Jim Wehrfritz with the Chautauqua Lake Property Owners Association expressed his support of the county asking the Department of Environmental Conservation to hold off on implementing the new wetlands regulations. P-J photo by Gregory Bacon

A much-discussed lawsuit seeking to invalidate the state’s Freshwater Wetlands Act has been filed in state Supreme Court in Albany County.

The Chautauqua Lake Property Owners Association, town of Ellery, Bemus Point Business Association and Southern Tier Builders Association are asking the state Supreme Court to annul, vacate and set aside the 2022 amendments to the state’s Freshwater Wetlands Act that took effect Jan. 1, 2025. The local organizations are represented by William A. Hurst of Young Sommer in Troy. The lawsuit argues the Freshwater Wetlands Act changes violate the State Administrative Procedure Act, violate state and federal due process protections in the state and U.S. constitutions, that the amendments are arbitrary, capricious and irrational; that the DEC’s newly created jurisdictional determination process constitutes an improper delegation of authority; and that the Freshwater Wetlands Act changes violate the state’s Municipal Home Rule Law by taking authority designated to local governments.

“The timing could not be more revealing,” Hurst wrote in his Memorandum of Law filed alongside the lawsuit. “Just as the nation’s highest court underscored the constitutional dangers of vague and boundless environmental regulation, New York chose to double down–empowering its environmental agency with the very kind of unfettered discretion the Court explicitly warned against. Where the Supreme Court drew a hard constitutional line to protect landowners from capricious enforcement, New York blurred every line it could find. The DEC’s regime now rests not on fixed definitions or clearly drawn jurisdictional maps, but on presumption, abstraction, and limitless agency discretion. In doing so, the State has effectively dared to fill the regulatory vacuum left by the federal rollback–using a blunt state-law instrument to impose a wetlands regime arguably more expansive than the one the court just struck down. In short, while Sackett reaffirms that there are constitutional boundaries to environmental authority, New York’s response has been to sidestep them entirely.”

A full story will be published in The Post-Journal’s Tuesday edition.