ALBANY — The bill set to trade 13 acres of pristine Pine Bush land for 30 acres and a landfill won’t see its vote.
"I have come to the conclusion today," Assemblyman John McEneny told The Enterprise exclusively Wednesday night, "that we don’t need the bill."

McEneny surprised environmentalists when he sponsored a bill that would allow the city of Albany to take 12.6 acres from the Pine Bush Preserve and add it to the Rapp Road landfill, with the provision that 30 acres would be added elsewhere.
"I find it appalling," Lynne Jackson, a spokesperson for the watchdog group, Save the Pine Bush, told The Enterprise on Tuesday. "I’m sure that he’s under a lot of pressure," she added referring to McEneny, who has one of the best environmental voting records in the Assembly.
"This is a slippery slope that we don’t want to go down," said Jackson. No land has been removed from the preserve since 1991, when the city dedicated the land, she said.
"Now a template will be set up to undedicate land," Chris Hawver, executive director of the Albany Pine Bush Preservation Commission, told The Enterprise this week. The State Legislature created the inter-municipal agency to govern a preserve that protects the globally rare inland pine barren, home to the endangered Karner blue butterfly. It spans three municipalities — the towns of Colonie and Guilderland and the city of Albany.

Hawver and Jackson both shared concerns that the Guilderland Town Board discussed at its meeting on Tuesday.
"I don’t want to set a precedent," Councilwoman Patricia Slavick said, when casting her vote against supporting the city’s proposed landfill expansion. Guilderland was the only municipality, in the 12-member Solid Waste Planning Unit that uses the Rapp Road landfill, that did not sign Mayor Gerald Jennings’s letter of support for expansion. It is also the only municipality in the unit that borders the landfill and contains part of the Pine Bush preserve, aside from the city of Albany.

The revenue from the landfill, which the unit member municipalities pay a tipping fee to use, totaled approximately $10.8 million last year for the city, according to Albany Comptroller Thomas Nitido. He said that this makes up about 7.3 percent of the city’s $148 million operating budget.

City property taxes would go up 23 to 25 percent if the city had to cover that portion of the budget, were it to lose the income from the landfill, Nitido told The Enterprise on Wednesday.
"Are we becoming too dependent on landfill revenue"" asked McEneny.

Ron Canestrari co-sponsored McEneny’s bill in the Assembly and a similar bill was sponsored by Neil Breslin in the Senate.

Jennings had first requested a bill on Jan. 23, McEneny said, but didn’t follow up until June 1; the legislative session ends in June. Jennings did not return calls from The Enterprise this week.

McEneny said that he sponsored the bill because he was led to believe by lawyers, experts in the field, and the city that this bill was necessary in order to conduct a State Environmental Quality Review on the land.
McEneny found that this commonly-held belief is wrong. "Alienation and SEQR are independent of each other," he said.

Alienation is the term used for the authorization given by the state legislature to the municipality that releases municipal park land for other uses. The city of Albany needs the legislature to pass an alienation bill in order to undedicate its land from the Pine Bush for use as a landfill.
"From an environmental review perspective, SEQR compliance should be commenced as early as possible in the decision making process," states the New York State Parks Handbook on the Alienation and Conversion of Municipal Park Land. "State Parks suggests that a municipality should undertake this review prior to seeking alienation legislation."

SEQR requires that the undertaking entity — in this case, the city of Albany — consider alternatives to the project that it is studying, according to the handbook.
"There are other things out there," said Jackson. "I think we need to look at them." Hawver also said that he’d like to see the city consider other options and provide a public forum in which they can be discussed.
One of the down sides to passing the alienation bill before getting the environmental review is there would be a "bias in favor of that alternative," said McEneny.
"It may well be necessary," he said of expanding the landfill further into the Pine Bush. "Do the SEQR first and ask for alienation later."