Scary Referendums

As much as I enjoyed Phil Terrie's talk on Friday, it also provided a lot of worrisome information, specifically about the conflict between NYCO, a mining company who was trying to acquire a plot of 'forever-wild' land for their business ventures, and the Adirondack Public, specifically groups like the Sierra Club and Protect the Adirondacks. I knew, of course, that amendments to the constitutional article protecting the Adirondack Forest preserve could be and have been made so as to accommodate human advancement in the park. However, until Terrie's talk, I had never thought about the fact that a for-profit company could spearhead one of these constitutional referendums, let alone make a convincing enough argument to gain the support of some Adirondack residents, environmental groups, and the APA itself. Even more surprising, when Terrie first introduced NYCO's side of the argument, I sympathized with those people who would lose their jobs when the wollastonite ran dry at their current mining site. I understood the need for this plot of Forest Preserve land from the humanitarian perspective, rather than a naturalistic point of view. UNTIL....I found out about NYCO's other, very prosperous mining site. The fact that they had been able to hide this information from everyone voting on the referendum is what was most concerning factor of this entire argument. How can the situation not be investigated further before such radical decisions are made? Is there a group whose job it is to look further into constitutional referendums before they are put to a vote? (Is that not part of the role of the APA? If so, how did they miss such a large component to this situation?) As Terrie said, it's possible the governor's office had something to do with this confusion, perhaps because they supported the proposal and wanted others to agree.