The assistant attorney general in charge of Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties has retired.
Robert Glennon, who lives in Saranac Lake and is also a former director of the state Adirondack Park Agency, retired quietly in mid-September after serving for 12 years as head of the AG's Plattsburgh Regional Office.
While he's retired from state service, Glennon said he plans to get involved again in Adirondack Park-related issues. He's currently doing some volunteer legal work for the environmental group Protect the Adirondacks and said he has also met recently with Dan Plumley of Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve.
"I hope to re-enter the Adirondack wars," Glennon told the Enterprise. "I've spent the entire day on Adirondack Forest Preserve issues."
Glennon noted that he won't be able to get involved in anything that took place at the APA during his tenure there, according to state ethics laws.
The Plattsburgh Regional Office of the attorney general is tasked with handling cases involving consumer fraud, charities and nonprofits, but the bulk of office's workload is defending the state in cases brought by inmates of state prisons in the region, as well as clients at facilities run by the state Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, like Sunmount in Tupper Lake.
Glennon, 66, said he thought about retiring last year because he grew tired of the commute to Plattsburgh and "the mental diet of prisoners and Sunmount." He also said he wanted to spend more time with his family, including his grandchildren.
Glennon said he enjoyed his tenure with the AG's office.
"I enjoyed my time in that all three bosses were wonderful guys," he said. "Eliot (Spitzer) - and I know he fell in disgrace - was a wonderful guy, and (Andrew) Cuomo was a good guy. This new guy (Eric Schneiderman), I've never met him, but he seems to be a real go-getter."
Glennon described many of the cases he handled as run of the mill - inmates complaining they were disciplined unfairly or their sentence was miscalculated. The cases he enjoyed working on the most involved constitutional issues, naming several religious rights cases brought against the state by inmates.
"The ones that get into constitutional aspects, be they Sunmount or be they prisoners, are the most intellectually challenging, because you learn something new every day," Glennon said.
Glennon was hired as the region's assistant AG in 1999 by then-newly elected Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Before that he worked for Ecologically Sustainable Development, an Elizabethtown-based environmental land-use firm, and represented the Sierra Club in a 1997 legal battle with the state over its plan to build a maximum-security prison in Tupper Lake. The prison, Upstate Correctional Facility, was eventually built in Malone.
Glennon had a long and sometimes controversial career with the APA, which he joined as an associate counsel in 1974. He served as the agency's executive director from 1988 to 1995 when he resigned to make way for an appointee of Gov. George Pataki. Glennon was a lightning rod for critics of the agency but was lauded by its supporters like the Adirondack Council, which named him "Conservationist of the Year" in 1991.
Prior to his career with the APA, Glennon worked as an assistant AG under former state Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz.
Assistant Attorney General Glen Michaels, who also works in the Plattsburgh office, has been named acting assistant attorney general in charge, according to Jennifer Givner, a spokesperson for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The state has also hired a new assistant attorney general for the office. Former Essex County assistant District Attorney Hilary Rogers, who had also been a private practice attorney, started work there earlier this month, Givner said Thursday.
A permanent appointment of a new assistant attorney general in charge of the Plattsburgh office will be made in the coming weeks, Givner said.
