EDINBURG, N.Y.—This community in the Adirondack foothills has two churches, one diner, a museum of rural memorabilia, the only covered bridge in Saratoga County and the Plateau Sky Ranch, a private airport. It doesn’t have a bank or a pizzeria, and there are no doctors or dentists. There are no public water or sewer systems in its 60-square miles, and just 16 street lights.

Edinburg, though, is where the low taxes are—the lowest rates for a town with its own school district in upstate New York.

State officials have long decried the problem of high property taxes in New York, and this year are proposing a $1.66 billion program to provide rebates based on homeowner income. During a speech last month in Nassau County, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state’s tax condition “is more relevant than ever before” because businesses and people are more willing to move.

“When you look at the problems we’re facing and you look at the issues we’re dealing with, they all come back to the taxes—flight of young people because they can’t afford to live here,” Cuomo said during a speech at Hofstra University on Long Island, where property taxes are among the highest in the nation. “It’s taxes. Flight of businesses because other states are cheaper to operate—that’s taxes. You have no long-term future if you are the tax capital of the nation. Period.”

Westchester, Nassau and Rockland counties are consistently ranked by the Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank, in the top 10 for average tax loads in actual dollars. When considered as a percentage of median home value, the highest taxes are in Wayne, Monroe, Cattaraugus and Livingston counites—all in western New York.

According to the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany, the highest effective tax rates in the state are in Wellsville, a village in Allegany County. In 2012, its effective tax rate was $63.51 per thousand dollars of assessed home value. Other towns and villages in the Hudson Valley top $40 per thousand, and the highest rates on Long Island are above $33 per thousand.

Edinburg charges just $8.19, according to 2012 data compiled by the Empire Center. The only lower taxes are in the Hamptons—de minimus rates are offset by multi-million dollar properties—and Hamilton County, an even more mountainous, sparsely populated part of the state to north and west of Edinburg.

We don’t think of these areas as economically thriving magnets for business. Their population growth has lagged the rest of the state and, particularly in the Adirondacks, the number of jobs is either flat or declining.

In Edinburg, officials and longtime residents point to a variety of factors for their distinction.

The government here, they proudly note, is frugal. A new town hall was paid for in cash within the last decade, and the bear skins and stuffed deer heads that adorn its lobby were donated. Some of the truck drivers in the department of public works are also ace mechanics, and consider maintenance a part of their employment. Property taxes account for less than a quarter of the annual budget—it’s around $1.475 million in 2015—with sales taxes shared by Saratoga accounting for two-thirds of revenue.

“We’re misers,” explained Jean Raymond, who has been supervisor since 1988. “We don’t provide any extra services, and we don’t borrow money so we don’t pay out any extra interest every year.”

Priscilla Edwards, 73, a seventh- or eighth-generation resident (“depending on which line”) who has been town historian for three decades, argued that this is a legacy of the frontier culture of the area, known as the Sacandaga Valley. The first settlers arrived in 1787, and agreed on the name of Edinburg in 1808. Some of the earliest European visitors had marched through the valley on their way to Fort Ticonderoga, site of the first American victory in the Revolutionary War.

It was a farming and logging community, with several saw mills booming through the 19th century. Things changed in 1930, when the gates of Conklingville Dam were closed, swallowing several hamlets throughout the valley.

The dam provided important flood control for communities down the Hudson River watershed—including Albany—but along with mass-availability of automobiles, it sparked a slow transition of the valley towns from self-sufficient farms to a hybrid rural-recreational landscape centered on Great Sacandaga Lake.

The Brownell family illustrates that shift. Victor and Elizabeth Brownell established their lumber company in 1933, running a sawmill that boomed as it provided lumber during World War II for the Watervliet Arsenal as well as General Electric and American Locomotive in Schenectady. After the war, their three sons assumed control and shifted the business toward the construction of homes and rustic cottages as well as retail supply.

