A longer version of this article appears on Eric Francis’s website.
Nearly everyone in the Hudson Valley is familiar with the land preservation efforts of Mohonk Preserve. The name is synonymous with forests, trails, and rock climbing. The Preserve has the reputation of being an excellent steward of its land holdings, estimated at 8,000 acres. When lawsuits involving Mohonk Preserve occasionally make the news, their standard response is that the Preserve, a New Paltz-based nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)3 corporation, buys only from willing sellers and rarely engages in litigation.
In that light, it’s noteworthy that in late May, State Supreme Court Judge Christopher E. Cahill issued a decision in a nine-year lawsuit that involved Mohonk claiming title to 75 acres of land that the court held actually belonged to its neighbors, Karen Pardini and Michael Fink. The land is located along Clove Valley Road in the Town of Rochester.
More noteworthy is that Mohonk and its agents have sued Pardini and Fink four times, trying to take their land, keeping them tied up in nearly nonstop litigation and appeals for 19 years. In all that time Mohonk has never once won a case; one of the smaller ones was settled. Yet as of July, Mohonk was fundraising to prosecute the most recent case further.
Pardini and Fink’s 300-acre property, formerly known as Smitty’s Dude Ranch, is the largest privately held, undeveloped tract on the Shawangunk Ridge not owned by Mohonk or Open Space Institute (OSI), a much larger, regional land preservation organization.
Located directly in Mohonk’s viewshed and developable as a commercial property, Pardini and Fink’s land is surrounded by the Preserve, which has contested nearly every boundary the two neighbors share.
Mohonk, OSI, and other organizations work closely together to acquire property along the ridge, for which they raise funds from the public. The Preserve started as the Mohonk Trust in 1963, when the Mohonk Mountain House, a for-profit resort hotel, put the majority of its land into a conservancy, thereby taking it off of the property tax rolls.
The King’s Lane Lot
Land in this area of the county is divided into Lots 1-19, part of a land grant from 1770 called the Nineteen Partners Tract, which was subdivided into 19 sections or lots in 1799. In 1841, the property boundary of a farm (called the Curran Farm) was drawn following a ridgeline laterally through Lots 1 to 5 and has not changed since.
The ridgeline and boundary divides the properties of Pardini and Fink from their neighbor, Gloria Finger. She owns 26 acres at the north end of Lot 1, land known since the 1800s as the King’s Lane Lot, because an historic road called the King’s Lane leads into it. Pardini and Fink’s land includes 75 acres at the south end of Lot 1, on the other side of the ridge, close to Clove Valley Road. In 1994, Mohonk “purchased” for $82,000 a deed for the 75 acres owned by Pardini and Fink from Finger, falsely claiming it was the King’s Lane Lot.
The transaction was arranged by Robert K. Anderberg, general counsel to both the Open Space Institute and the Shawangunk Conservancy. Anderberg served on Mohonk’s board of directors from 1981 to 1988.
Anderberg’s plan to acquire the 75 acres on Mohonk’s behalf dates back to a March 24, 1993 memo from Anderberg to Norman Van Valkenburgh, Mohonk’s longtime in-house surveyor, and Glenn Hoagland, Mohonk’s executive director. In that memo, Anderberg writes, “One of the landowners on Rock Hill, a Gloria Finger, is interested in selling a portion of her acreage to the Mohonk Preserve.”
A survey map was prepared and certified by Van Valkenburgh, the longtime in-house surveyor for Mohonk, which claims that the 75 acres of Lot 1 at the west end of Fink and Pardini’s land belongs to Mohonk. Mohonk filed the map with the county and used it to get Planning Board approval for a subdivision from the Town of Rochester in 1994. The same map was used to secure title insurance from First American Financial. Title insurance is a form of coverage that protects the buyer in case it turns out the purchased land was not actually owned by the seller.
The Preserve then brought a lawsuit in State Supreme Court against the actual owners of the property, Pardini and Fink, attempting to get the courts to affirm what they claimed was “record title.” The litigation was paid for by First American, which now must either sponsor an appeal or reimburse Mohonk for its cost of purchase.
While it may seem that Finger tried to trick Mohonk into buying land that she didn’t really own, it was Anderberg—an attorney—who arranged the transaction on Finger’s and Mohonk’s behalf. It’s not the first time he’s tried to buy land from someone who didn’t own it; the same court found that he did the same thing in a 1997 case involving the Shawangunk Conservancy.
