North Country Respondents Voice Vision for Sustainable Future

Focus group and e-mail respondents in the Adirondack Park, Tug Hill and the three neighboring Northern Forest states were asked to consider the following question: If new and additional investment funds were available to help stimulate a sustainable economic and environmental future for your community, what investment choices would you make?

For the last two years researchers from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) and the University of Vermont (UVM) have conducted facilitated discussions with focus groups drawn from communities in Tug Hill and the Adirondack Park. They conducted follow-up surveys with these groups and with a broader population in the neighboring states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The title of the research project, funded by the Northeast States Research Cooperative, is “Bottom-Up Strategies for Bio-Regional Policy: Designing Participatory Processes in Legislative Policy Formation.”

A key question the researchers set out to investigate builds on the responses in the focus groups and the replies to the survey questions. The key question is this: Would community-level, “bottom-up” investment choices be similar to region-wide, “top-down” ones? Or would they be very different?

The premise of the overall study was to understand the ideas and priorities of local communities, the North Country region of New York State, and the four-state region as the basis of a vision for the economic, social, and environmental well-being of the Northern Forest. This vision for the future will give a voice to residents in prioritizing regional, state, and federal funding and investment in community resources, as well as a basis of comparison as to how well regional planners and interest groups represent the ideas and priorities of local communities.

Methods

To begin the focus group discussions participants were asked to think about their communities a generation from now, about 30 years into the future. They were asked to think about a vision for their communities and not to concern themselves with existing resources or existing programs, either local, state, or federal. Questions on the eight-page survey form reflected the many hours of discussion that each group devoted to the issues. The responses show many areas of agreement, and several areas where priorities differ from one community to another and from one level— local, state, regional—to another.

Discussions and the resulting survey were developed in a three-step process. First, a series of meetings was held with each of the New York groups in which ideas and visions for the future of the North Country were developed. Then a survey was mailed to all these participants with questions reflecting the discussions, with 53% of those contacted responding. The survey was then mailed and e-mailed to interested people in the neighboring Northern Forest states and their results tabulated separately; this resulted in a 27% response rate from these three states.

The groups were selected from people active in community leadership, and did not represent the full demographic characteristics of the region. The respondents were older—average age of 53—with families; they grew up in small towns or rural communities, had lived in their communities for an average of 21 years, and the great majority (80%) had bachelors or graduate level education. As a group they had a higher average household or family income than Northern Forest communities overall.

Results

Preliminary results strongly suggest that the respondents—from one Tug Hill focus group, two Adirondack community groups, two North Country groups and one region-wide group—want to maintain and nurture a strong rural character as crucial to their future. They also rate encouraging a diverse local economy very highly and say that protecting the environment as the basis for improving their quality of life is also important. Opinions on the role and future of the forest products industry in their communities were somewhat mixed.

Asked to choose between five types of investment, respondents across the board rated physical infrastructure at the top, and within that broad category, improving telecommunications, electric services and cell phone service were the most important. Overall, respondents rated investment in the economy and planning capacity as the second priority, followed by investment in environmental projects, and then investment in people, social and cultural projects.

Though survey respondents agreed on many issues and priorities, there was significant disagreement on some issues among the three broad groups, namely local communities in New York, the larger group representing multiple communities and specific interest groups in the Park, and the respondents in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. There were key differences in opinion, for example, on whether “a generation from now I would like my community to be much the same as it is today,” with which statement 53% of the Northern Forest group, 48% of the North Country group, but just 23% of local respondents disagreed. There were also differences in priorities on the role of chain stores in local economies, improving centralized sewer and water services, the role of second home development and its impact on community character, the importance of four-season tourism and recreation as the economic engine for the region and the value of promoting local agriculture and farm-based businesses.

Survey results were presented and discussed at a workshop held on November 30, 2006, in Saranac Lake organized by the Adirondack North Country Association.

Possible Next Steps

The focus group discussions and the responses to the survey have provided a wealth of information that can be used to inform whatever regional economic planning project goes forward in the next year or so. The information from these responses is summarized in the selected accompanying figures and tables. The next steps proposed in making this survey truly useful to the broad Northern Forest community are as follows:

1. Develop a shorter version of the survey suitable for use in a 15-minute telephone interview format, to go to a much broader cross section of the population in the Northern Forest counties of the four states, one that reaches all demographic groups in the region.
2. Assess existing local, state, federal and private programs and resources that address the issues discussed in the survey results, and where needed, suggest new or modified programs that do help communities as they envision and strive for a productive and sustainable future.

The impetus for the research question came from proposals to create a regional economic development strategy and perhaps create a regional economic commission to bring additional federal funds to the 30 Northern Forest counties. These two actions are as follows.

Northern Forest Center Economic Adjustment Strategy

The Northern Forest Center has been awarded a grant by the U.S. Department of Commerce to work with representatives from the four states and their respective governor’s offices to develop a regional economic adjustment strategy. The NFC has convened a steering committee from the four states and is making progress on this planning process.

Federal Government Action for a Sustainable Future

In the U.S. House of Representatives Congressman Michael Michaud (D-ME) has proposed legislation (H.R.1695, to be re-introduced in the current Congress under a new number) that would, among its several provisions, bring additional federal resources to the Northern Forest counties. The bill would create a regional economic development commission for the four states, similar to the Appalachian Regional Commission; would develop a sustainable regional economic development strategy; and would be authorized to disburse an additional $40 million a year for five years to the participating states and counties for projects consistent with the overall strategy. A similar bill is being considered in the U.S. Senate by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME). Congressional representatives in New York’s North Country have signed on as co-sponsors of the House bill.

Questions about the Research and NSRC

The survey is part of a research project financed by the federally funded Northeastern States Research Cooperative and conducted by SUNY ESF and UVM. If you have questions about the study and the survey, please direct them to Graham L. Cox or to Jon D. Erickson at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at UVM.

Authors

Dr. Graham L. Cox, glcox@audubon.org, is coordinator of open space and sustainable forestry programs with Audubon New York; Dr. Jon D. Erickson, jon.erickson@uvm.edu, is Associate Professor of Ecological Economics at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont; Dr. William F. Porter, wfporter@esf.edu, is Professor and Director, Adirondack Ecological Center and Roosevelt Wild Life Station, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Anne M. Woods, amwoods@syr.edu, is a graduate student who works at SUNY ESF’s Adirondack Ecological Center.

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