Protect the Adirondacks announced Thursday its Legislator of the Year Award for 2017 will go to state Assemblyman Steve Englebright, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Environmental Conservation, for several conservation bills and amendments.
The Democrat from Setauket, Long Island, sponsored a bill to require conservation design for all major subdivisions in the Adirondacks and shepherded through a new constitutional amendment for health and safety land accounts in the Adirondacks.
Protect, an environmental advocacy group, will also award its Howard Zahniser Adirondack Award 2017 to Dick Booth, a former state Adirondack Park Agency board member and a professor in Cornell University’s Department of City and Regional Planning. This award recognizes Booth’s service on the APA board from 2007 to 2016, when he distinguished himself in defense of the “forever wild” Forest Preserve and classified wilderness lands in the Adirondack Park.
Englebright, a geologist by profession, has served in public office since 1983, when he was first elected to the Suffolk County Legislature, where he helped double the county’s parklands.
Elected to the Assembly in 1992, he pushed successfully for the Pine Barrens Protection Act, authored New York’s solar and wind net-metering laws in the 1990s, and successfully pushed in 2008 for the expansion of solar net-metering to include all utility customer classes.
Protect, based in Lake George, will present these awards at its annual meeting on Saturday at the Heaven Hill Farm in Lake Placid.