In trying to prove that a smaller 26-acre piece of land was a neighboring 75-acre tract, Mohonk presented conflicting theories that in effect rearranged the ownership history along that section of the Shawangunk Ridge.
Over nine years of litigation, the court heard from 30 witnesses, reviewed 100 exhibits, and read 1,299 pages of trial testimony. After all of this, Judge Cahill ruled on May 29 that Mohonk Preserve had no claim to the 75 acres in question. The court rejected every single claim made by Mohonk and its attorney, John Connor of Hudson. It accepted every fact and argument presented by Pardini and Fink and their attorney, Sharon Graff of Kingston, calling theirs the “more coherent” of the two descriptions of history.
Smitty’s Bar and Dude Ranch
Many old-timers in the Hudson Valley remember Smitty’s Bar and Dude Ranch on Clove Valley Road. It was owned by Wilbur Smith, known to everyone as Smitty. For more than a generation, Smitty’s was the place to hang out by the stream, ride horses, camp, and go hiking. Regulars and staff stayed in a little hotel above the bar. Smitty patrolled his land on horseback wearing a revolver on his hip.
The place was a mecca for countless hippies and nature lovers from the 1960s until Smitty sold the property to Pardini and Fink in 1987. The couple closed the business and made a project of cleaning up the land from decades of overuse, removing 74 dumpsters of garbage and debris the first few years.
Part of the irony of this case is that the location of Smitty’s and the lay of the land there are so deeply ingrained in local folklore.
Smith had been hounded by Mohonk with threats and legal actions during the 1970s and 1980s. Too poor to defend himself and unable to read survey maps, he sold the bar and the surrounding lands to Pardini and Fink.
The couple was first sued by the Shawangunk Conservancy, which serves as a land acquisition agent of Mohonk, in 1994. That suit unsuccessfully attempted to take 136 acres from them. State Supreme Court Judge Vincent Bradley said in his 1997 ruling that Pardini and Fink had standing to bring a fraud action against the Conservancy.
When I interviewed Van Valkenburgh about that lawsuit in 1997 as a reporter for the Woodstock Times, he told me that he was after “the whole farm, whatever they [Pardini and Fink] own.”
He really meant it. For example, Pardini and Fink’s property includes about 200 acres on the north side of Clove Valley Road. In various lawsuits (including the most recent one), Mohonk or its agents have claimed every acre except for Smitty’s former house.
Fink said in July that he and Pardini have spent more fighting lawsuits by Mohonk and its agents than they paid for the whole ranch. One can only imagine Mohonk’s legal bills.
The Case of the Moving Mountain
As is in true many places, rural land along the Shawangunk Ridge is often described by the neighboring properties. These are called adjoiners. Once something is described by its relationship to adjacent lands in all directions, you know where it is.
No two parcels of land have all of the same adjoiners; each is unique. This is why adjoiner descriptions are so dependable. Your land describes that of your neighbors; their land describes yours.
Change any one adjoiner description and you have to rearrange the descriptions of every property in the area, since they all depend on one another. It’s a little like turning a Rubik’s Cube. When you turn any one section, you simultaneously rearrange the patterns on four sides of the cube and shift the orientation of the other two.
In its lawsuit, Mohonk asserted that the 75-acre portion of Lot 1 was the King’s Lane Lot, when in fact the King’s Lane Lot is the smaller 26-acre portion of Lot 1 to the north.
At the trial, Pardini and Fink pointed out that Mohonk failed to explain why its claim to the 75 acres was missing many necessary adjoiners and that it listed others not called for by the deed record. One example involves land formerly owned by John I. Davis in the 19th century, now called the Davis parcel. The real King’s Lane Lot—the 26-acre one owned by Finger—calls for Davis as its eastern adjoiner.
But Mohonk claimed that Davis was next to the 75 acres owned by Pardini and Fink, which it is not. To do this, they had to pretend that the adjoiners for the real King’s Lane Lot would work simultaneously for that lot and for the 75 acres they were claiming. In other words, Mohonk claimed that the Davis parcel existed in two places at once.
In Van Valkenburgh’s survey of the 75 acres that was used to make the purchase and secure title insurance, Van Valkenburgh accurately lists Pardini and Fink as the eastern adjoiner.
