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With two 18-hole golf courses, and over one hundred buildings, Crossroads Ventures LLC’s proposed Belleayre Resort at Catskill Park would be a new mountaintop "city" in the heart of the Catskill Park, seven times larger than the nearest village of Pine Hill. We're concerned that the development's enormous and disproportionate scale will have an equally enormous impact on the character and vitality of our existing Catskill communities.
The mega-resort's scale is a concern, but even more is its proposed location. Straddling two towns and two counties in the central Catskills, the mountaintop development is planned for the heart of one of New York State’s most important watersheds. Feeding both the Ashokan and Pepacton Reservoirs, the tributary streams of Belleayre Mountain are significant sources of the drinking water not only for the residents of the Catskills but for over nine million people in New York City.
A watershed is a fragile and life-giving treasure. The drinking water that flows from these mountains has never needed filtration because for the last one hundred years the Catskill Park has been protected from the runoff and pollution that come with the kind of large-scale development now being proposed. Looked at the other way around, part of why the Catskill Park has been so carefully maintained is its ability to provide clean, unfiltered drinking water. Golf courses need intensive chemical maintenance. Clear-cutting dramatically increases soil erosion and runoff. Should our waters become polluted, New York City would be forced to build a six billion dollar filtration system, and much of the perennial motivation to protect the beautiful Catskills would be lost.
Unless we want to see our precious region unrecognizably transformed by the kind of massive development that has plagued other scenic areas of this country, we need to turn away from the risks of the large-scale development proposed by Crossroads Ventures LLC, and pursue more sensitive models of increasing the health of our Catskill region.
Our future depends on it!
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Poster #1
(click poster for large image)
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Poster # 2 (for NYC)
(click poster for large image)
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Posters designed by
Bullfrog & Toad Design
bullfrogandtoad@verizon.net
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FOBM hosted a contest challenging members to create a poster that powerfully represents our stance on the proposed Belleayre resort. Needless to say, we were very pleased with the results.
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