“It went from this area’s tax base being old farms and shacks, then, from 1950 to ‘60, what I’ll call regular people started building seasonal camps,” explained Bruce Brownell, 77.

They worked the assembly lines in Schenectady, which is about 45 minutes directly south, in the tanneries and leather factories in and around Gloversville, in Fulton County to the southwest, or at the paper mill in Corinth, east of the dam.

“People here were poor. In 1945, when I was just a little kid, we were 40 years behind the times,” he continued. “In the 60s you began to see people retire and come here, and they built actual homes. In the 70s and 80s, we started to get people with money. The houses they built were worth $500,000 at a time when a lot of the old homes were worth more like $36,000.”

His brother, Bradley, explained that the “flatlanders” gradually became the driving economic force. The family’s octagonal hardware store is less than a mile down the road from what locals call the Four Corners. It’s home to two churches, a general store and gas station, a garage, two real estate offices and a diner.

“We are supported by New Jersey, by Connecticut,” Bradley said.

The airport, as well as its convenient access to Albany, Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, makes the destination a favorite for people like Reg Jones—the former chairman of General Electric—to keep a residence.

Raymond, the supervisor, said the official 2010 Census population of 1,214 is “low,” and estimates the population at least quintuples during the summer, when recreation peaks. (Even in winter, the lake is a favorite for snowmobiling and ice fishing.) Roughly 400 of the town’s dwellings are classified as year-round, while another 1,700 are seasonal.

Debbie Oare, a realtor who has been selling around the lake since 1989, said second homes account for 90 percent of her sales and that “the lower taxes are certainly a driver” for Edinburg over the surrounding towns and school districts. She recounted the story of a couple from Glenville, a Schenectady suburb, who were considering a move.

“They told me their taxes in Glenville were over $8,000 a year,” Oare recalled. “This house was more money, but they had $400 more per month that they could put into their payment.”

But second homes only partly explain why Edinburg is in such a sweet spot. Other Adirondack communities with similar profiles don’t fare quite as well.

According to Empire Center president E.J. McMahon, Saratoga County’s overall growth has been a major factor.

The county boomed after the opening of the Adirondack Northway in 1960, as corn fields just across the Mohawk River—a dozen miles from downtown Albany and just northeast of the industrial urban core from Troy to Cohoes—grew into upstate Levittowns. The county’s urban centers were small, and in the case of Saratoga Springs, attracted the Gilded Age gentry with mineral spas and thoroughbred racing.

“Saratoga is the biggest, most affluent county without a large urban core full of poor people,” McMahon said. “They have very low Medicaid and welfare costs, and if you get into the rural areas, you get less of a school district cost.”

The county as a whole, too, boasts the lowest taxes in the region and some of the lowest in the state. In the last decade, state and local planners invested over a billion dollars to site a chip fabrication plant in a former rocket test range. Saratoga Springs revitalized its downtown to emphasize its former Victorian glory, attracting millennials and creative workers that post-industrial cities across the country are fighting for.

Edinburg doesn’t seem to be poised for much growth, and residents say that’s just fine. Brad Brownell said the town works now because there’s the “right mix of people with the right mix of attributes.”

Edwards said it was a place where “everybody looks out for each other.”

Both her daughters live nearby, and Brownell’s 30-ish nephew works in the store.

Since the town lies within the Adirondack Park, development is restricted and major projects must be approved by a state agency. This has caused tension across the six million-acre park for decades, and it’s led Raymond to a pragmatic outlook.

“I think it’s going to grow but it’s not going to grow extraordinarily,” she said. “I think you will see more homes, and I think you will see camps being torn down and replaced by year-round homes. I don’t think there will be a lot of substantial changes.”

“There’s nothing prettier than downtown Saratoga Springs in the summer, but it’s expensive,” Raymond said. “The flowers don’t water themselves, and the grass in the parks doesn’t cut itself. The people who live here would prefer to take care of themselves and pay lower taxes.”

© 2015 Capital New York