Forest Preserve (New York) - Article 14

Article 14

To manage the land, the state had created a Forest Commission, making New York second only to California in having a state-level forestry agency. Most of its members were either openly or covertly connected to timber interests, however, and routinely approved dodges around the legislation to make sure logging would continue. In 1893 the legislature retroactively approved many of these practices by giving the commission the right to sell timber from the lands and trade them as it saw fit.

It seemed the Forest Preserve now existed only on paper. But the following year New York held a constitutional convention, and the language of the law was written into the new state constitution with added words to close every loophole the Forest Commission had found.

This section, Article 7 of the 1894 constitution (which was later changed to article 14), is often referred to as the "forever wild" section even though those two words do not appear next to each other in the text.

Since amending New York's constitution is a deliberately cumbersome process that requires the approval of both Assembly and Senate in successive sessions of the legislature, followed by public approval at the next general election, this put a severe damper on any efforts by the Forest Commission to placate the loggers while still claiming to be honoring the law.

Nonetheless, they would try. The new provision barely survived an attempt to gut it two years later when they again prevailed upon the legislature to approve an amendment requiring the state to "manage the land in accordance with sound timber management principles." Voters resoundingly rejected it, however, and the principle of a "forever wild" Forest Preserve has remained inviolate in New York State to this day.

Since then, over 2,000 amendments to Article 14 have been introduced in the legislature. Of those, only 28 have made it to the ballot, and only 20 have passed. Many of those have been otherwise routine land transfers that enabled the construction or expansion of public cemeteries or airports. Others have allowed for the construction and continued maintenance of reservoirs and highways. The most significant change was a pair of amendments that created the ski centers at Belleayre in the Catskills and Gore and Whiteface in the Adirondacks. The latter includes a toll road to the summit as well.

Subsections were later added to allow the construction of reservoirs and make certain that use of the land remained free to the public beyond any reasonable fee the state could charge for a particular activity.