Then in court, Mohonk tried to claim that the John I. Davis parcel was the eastern adjoiner to the 75 acres, in effect attempting to kick Fink and Pardini off of even more of their land. Davis is nowhere to be found in Pardini and Fink’s chain of title, for a good reason. The Davis parcel is located east of the real Kings Lane Lot, not the 75 acres that Mohonk was pretending was the King’s Lane Lot.
That Van Valkenburgh originally listed Pardini and Fink as the eastern adjoiner to the 75 acres in the survey used for the purchase and title coverage proves he knew Davis was not located there and that he knew who the real owners of the 75 acres were. Doing a survey involves researching the ownership history of each adjoiner. But he had another reason to know the real history: He had been surveyor and expert witness in every prior lawsuit against Pardini and Fink.
At trial, Mohonk failed to present a witness who had actually done a survey of the property it was claiming. Notably, Van Valkenburgh was not called as a witness by Mohonk to tell the story of his survey, which is the usual practice. But he sat in court every day of the trial and assisted Mohonk. Had he been called as a witness, Pardini and Fink’s lawyers would have asked him to explain how the Davis parcel got up and walked down the mountain.
Presented with these and other facts, Judge Cahill concluded that Finger never owned the land Mohonk had “purchased” from her, and ruled that Pardini and Fink hold both proper title and common law possession of their land.
In late July, I went to Mohonk Preserve to interview its top leaders—Glenn Hoagland, the executive director, Ronald Knapp, the board president, and Gretchen Reed, the director of marketing and communications. They spent an hour and 20 minutes attempting to convince me that Michael Fink was trying to take their land from them. They also claimed that Pardini and Fink didn’t believe they owned the 75 acres that the judge determined were part of the couple’s own property.
None of the Preserve’s officials would answer any of my questions about why the adjoiners to the land they were claiming did not match known reality on the ground, saying they didn’t remember the details and didn’t want to “re-litigate” the case in their conference room.
Mohonk recently said that its board of trustees had voted to appeal Cahill’s ruling. In a July 5 letter to the Preserve’s members and supporters, Hoagland and Knapp claimed that Mohonk still owns the 75 acres. They trivialized Judge Cahill’s decision as being just three pages long when in fact it’s 90 pages.
Hoagland and Knapp wrote, “The continuing litigation…underscores the importance of the Preserve’s critical land protection work, which deals not only with acquisition of land and conservation easements but with the perpetual protection of lands in our care. With your continued support, we will remain steadfast in our 50-year heritage of saving the land for life.”
Sure sounds good.
This article appears in August 2013.
Thank You Eric Francis for this well written piece. The Hudson Valley needs more journalists who will dig deep to get to the bottom of the story. You have done the community a great service.
Eric,
Thank you so much for writing such a brilliant expose on Mohonk’s ruthless quest to steal land from adjoining properties! I have witnessed, first hand, the hardship that this has caused Karen & Mike. Thank you for exposing Mohonk’s corruption! I’m sorry that this is so as my property borders Mohonk’s land & I would like to think that the Preserve is doing a great service to the surrounding area. However, the truth needs to be told!
Toby Stover
Thank you Eric Francis Coppolino for a well written and factually accurate article. The very first lawsuit brought by The Mohonk Preserve was against the entire Town of Gardiner. Mohonk Preserve sued the Town to get out of paying property taxes, property taxes that they had promised to keep paying. In a recent interview with Mohonk board member Norman Goluskin, he said it costs $3 million dollars just to “keep the lights on and pay the salaries”. The executive director Glenn Hoagland pockets $130,000/ year alone. This type of spending for a “nature preserve” is truly wasteful and not in the spirit of what open space should be. The only way to stop the lawsuits brought by The Mohonk Preserve against its neighbors is to stop donating.
As Clove Road residents and real estate donors to the Mohonk Preserve, we were surprised and dismayed by an article in the August 2013 Chronogram. In the Planet Waves section of the magazine an article by Eric Francis Coppolino asserts that the Preserve is guilty of attempting to claim acreage belonging to Michael Fink and Karen Pardini, also Clove Road residents and among the largest landowners in the area. The article, inaccurately in our opinion, depicts the Preserve as harassing Mr. Fink and Ms. Pardini over a number of years in attempts to resolve disputes over acreage claimed by both parties.
