Shadmoor Letdown
What a letdown. The Federal Government has axed the money it would have appropriated next year to buy Shadmoor, a breathtaking 98-acre tract on the ocean in Montauk.
The Senate already had earmarked $2 million. The House chose not to earmark anything. But the Nature Conservancy and other parties still expected the funding would survive negotiations in Congress. It did not.
Perhaps because they needed to look fiscally conservative in an election year, members of Congress decided to hold the line on such land purchases nationwide, and to give New York State only one of two high-priority purchases on its list. The Sterling Forest, a 20,000-acre watershed on the New York-New Jersey border, beat Shadmoor out.
Ironically, the Federal money would have come from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a repository of royalties from privately used public resources that has been largely diverted to non-conservation purposes. Furthermore, to get the overall parks bill saving the Sterling Forest through the Senate last week, President Clinton had to agree to extend a logging lease in Alaska's Tongass National Forest and to ease development restrictions on some of Florida's barrier islands.
The lesson, perhaps, is that nothing comes without a price. It hurts indeed when our corner of the earth is the one to pay it.
A more pragmatic lesson is that Congress could avert "this kind of natural areas conservation cannibalism," as Sara Davison of the Nature Conservancy puts it in a letter to The Star today, if the Land and Water Fund were used exclusively for the purpose for which it was named.
Shadmoor is habitat to one of the last populations in the world of a snapdragon called the sandplain gerardia. Thus, the Nature Conservancy can be expected to continue to pursue Federal funds from the 1998 budget.
In the meantime, however, the East Hampton Town Planning Board has given Shadmoor's owners preliminary approval for its development. Let's hope something can be worked out before the bulldozers arrive.