Fifty Years Ago4

On July 15, 1971, Town of Rockland officials announced their response to the action taken against the town and its planning board concerning the proposed large-scale development bordering Edgewood Lakes. Like the Swiss Forest development that created problems at Sand Pond one year earlier, the developers, Fred and Evelyn Haas, the proprietors of Edgewood Lake Inn, were also included in the suit by area residents and their allies.

The Town of Rockland began its pursuit of adopting land-use regulation in 1961 with the formation of a zoning commission, whose role was to propose a zoning ordinance for the town. Six years later, work by the commission was completed and on July 6, 1967, the Town Board adopted the zoning ordinance and map that went into effect January first of 1968. With the passage of the ordinance, that included alterations by the town board, the original commission who drafted the zoning document now became the town’s planning board.

The 1968 document, which divided the town into zoning districts, allowed one-half acre building lots for much of the township outside of the agricultural district. However, within a year of adopting the ordinance, developers approached the town with schemes of large scale development within the agricultural district. Pro-development town officials altered the zoning map to allow residential districts, which allowed the one-half acre lots, within the agricultural districts. During the summer of 1969, two such proposals were located along the White Roe Lake Road. The first was a proposed trailer park on a sixty-acre parcel. The second request was for 87 private home lots to be allowed north of Trojan Lake. This systematic altering by town officials of the Town of Rockland’s original zoning districts in a spot-zoning manner, whenever these officials were approached with a large-scale development scheme, set the stage for the two-year confrontation between the local conservationists and their associates against the Edgewood Lake developers and their community allies