VERONA - It's an 18-acre parcel, cluttered with abandoned buildings and ringed by wooded lots and fields, and once used by the U.S. Air Force for testing radios and radar.

But the fate of the small parcel in Oneida County looms large for New York's Indian tribes looking to have thousands of acres of upstate land put into federal trust - and beyond the control of state and local governments.

Late last year, with little attention and less fanfare, the Air Force transferred the tract to the U.S. Department of Interior, which put it into trust for the Oneida Indian Nation under a provision of the Base Realignment and Closure law.

“It's a precedent. It's the first land in New York to be taken into trust. Although it's a different process ... it's trust land nonetheless,” said Dan French, a former federal prosecutor who is now attorney for the Cayuga Indian Nation, which has an application pending to put 125 acres in Seneca and Cayuga counties into trust.

“It assumes the legality of trust land in New York,” said Arlinda Locklear, an attorney for the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin, which has applied to have a 2-acre parcel in Madison County put into trust. “There have been some parties who claimed that it is simply not legal for there to be any trust land for any purpose.”

The federal government holds 66 million acres of land in trust for Indian tribes, mostly in Western states.

In federal trust, the land is permanently free from taxes and local and state laws.

In the past, New York's Indian tribes have tried to recover their lost aboriginal lands through land claim lawsuits, but those attempts have been struck down in recent federal court decisions.

Instead - acting on a suggestion by the U.S. Supreme Court - six New York tribes have filed applications to place a total 18,114 acres in trust.

Most of that would be for the Oneida Indian Nation, which is seeking trust status for 17,370 acres in Madison and Oneida counties.

After a contentious three-year review, Interior officials finally recommended last May placing 13,000 acres into trust. The decision is being challenged in federal court in more than a half-dozen lawsuits.

The 18-acre parcel was surplus U.S. Air Force land and not part of the Oneida trust request or the Interior Department recommendation.

The parcel is part of a larger 513-acre tract called the Verona Test Site. The site was acquired by the Air Force in 1951 and used for testing into the mid-1990s until nearby Griffiss Air Force Base was shut down.

Two key arguments in the lawsuits are that trust land in New York is unprecedented and can't be taken without state consent.

That's what makes the transfer of the 18 acres so significant - opponents worry it could undermine both positions. Local and state elected officials have called the transfer an end-run land grab. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer and Reps. Michael Arcuri and John McHugh sent a letter of protest to the Interior Department.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn is expected to consider challenges to the transfer Wednesday during a conference in Albany.

The transfer “is especially troublesome because of the possibility that it is only the first of a number of such actions that will result in significant amounts of land unlawfully being taken into trust without advance disclosure or any opportunity for public comment or challenge,” state Assistant Attorney General Robert Siegfried wrote Kahn.

Siegfried added that the transfer was “in blatant disregard” of Interior's own regulations.

Attorney David Schraver, who represents the counties, said he has questioned whether military base closure laws are even applicable because the parcel was not a physical part of Griffiss, which was located in Rome, N.Y., 10 miles away.

When Congress was closing military installations in the 1990s, it included in the Base Realignment and Closure statutes a process for disposing of excess federal military land, Locklear explained.

“There's a priority for what the government does with those lands and who is eligible to receive them,” Locklear said. “The first level of priority is other federal agencies. So when excess land is located within boundaries of an Indian reservation, then the Interior Department has the first priority because Indian tribes are an eligible recipient.”

But Schraver noted that question about whether the Oneida reservation still exists remains is dispute.

Locklear doesn't think the transfer can be challenged because of a law that precludes anyone from suing the U.S. government to recover possession of land. Once acquisition has occurred, the best and only remedy a plaintiff could hope for is compensation, she said.