Mr. Coppolino, who characterizes himself as an investigative reporter specializing in “fraud and crimes against the environment,” paints the Preserve as a land-grabbing, unprincipled entity that is harassing Mr. Fink and Ms. Pardini. This is not the Preserve we know.
We donated property to the Preserve precisely because we have such faith in its stewardship of the acreage it owns and our satisfaction over many years with its conservation ethic. This opinion was formed in over 50+ years of climbing, hiking and nature appreciation at the Preserve. Indeed, this is not our opinion alone: the Preserve was recently awarded a coveted Land Trust Accreditation by the Land Trust Alliance.
To state it stronger: we are Clove Road owners and residents because the Preserve exists. Without its protection of nearly 8000 acres, development and commercial ventures would have long since destroyed our interest in being here. In discussions with our neighbors over the years, we find that nearly all agree. Like us, they value the Preserve both as a neighbor and collaborator in the preservation of the Shawangunks.
Burt and Anka Angrist
While I am grateful for further insight into this case, Eric Francis’ journalistic approach is disappointing. I am an avid reader of his horoscopes and Planet Waves articles, and this diversion from astrological insights into local land debates is striking.
Francis’ bias becomes evident as the article reads on, until it culminates with a sarcastic innuendo. Frankly, I am less concerned with the outcome of the case than with Francis’ slanted journalism. It is rife with conjecture and smacks of cronyism. I question his motivation more than I wonder who the land belongs to.
The purpose of investigative journalism is to lay out the facts so that educated readers may deduce their own conclusions. Francis, however, seems to have his own agenda. The article reads like an homage to great heroes winning a war against evil. Perhaps this is how the story unravelled, but it is Francis, not the facts, who make it read this way.
For my part, I am insulted that the author so proudly asserts his assumptions (Mohonk’s repeated “pretending,” for instance). Perhaps he should have a little more faith that his readers can draw their own conclusions.
Otherwise, he should stick to the horoscopes.
About the Mohonk Preserve’s efforts to keep their public usage land holdings from being usurped by Mike Fink, certain key errors must be clarified.
The parcels that have been litigated about between Mike Fink and Karen Pardini, and the Mohonk Preserve are on the Clove Road. I am a Clove Road property owner for almost 35 years and have roamed the valley and both bounding ridges for 55 years. In these cases, the Preserve had to respond to incursions upon their longstanding boundaries by Mr. Fink, who tore down existing posted signs, placed up his posted signs, cut logging roads into these neighboring properties and harvested trees. After repeated letters and offers to try to negotiate what the perceived problems were and repeated requests to cease and desist, the Preserve had to file suit to derail the opportunity for “adverse possession” to be claimed by Mr. Fink.
So these suits were brought by the Preserve to stop the invasions by Mr. Fink.
In one case, for which I was a witness, Mr. Fink and a companion suddenly began posting a huge stretch of Clove Road up to and including a long existing privacy fence, followed by painting red blazes on trees descending the hillside right through the garden of neighboring land owners. I have been hanging out and visiting on these lands with these boundaries long established way before Mike Fink ever appeared and long before Smitty got foreclosed on. Fink attempted to extend his land grab beyond Preserve property onto quite a few acres of yet another neighbor. In court, he claimed amongst other things “adverse possession” for these properties, maintaining that he, Fink, had “exclusive use” of these properties for 25 years. So I happily rendered a travel log in court of my various wanderings on these properties over the years , hunting for deer, observing rare salamanders, hiking, and camping by invitation on my friend’s property during a hurricane, etc.
Note that Fink not only harassed the Preserve, but expanded his incursions onto other neighbors’ property. At Mr. Fink’s request, the suits brought by both the neighboring landowners and the Preserve were co-joined. Contrary to the assertions by Coppolino in the article, all of the parties, including Mr. Fink, mutually agreed to settle this case. So of the 2 cases involving Fink vs. Preserve he lost all of his claims upon the non-Preserve neighbor and settled with the Preserve. It is totally untrue that he never lost a case.
