AURELIUS - As the Cayuga County Legislature prepares its challenge against the Cayuga Indian Nation's land-into-trust application, legislators are urging the public to formally express their opinions to the Bureau of Indian Affairs

“It's one of these things when there is a window, and it's open, and then it closes and it never comes back,” Legislator George Fearon said to a small collection of town and village board members and the public during a Committee of the Whole meeting at the Cayuga-Onondaga Board of Cooperative Educational Services Regional Education Center Thursday.

The “window” he referred to is the 45-day comment period that began on May 22 when the BIA released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which analyzed the potential affects of the nation placing approximately 130 acres of land into trust, a process that would remove the properties from the tax rolls and make them exempt from local laws and regulations.

The DEIS states that any environmental impact - which includes issues of taxes, businesses and economic development as well as the impact on the land - from placing the land into trust would be negligible at most. Fearon fundamentally refutes that conclusion, saying the DEIS does not accurately show the possible impact in Cayuga and Seneca counties if the application is granted. While the DEIS states land-into-trust could benefit the county $4.2 million and the state $7.5 million annually, Fearon believes the loss of sales and property taxes would have to be offset by additional taxes on the remaining residents.

From the lack of regulation to the potential harm to the land, Fearon said the DEIS did not adequately portray what may happen to the community. For him, the document's greatest weakness is its assumption that the Cayuga Indian Nation will not establish any new businesses or buildings in that territory.

“I would purport that what would happen would be much greater ultimately than what we see today,” Fearon said. “When we look to the future, we're looking forever. It's not 10, 15, 100 years from now. It's as long as this country exists and that could be a long time.”

With the official BIA public hearing at the New York Chiropractic College on June 17 and with the comment period ending July 6, both Cayuga and Seneca counties are working to mobilize the community to either attend the hearing or send letters to the BIA or both. Legislators had 100 posters printed Thursday for people to post around the community.

But Aurelius Town Board member Stephanie Church said putting up posters at town halls isn't enough.

“One thing we haven't spent a lot of time on in specifics is how we can actually get our community to show up and speak and write letters ... to think about places where we can leave it at, how we can reach out, whether we leave it with friends, distributing posters to little league fields, hair salons, barber shops, places where people hang out and talk,” she said.

With the BIA requiring specific information in people' letters, Aurelius Town Supervisor Ed Ide had a suggestion of creating a letter template people could use. Representatives from Harris Beach, a Rochester-based law firm representing the counties, said they will get a template established and placed on the counties' Web site, www.nocayugalandintotrust.net.

Staff writer Alyssa Sunkin can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 239 or alyssa.sunkin@lee.net