Buying Land in Franklin County, New York

A county split by the Blue Line

Franklin County runs from the St. Lawrence Valley and the Canadian border in the north down into the high peaks and lake country of the Adirondacks in the south, and that geography is the single most important fact for anyone evaluating land here. The Adirondack Park's boundary -- the "Blue Line" -- cuts across the county rather than following its edges, so Franklin County land is not uniformly inside or outside the Park the way, say, all of Hamilton County is. Malone, the county seat, and the agricultural and border towns to its north sit outside the Blue Line, where zoning is a standard town-and-county matter with no state land-use agency involved. Southern Franklin County is a different story.

Search-indexed sources place several southern Franklin County towns inside the Adirondack Park: Harrietstown (which contains the village of Saranac Lake), Brighton, Santa Clara, Tupper Lake, and the town of Franklin all have territory within the Blue Line, much of it in and around the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest. This page treats that as a reasonably confirmed but not necessarily complete list -- Park boundaries follow lot lines and waterways in ways that don't always track cleanly onto a full town, so a parcel in one of these towns is not automatically inside the Park, and a parcel in a town not listed here is not automatically outside it. Before anything else, confirm directly with the Adirondack Park Agency or the town's own assessor/zoning office which side of the Blue Line a specific parcel actually falls on.

What changes once you cross the line

For land outside the Blue Line, Franklin County works the way most of upstate New York does: the relevant town handles zoning and building permits, and the county's role is largely limited to septic permitting, deed recording, and property assessment coordination. For land inside the Blue Line, add the Adirondack Park Agency to that list -- its six land use area classifications, subdivision and wetland jurisdiction, and (for septic) its own on-site sewage disposal siting review sit on top of the town's own process, meaning budget for two approvals rather than one. Harrietstown and Tupper Lake, the two southern towns with the most active current APA project history, and the practical differences a Local Land Use Program can make there, are covered in more depth on our dedicated Franklin County zoning page.

County government: Board of Legislators

Franklin County is governed by a Board of Legislators -- currently a seven-member body elected from apportioned districts, a structure adopted in 1970 to replace a nineteen-member Board of Supervisors in which each of the county's nineteen towns held one seat regardless of population. Older county documents and some regional references may still use "Board of Supervisors" language; for current purposes, "Board of Legislators" is the operative body, exercising the county's legislative, budgetary, and policy authority.