As for the current case, which the Preserve did lose at trial court, but is currently appealing, I have observed in my travels up and down the road to destinations usually involving doing something on Mohonk Preserve land, the gradual extension of an old logging road upwards onto the 71-acre former Finger property. My research into this matter, whereby I actually took note of my interview with Preserve representatives BEFORE writing this response, indicates that various incursions onto the land, including cutting of trees and tearing down posted signs and putting up other posted signs, required the Preserve to take legal action. All of the rigamarole presented by Mr. Coppolino to support Mr. Fink’s claim upon this land can be most simply undermined by the following FACT presented by Fink during the court case: A deed conveying the land in question from Michael Fink TO Michael Fink, circa 2009. How’s that grab ya?
The evil machinations attributed to the Preserve are actually exclusively those tactics wielded by Fink/Pardini in their long vendetta against the Preserve – adverse possession, squatter’s rights, and quit claim deeds, supplemented by verbal and other harassment of Preserve headquarters, attempts at intimidating Preserve employees, embellished by copious amounts of tearing down of posted signs, and supplemented by positioning his own posted signs.
I rest my case.
Mr. Clovis Pointman, If mike fink was cutting trees, making roads on someone else’s land, posting neighbors land, harassing preserve staff, etc., why was he never arrested by the police? Just wondering….
Btw, there is testimony from the neighbor (i will leave her name out, she knows who she is) that proves she was lying in court about her boundaries and the extent of Smitty’s Dude Ranch. It’s quite funny reading it and desplaying her inability to answer simple questions about the land and then get caught lying all at the same time. That’s perjury! It’s documented and open for public review.
We’re you trespassing on these lands with your travel log, hunting and looking for salamanders? Sounds like it. Sounds like you lied in court also. Money was an issue as to why there was a settlement as these litigations are very expensive. Try being sued as a defendant for 20 years and see how much it costs with appeals and all. Mohonk thinks it can wear people down with its deep pockets. Unfortunately, they are just creating a history of litigation that frames them as antagonistic, greedy, entitled, and dumb. Just read the judges decision and you will laugh just like he did.
As for deeds from mike fink to mike fink…these were ordered by the court to fix the inaccuracies in the deed that was being knowingly exploited by the Mohonk Preserve. Again public record.
Mike fink and Karen Pardini have never had a vendetta against the Mohonk Preserve or any of their shell organizations. If they did then why were Fink/Pardini defendants on all the cases. There was no motivation for a vendetta. But there was motivation for the local land trusts to take their land as it probably the largest and most beautiful group of parcels in what I would not hesitate to call the “Mecca of the Gunk’s.” Internal documents reveal that Mohonk was going to make Smitty’s Ranch another visitors center, charge people for camping, and sell 4 or 5 lots to make up for the cost of the purchase. I wonder who would have bought those parcels and built their own nice new home? Oh yeah, maybe Bob Anderberg and his friends!
So you see, none of your key errors hold any water because they are lies and you drank the cool-aid at the Slingerland Pavillion.
Currently, no one has developed more of the Gunks than the Mohonk Preserve and the Open Space Institute. This is evidenced by their need for multiple visitor centers that cost ridiculous amounts of money, expensive kiosks that would make your head spin if you know how much money they wasted on them, gravel carriage roads that constantly need repair, a new campground with car camping for 50+ sites, and major new plans for developing the foothills. This sounds like the Mohonk Develpoment Corporation. They should be paying taxes since they get federal and state grants to help fund their self serving crusade. Why is it that for the price of 1 person to visit the Mohonk Preserve, five or more can visit Minnewaska State Park? How do they get away with this at the local level? Oh maybe it’s because they get their lawyers and friends on the town boards to do their bidding. They need to pay their fair share of taxes and don’t give me this bull about how much they help the local economy. The numbers don’t add up and I don’t own a business like Rich Gotttlieb does.
Clover Girl we are all entitled to have opinions but let’s keep to the facts that were reported. It would be one thing to say the author is not telling the truth, but what is being exposed are facts with actual documentation from court cases that supports Fink & Pardinis’ argument. Not the other way around. Your just shooting the messenger and not caring about the facts. That says a lot!
Burt and Anka Angrist like you said yourself “inaccurately in your opinion.” Opinions are not facts so to say that the author is not telling the truth with no facts of your own to support your argument, doesn’t make you look very credible. Especially, since you have such a long relationship with the prosecution it looks like you drank the Kool-aid a long time ago. What I said to Clover Girl applies to you also.