in Adirondack Climates Since the Early 20^th Century.”  In my preliminary search for invasive species information, this kind of keystone paper has not surfaced.  I did stumble across a great website, created by the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program.  Divided between aquatic species and terrestrial species, this site highlights the invasive plant species already taking hold in the park ecosystems.  I really appreciated the maps that show the locations where these plants have been found.  However, I worry that these maps are incomplete indicators, or last chance indicators.  Are we supposed to wait until emerald ash borers have established themselves in the park before mapping their locations so that they can appear as “indicators” of this invasive specie?  This is not to say that the maps are useless; they are great for planning invasive species removal projects.

But, the APIPP is very clear that there is a need for coordinated monitoring, so presumably their maps reflect only the beginning of the spread of these species.

If maps within the park are not up to par, should the Adirondack Indicators project map invasives across the region — outside of the park — to monitor the spread of invasives before they reach the blue line?  The steady march of insect pests on the map in the Adirondack Council’s State of Park 2009 could be an example.  While this simplified model effectively raises awareness, I still wonder if we could find a different, more anticipatory kind of indicator …

~ Caitlin McDonough

For the Health Indicators section, I chose to analyze data from eight counties within the Adirondack Park: Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, St. Lawrence, and Warren counties.  Although a total of 12 counties have some amount of land within the park, these eight were selected because they seem to best represent conditions in the Adirondack North Country region.  Thus, counties containing only a small amount of land within the park and/or those that also contained significantly developed or urbanized areas outside the park were excluded.  The same data collection criteria were also used in The Adirondack Condition, a report by Jim Northup published by Environmental Advocates in 1997.

I selected ten indicators for which data are available from the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) County Health Indicator Profiles.  Data for the years 2003-2007 are available online free of charge at:  http://www.health.state.ny.us/statistics/chip/index.htm.  I chose indicators that cover a broad spectrum of health-related issues, including reproductive health (teenage pregnancy, low birthweight, and prenatal care), nutrition (heart disease), mental health (suicide), substance abuse (drug-related hospitalizations), and disease (lung cancer, breast cancer, asthma, AIDS).  Each of these indicators could suggest a number of factors at play in Adirondack communities – i.e. teenage pregnancy rates could reflect the level of education of young women; access to family planning services; and/or cultural norms in the region.  Therefore one should be careful to draw conclusions from a single indicator.  However, taken together, these indicators provide a snapshot of the health of Adirondack residents as compared to neighboring counties and relative to the state as a whole.

One major limitation of the data as presented is that only five years of information are included, because only data from 2003-2007 were readily available.  This short time frame makes it difficult to discern long-term trends or draw conclusions.  As this section is developed further, I recommend that data be acquired and analyzed from NYSDOH on ten-year intervals (i.e. 2007, 1997, 1987, etc.).  Presumably these data exist, but have not yet been digitized and made available online.

Another limitation to note is that by analyzing data at the county level, a number of areas are included that are outside the “blue line” of the Adirondack Park.  Therefore, data do not precisely reflect the conditions of those living within the park.  In order to attain such accuracy, data would have to be analyzed at the township level, and perhaps subdivided further for townships that themselves straddle the blue line (as was done in the Adirondack Park Regional Assessment Project, or APRAP, available online at: http://www.aatvny.org/content/Generic/View/1).  Instead, the data presented here should be taken to reflect conditions in the Adirondack North Country region more broadly.

Further study could be conducted to gather data on health issues such as obesity, substance abuse, health care access, and insurance coverage.  These topics would likely require original qualitative and quantitative research that is currently beyond the scope of this project.  However, as the project gains momentum such indicators could be developed by researchers for future study.

~ Liz Mills