What’s really behind the sweetheart land deal in which Albany further enriched the already enormously wealthy Nature Conservancy?
On Monday, Post State Editor Fredric U. Dicker blew the lid off an October 2008 tax-dollar payday in which the Conservancy peddled a parcel of Adirondack land to the state — netting a 57 percent profit in just three years, even as area real-estate prices were cratering.
Now Gov. Paterson has authorized Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to launch a civil investigation into the sale; a criminal probe could follow.
As Dicker reported, the state Department of Environmental Conservation paid The Nature Conservancy nearly $10 million for 20,000 acres of Adirondack wilderness — for which the group had paid just $6.3 million in 2005.
That allowed the group to realize a taxpayer-funded profit four times the increase in value of other north country forest land.
It’s tempting to blame the Paterson administration for this outrage, but the deal first took root and moved steadily along under his two predecessors, George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer.
Now, reports Dicker, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has been blocking a plan by which DEC would overspend in the “millions” for a large tract of land near Belleayre Mountain in the Catskills.
In a letter in the adjacent column, The Nature Conservancy’s New York director claims that the Adirondack deal price “was determined by two independent appraisals” and “approved by the Office of the State Comptroller.”
What he doesn’t say is that the appraisals in question were conducted in May and June of 2007 — before real-estate prices began falling in the recession.
And the comptroller’s review was only a check of the math in those appraisals — in other words, to ensure the numbers added up, not that the state was paying real market value.
At best, this practice amounts to the enrichment of private interests at the taxpayers’ expense. What else may be going on remains to be seen.
Do your duty, Mr. Cuomo.