Truck Bypass Through State Park: An Illusory Solution

[An error was made. I put up a map of Saratoga Battlefield rather than the state park. This is the state park.]

Saratoga Springs Planning Board members Bill McTygue and Mark Pingle received major media coverage when in a report, they circulated, they proposed building a truck bypass through the southern end of the state park to remedy the problem of trucks traveling through the residential neighborhood of Van Dam Street.

I was surprised by Bill’s involvement in such a proposal. He was active in the city working for his brother, Public Works Commissioner Tom McTygue, when this bypass was proposed back in the ’90s. The state dismissed the idea for basically the same reasons as the points made in a recent paper written by Sustainable Saratoga.

I have sympathy for the Van Dam neighbors who must contend with the trucks that pass by their homes. It seems unfair, though, to offer them the illusion that the state would finance the huge project of a truck bypass through a state park given not only the cost but all the other issues raised in the Sustainable piece.

The following are excerpts from the Sustainable paper along with the paper itself.

• The value of protected wild lands and public support for their preservation is greater than ever. The proposed route through the park would cross 2,000 feet of high-quality wetlands, as well as tributaries to Kayaderosseras Creek, including Geyser Creek. Undisturbed forests and wetlands provide essential habitat for wildlife and mitigate the effects of climate change. Wetlands reduce downstream flooding, a benefit ever more important as the frequency and severity of storms steadily increase. A renewed push for the construction of
  a major highway through the park would be met with a strong public outcry.
• The construction of a truck bypass highway, where proposed, would violate the New York State Open Space Conservation Plan. The Open Space Plan calls for actions to further protect the streams and wetlands in the Kayaderosseras corridor. The acquisition of nearby upland areas, as proposed by the planning board members, is not an objective of the Open Space Plan and would not compensate for the impacts to Kayaderosseras tributaries and the extensive destruction of valuable wetlands that would result from highway construction.
• The bypass project would be very costly and would have to clear several governmental hurdles. The construction of a bypass highway through the state park would have enormous financial and environmental costs. The source of funding has not been determined. The project would involve a transfer of jurisdiction from State Park land to a State or local highway department. It would involve the New York State Department of Transportation and likely require approval by the New York State Legislature. Members of the Assembly and Senate, many with State Park lands in their districts, would have a hard time justifying the alienation of parkland with uncertain benefits for a distant city. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, which has jurisdiction over the park, opposed the proposal last time and, based on the similarity of this proposal, would be confronted with the same environmental concerns.