On February 12, 2025, the regional field representative for the Public Employees Federation (PEF), the union representing approximately 50,000 State employees with professional, scientific and technical responsibilities, sent an email to each of the eleven members of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) Board.
Attached to the email was a letter, on PEF letterhead and sent on behalf of twenty APA staff members, regarding an alleged “hostile and toxic work environment” at the APA.
Rather than attempting to summarize or paraphrase its contents, we will let the letter speak for itself:
“As dedicated staff members, we are writing to raise awareness of an ongoing issue that is significantly impacting our ability to serve the public and uphold the agency’s mission to protect and steward the unique natural, environmental, and cultural resources of the Park.
“In recent years, our workplace has become increasingly defined by a hostile and toxic environment stemming from executive management’s actions and behaviors.
“Staff have experienced or witnessed numerous instances of intimidation, belittlement, bullying, and disregard for professional input. This culture of fear
has eroded morale, stifled collaboration, and led to the resignation of highly skilled professionals and the loss of institutional knowledge.
“Compounding these issues are executive management’s troubling trends in hiring and promotional practices, which raise serious ethical concerns. These patterns have not only diminished staff morale, but have also undermined the Agency’s overall effectiveness.
“Efforts to raise these concerns internally have been met with resistance, retaliation, bullying, and isolation, or been ignored altogether. This dynamic
undermines staff’s ability to function effectively and fulfill the agency’s responsibility to the people of New York State.”
The letter goes on to state that the APA’s “critical work to safeguard one of the nation’s most precious landscapes… cannot be achieved when employees work under persistent stress and intimidation.”
The letter concludes by calling for “an independent review of the agency’s workplace culture and leadership practices.”
According to the PEF communication, the twenty staff members who signed onto the letter chose to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by those in APA management.
In any other State board or commission, the receipt of such troubling and disconcerting allegations would trigger alarm bells and an immediate effort to discover what is going on internally. But, apparently not at the APA.
The PEF email with the attached letter was sent on Wednesday afternoon, February 12. During the monthly APA Board meeting held the very next morning, a Board member voiced a “vote of confidence” in the Agency’s Executive Director since 2022 Barbara Rice, which other Board members seemed to endorse.
The vote of confidence — occurring the day after receipt of the PEF letter — stood in stark contrast to the very serious allegations raised the day before by nearly half of the APA staff.
Instead of going into Executive Session to review the PEF letter and its allegations, the APA Board’s circling of the wagons seemed orchestrated and intended purely for public relations. During the remainder of the meeting, the APA Board seemed unaware of or disinterested in the concerns of nearly half of their hard-working, dedicated staff.
Given the state, national, and global importance of the Adirondack Park, Governor Kathy Hochul needs to focus on the APA and take immediate steps to reverse its downward course.
The APA’s many failures in recent years to uphold and enforce the laws protecting the Park’s natural resources, its ongoing failure to implement the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, its failure to update its wetlands regulations to reflect the amendments to the Freshwater Wetlands Act that recently took effect, and its current proposal to eliminate a key provision of the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan that protects Wilderness areas from motor vehicle use are all serious problems.
So is an APA Board that includes five members serving expired terms and one seat that has been vacant since 2023.
Now comes these serious internal allegations of intimidation and disregard of professional input from a significant portion of the APA staff. It is plain that the APA’s statutory responsibility to protect the Park’s resources will continue to be compromised if, as alleged in the PEF letter, the input from the Agency’s professional and scientific staff is being ignored.
It is clearly time for the Governor to take action to revitalize this once-vaunted environmental agency responsible for regional planning for the six million-acre Adirondack Park.
Good first steps would be to promptly appoint new, environmentally aware, critical thinkers to the APA Board, and to commission the independent review of working conditions requested by the APA staff.
Christopher Amato, Conservation Director and Counsel for Protect the Adirondacks, contributed to the this essay.
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