Stop Sale and Logging of New York's Largest Old-Growth Sugar Maples
11/20/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Environmentalists are trying to stop the sale and logging of New York's
largest remaining forest of old-growth sugar maples
The buyer of the state land says "tree police" should mind their own
business
Published Nov. 20, 1996, in the Herald-Journal.
Copyright (c) 1996, The Herald Company
www.syracuse.com
Amy Samuels, a plant ecologist at the State University of New York
College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, helps Wayne
Gillespie, director of Centers for Nature Education, measure the oldest
tree in the stand of old-growth trees in Camillus. It's more than 350 years
old and 11 feet around.
By Mark Weiner, Staff Writer
The state has auctioned off New York's largest remaining forest of
old-growth sugar maples, a stand of trees up to 400 years old in Camillus.
The buyer, a felon twice convicted of embezzlement, wants to log the
property for its valuable timber.
Stephen L. Scheidel, 46, of Camillus, offered $480,000 at a state auction
of 315 acres that includes the forest.
Scheidel, a former pizza shop owner, said he does not yet have the money.
If he can borrow the money, he said he plans to pay off the debt by
harvesting the 40-acre forest for timber.
The forest of sugar maples - New York's official tree - is among the finest
old-growth stands on the East Coast, said several forestry experts who
examined the trees. Some may date to the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620.
"Certainly in New York state we'll never see a maple forest like this
again," said Andrew Hillman, Ithaca's city forester, who inspected the
trees Monday.
Until now, no state agency or environmental group questioned the August
auction. A coalition of environmental groups wants to stop the sale.
Three companies have already marked the largest trees in the centuries-old
forest for logging, coalition leaders said. Blue dots and orange slashes
have been spray-painted on many of the large trees.
Scheidel's bid was the highest of five submitted for the former Syracuse
Developmental Center property, overlooking Nine Mile Creek off Warners and
Thompson roads in Camillus. He gave a $10,000 deposit and has until Dec. 31
to deliver the balance.
The state Office of General Services, which handled the auction, will not
transfer the deed until Scheidel pays the $470,000 balance, said Lisa
Coldwell, an OGS spokeswoman in Albany.
The offices of the state attorney general, comptroller and secretary of
state routinely must approve sales of state surplus land. Until then,
Scheidel may not remove any trees.
"He's not allowed to do anything with that property until we have received
full payment," said Coldwell of OGS. "If someone is surmising he will sell
the timber to pay what is owed, that certainly doesn't seem possible."
Scheidel said he plans to sell 250 acres of the property to a farmer,
keeping 65 acres for himself, including the forest.
In the meantime, Scheidel said those who want to preserve the trees should
mind their own business.
"Under what rights do we let somebody come in and say tree-cutting is
illegal?" he said. "Are we going to have tree police that come onto
people's properties and say, "These are the trees you can cut, but these
you can't?' I bought the property fairly, and I intend to manage the wood
lot with selective cutting. What's wrong with that?"
Scheidel said he had not wanted to cut the trees, and offered to sell the
property to at least five conservation groups, including Save the County.
Karen Slotnick, executive director of Save the County, a land trust that
has preserved more than 1,500 acres in Onondaga County, said her group was
never contacted by Scheidel.
Scheidel said he has no intention to clear-cut the forest, but will cut all
trees that are rotting or more than 50 years old. He disputes the
assessment of professional foresters that the sugar maple stand is
old-growth, which means it dates to the settlement of America.
SUGAR MAPLES are prized hardwoods known for their excellent veneer and for
producing high-quality furniture. Nature enthusiasts call the trees the
redwoods of the East Coast because they grow so straight and tall.
On Monday, about a half-dozen forestry experts from Syracuse to Ithaca
marveled at the trees.
"It's a living museum and it's the last of its kind, so why destroy it?"
said Mike DeMunn, a forester with the Finger Lakes Land Trust.
"The best trees are still there," DeMunn said. "We are seeing the
culmination of natural selection. We're seeing the best that nature can
produce."
The Nine Mile Creek Conservation Council, which acquired a 30-acre section
of the state property along the creek, is leading efforts to stop the land
sale.
The group wants to preserve the trees for their aesthetic, historical and
scientific significance. The group also fears the logging will allow soil
erosion to foul the creek.
The Camillus trees are part of what was once America's vast Eastern
Deciduous Forest, 600 million acres of timber that covered the landscape
from Maine to Texas.
"A squirrel could have traveled from Maine to the southern part of Texas
without ever touching the ground," said Wayne Gillespie, a council
spokesman and director of the Centers for Nature Education at Baltimore
Woods. "Now all we have are remnants."
THE FOREST disappeared as the Europeans settled America, leaving fewer than
200,000 acres of old-growth forest on the East Coast today, most of it in
the Smoky Mountains.
Today some of the trees measure 130 feet in height (the equivalent of a
13-story building) and are 11 feet around.
An expert at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry said
there are historical, aesthetic and scientific reasons to keep the forest
standing.
Don Leopold, a forest biologist at the college, said, "I've seen some of
the biggest trees in the east and the world, and this is a visually
beautiful stand. To have it logged would be a real shame."
Leopold said he was surprised to find the trees still existed.
"It has been believed for decades that there are no more old-growth or
pre-settlement forests left in Central New York," Leopold said.
IN THE BID specifications, the state set no restrictions to protect the
trees or creek. In fact, those documents raved about the potential for
logging there.
The report cautioned about erosion if the 40-acre forest was cut, and
recommended a "managed harvest" if the trees were sold for timber.
The state Office of General Services offered the forest to the college
before the auction. But officials declined the offer.
SUNY-ESF spokeswoman Jeri Lynn Smith said, "We did not want to take title
to the property, but we did make a counter-proposal to jointly maintain the
property with the regional office of the Department of Environmental
Conservation."
The joint proposal was rejected by the Office of General Services, Coldwell
said. She promised officials would re-examine the offer.
SCHEIDEL IS A former Citibank assistant vice president whose convictions
left him delivering pizza for a shop he owned.
In 1992, Scheidel was sentenced to a year on probation for embezzling
$75,000 from a pension fund for employees of an Ogdensburg auto parts store
he co-owned.
Scheidel withdrew the money from the pension fund five days before he was
sentenced to probation for embezzling $84,000 from Citibank in Syracuse.
In the Citibank case, he submitted a phony loan application and used the
money to buy a house, prosecutors said.
"I'm not ashamed of the fact that I was a convicted felon," Scheidel said.
"This was seven years in the past. I paid for it. And it can't hurt me
anymore."