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Leader of property rights tackles issues
BY SARA FOSS Gazette Reporter

   When Carol LaGrasse and her husband moved to the tiny Warren County town of Stony Creek, they planned to live simply, “in harmony with nature.”
   They used bicycles to get around. They didn’t have electricity. They grew their own food.
   “I didn’t need a lot of money,” recalled LaGrasse, a retired civil engineer. “I grew up with the old ways. I saved a lot of money. It was a very fanatical, principle-driven thing.”
   Life might have continued on in this fashion if LaGrasse hadn’t become a leader in the property rights movement, founding an organization called the Property Rights Foundation of America in the 1990s. She got her driver’s license, so she could drive to Washington, D.C., and testify before Congress. Today her house has electricity and Internet service to support what LaGrasse calls “the project” — her tireless advocacy on behalf of private property owners.
   As president of the Property Rights Foundation of America, LaGrasse advises people on how to fight zoning laws, fields calls from ranchers and assists people who are dealing with what LaGrasse considers excessive environmental regulations. Eminent domain has emerged as a big issue, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling that the town of New London, Conn., had the authority to take homes for a private development project.
   On Saturday, the Property Rights Foundation of America will hold its 11th National Conference on Private Property Rights at the Turf Holiday Inn on Wolf Road in Albany.
   The event is expected to draw between 85 and 100 people, mainly from the Northeast. The busy schedule, which runs from 8 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., features panels with titles such as “Farmers Fight Back in the New Jersey Highlands,” “Twenty-First Century Carpetbaggers & Privateers: The Booty is Your Property,” and “Confronting International Animal Rights and Eco-Terrorism.”
   The goal of the conference, LaGrasse said, is to educate people and provide them with tools and resources they can bring back to their communities to work for property rights. “I believe in people’s rights, everyone treating everyone with respect,” LaGrasse said. She doesn’t eat meat, she said, but supports the rights of ranchers. She doesn’t like all-terrain vehicles, but believes they should have access to state land, just as hikers do.
   People, LaGrasse said, should be able to do whatever they want with the land they own.
FIGHTING FOR CHANGE
   A lot of people got involved in the property rights movement in the late 1990s, in response to increased regulation of wetlands, LaGrasse said.
   There was another surge of interest in 2005, after the Supreme Court ruling in the New London, Conn., case. The U.S. Constitution says governments cannot take private property for public use without “just compensation.” Governments have traditionally used eminent domain to build public projects such as roads, reservoirs and parks; recently, however, more cities have been using eminent domain to eliminate blight and spur redevelopment.
   LaGrasse herself first got involved in the property rights movement in 1990, in response to an Adirondack Park Agency plan to buy 650,000 acres of private forest land and turn it into public parkland. She saw this as a move that would hamper economic development, and drive up the cost of land.
   “There's not much land left,” LaGrasse said, of the Adirondacks. “What’s left is expensive.”
   The more she learned, the more she realized property rights was a national issue, LaGrasse said. This revelation led to the formation of the Property Rights Foundation of America.
   The organization’s Web site contains writings and articles on property cases throughout the country and in upstate New York. One piece, written by LaGrasse and titled “(The Department of Environmental Conservation’s) Insidious Disregard for the People,” is a stinging attack on the agency’s draft unit management plan for the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest in the southeastern area of Adirondack Park.
   “In studying several of DEC’s draft unit management plans, it is apparent that they all have similar intentions, to cause a death of a thousand cuts, to eliminate human access, to eliminate roads [both town highways and logging roads], to eliminate campgrounds and generally to make the stateowned lands inhospitable to hunters, snowmobilers, and users of motorized vehicles,” LaGrasse writes. “None of these groups represent the APA’s and DEC’s clientele, which are the environmental organizations, the river and kayak or canoe groups, the hikers and mountain climbers.”
   LaGrasse and her husband, Peter, moved to Stony Creek from New York City in 1973, unhappy with their profession, engineering. In New York City, they felt they couldn’t make big engineering decisions, she said, because political interests dictated how projects would turn out.
BUSINESS WORRIES
   Jane Hogan, a member of the Property Rights Foundation of America who splits her time in Virginia and Maine, plans to attend the conference on Saturday.
   She said she met LaGrasse about seven years ago at a meeting and was “impressed with what she was saying and doing. … Her thoroughness and intelligence and research is what makes her so impressive.”
   Hogan, who used to own a hardwood sawmill with her husband, became active in the property rights movement after becoming concerned about how logging regulations would affect their business.
   “Some of these regulations … crippled the industry without having any environmental impact,” she said. More recently, a friend of hers in Richmond, Va., battled city officials who wanted to take his rental properties under eminent domain for redevelopment.
   Eventually, she said, Virginia passed an eminent domain law with protections for private property owners.
   Although LaGrasse expresses support for conservation and simple living, she often finds herself at odds with environmental groups.
   John Sheehan, a spokesman for the nonprofit Adirondack Council, an environmental organization that works to protect the Adirondack Park, said that the Property Rights Foundation of America wields little influence.
   “They never really caught on as an organization,” Sheehan said. “They enjoyed some popularity in the 1990s when the national property rights movement was going on. People take their concerns into consideration, but sometimes [these concerns] are selfish. They haven’t had much momentum.”
   LaGrasse said she considers most environmentalists hypocrites.
   She feels many environmentalists support restrictions and policies that improve their quality of life, such as logging restrictions in the Adirondacks, but are alltoo-willing to import goods from countries with few environmental controls, such as China.
   “I don’t have any qualms about fighting environmentalists,” she said.
   “People should be learning to live in harmony with nature, in a way that has less of an impact on nature.”

  
  
  

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LaGrasse herself first got involved in the property rights movement in 1990, in response to an Adirondack Park Agency plan to buy 650,000 acres of private forest land and turn it into public parkland. She saw this as a move that would hamper economic development, and drive up the cost of land.

Show me the $$ trail......so for everyone who thinks they pay too high taxes, another 'protection' to a town/village is to outprice anyone who wants to move there.....it's an invisible gated community......

...as to how or on what our taxes get spent on is the responsibility for those who live there....not just nay/yea-sayers,,but honest research and information

Carol LeGrasse is just a tree hugger! Plain and simple! Probably a friend of Al Gore too!