From rugby to environmental advocacy

Claudia Braymer’s journey to leadership role at Protect the Adirondacks

By Gwendolyn Craig

Phoebe and Louie squawked from upstairs in Claudia Braymer’s home on a snowy day in January. Cora rushed to her side with a wagging tail. Braymer adopted the parrots and the pitbull mix during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Braymer is particularly fond of birds and one makes up the logo of her one-time bustling law firm. The environmental attorney closed her office doors at the beginning of the year. In some ways, 2024 is a time of endings and beginnings. 

Braymer is putting aside her law practice and saying goodbye to her eight years as an elected representative on the Warren County Board of Supervisors. The two-time World Cup rugby player is also slowing down coaching the next generation of flankers and half backs. 

It is a bittersweet point in her career, but sitting in her home office decorated with an owl photo and a sign that reads, “Climate Crisis,” Braymer is all smiles. 

The 43-year-old deputy director of one of the most influential environmental organizations in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, is readying to become its top leader.

Protect the Adirondacks’ board voted to promote Braymer and transition current executive director Peter Bauer to a special projects post on Jan. 1, 2025. Bauer has led the organization, known for its penchant for litigation to block developments, since 2012.

“He has big shoes to fill,” Braymer said. “I feel ready.”

Charles Clusen, Protect’s chairman for 15 years, said he’s excited about Bauer’s successor. “I think we very fortunately have somebody who is of equal strength coming up to bat.”

Or, perhaps, stepping up to the scrum.

Rugby roots

The daughter of two Pennsylvania gym teachers, Braymer fell in love with the Adirondacks on a church camping trip in eighth grade.

With Camp Kirchenwald, which means “church in the woods,” Braymer backpacked in the High Peaks. She summited the state’s tallest mountain, Mount Marcy and its second tallest, Algonquin. She backpacked and canoed in the Old Forge area. She returned again and again, eventually leading the Adirondack trips.

Captivated by the outdoors, she enrolled in environmental resource management classes at Penn State, the college her two older sisters attended. After an unsuccessful tryout for the school’s soccer team, she joined the rugby club. Her sisters had been members. 

Braymer, with her 5-foot-3-inch frame, became the team’s scrum half, the lead ball distributor in rugby and similar to a quarterback in football.

“I love bashing into people,” Braymer said.

Her sophomore year, Braymer’s team won the national championship though she had to sit the game out after tearing her ACL. The team made it to the national championship games in her junior and senior years, too.

After moving to Virginia and working for Booz Allen Hamilton on federal contracts with the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and Department of Defense, Braymer continued playing rugby. In 2005, the U.S. Rugby team selected her and she traveled to Edmonton, Canada in 2006 to compete in the highest competition in the sport, the World Cup. They placed fifth.

Braymer took a hiatus from the U.S. team to give birth to her daughter and move up north to the Capital Region where she attended Albany Law School. She got back in shape for the 2010 World Cup in London. The team placed fifth again. The Albany Times Union profiled Braymer prior to her last World Cup, as did the site, “All Over Albany,” where a caption of Braymer as scrum half read, “She’s 5’3” and can probably take you down.” 

Braymer laughed recalling those profiles but is very proud of her rugby roots. Framed competition photos hang in her home. One shows blue-shirted players holding back a cadre of white-shirted ones. In the center and crouching is Braymer, shouting and holding the ball. 

It’s another world running on the pitch, but in some ways it’s very much the same as arguing in the courtroom or advocating in the halls of the Capitol, Braymer said.

“I bring in some of my rugby skills including being able to speak up for myself or my organization or my clients, and not being pushed over physically, or from a metaphorical standpoint,” she said.

Leadership roles

After moving to Glens Falls in 2012, Braymer became drawn to local politics. She served for eight years on the Warren County Board of Supervisors representing Ward 3 in Glens Falls.

Diana Palmer, who is on the city’s council, said Braymer fought for the environment, helping to pass a countywide plastic bag ban and leading Climate Smart Community initiatives.

 Palmer recalled a Parent Teacher Association volunteer event in which Braymer’s leadership played out. Organizers were tempted to throw away disposable plates. Braymer gathered the plates, brought them to the kitchen, rolled up her sleeves and started washing them, Palmer said. Before long, others joined in.

During the height of the pandemic, Braymer ran for state Assembly to represent the 114th district. She was a Democrat running in a largely conservative area against Republican Matthew Simpson, who was the town supervisor of Horicon and on the Warren County Board of Supervisors. 

Braymer hoped constituents would look at the work Democratic Assembly members Billy Jones and Carrie Woerner had accomplished in the majority representing other North Country districts. She wanted to bring similar representation to Albany.

She lost, but credits Simpson. “He does a good job staying in the middle and listening to his constituents from both political parties,” she said. 

Palmer said she had always admired Braymer’s ability to “find common ground” with people across different viewpoints. Braymer said there were times when she would disagree with her colleagues in local government, but away from the debates they could still greet each other and talk about their families.

It can all be tied back to rugby. 

Kim Magrini, a Philadelphia attorney who played on Braymer’s Penn State and U.S. national teams, said one of the best things about the sport is “the minute it’s over, you share a drink with the opposite player.” Magrini thinks Braymer will approach her new job like that. 

Magrini and Braymer should have been natural enemies, too. Both were scrum halves, meaning only one of them could play at a time. “It was never one of those adversarial relationships,” Magrini said. “It was always a ‘we make each other better’ relationship, and I think she takes that approach to all aspects of her life.”

Braymer has also coached rugby and was on the Board of Directors for Rugby New York after she retired from competing. Tammy Morgan, who played against Braymer and later coached with her, said Braymer created a rugby community where everyone was “one big family.” If an opposing team showed up with too few players, Braymer would lend hers to the opposition.

Law career

For Protect the Adirondacks members, Braymer’s legal expertise stands out. 

Her focus is “opposition work,” a term Braymer said signifies helping clients who are against projects, usually for environmental reasons. She does not like the term NIMBY, or “not in my backyard.” 

Even if she couldn’t stop a project, her goal, she said, was to make it better from an environmental standpoint.

Braymer was co-counsel on Protect the Adirondacks’ battle with the state challenging the constitutionality of certain snowmobile trails on forest preserve. Protect won the suit in May 2021 after more than a decade of confrontation.

The state’s highest court ruled snowmobile trails 9-feet to 12-feet wide violated the state constitution’s “forever wild” provision. It marked a rare ruling regarding Article 14 and led to forest preserve policy changes, like requiring the state Department of Environmental Conservation to count trees less than 3 inches in diameter at breast height in its forest preserve work plans.

Bauer said Braymer’s “broad understanding of the legal framework of the Adirondack Park” is important for her upcoming role as executive director. In addition to the Article 14 case, Braymer has been involved in legal matters over the Adirondack Park Agency Act, the State Environmental Quality Review Act, the Lake George Park Commission Act and others, Bauer said.

Protect and Bauer are also known to take field trips into the forest preserve, inspecting the state’s management. Bauer admires Braymer’s ability to ski, snowshoe, hike, bike and canoe and thinks her athleticism will be useful to continue in-the-field investigations.

Looking to the future

Often on opposite sides of forest preserve issues, Jerry Delaney, executive director of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board, assumes Protect will be unchanged under Braymer. Her personality and style of working with people will be different from Bauer, “but overall I expect Protect the Adirondacks continuing to be the organization that they are,” he said.

Clusen hinted that even more changes could be coming, perhaps with new board leadership, he said.

Braymer is ready to take the reins no matter. 

She has her sights set on updating the law that created the Adirondack Park Agency. The act does not mention things like climate change or affordable housing and has obsolete terminology, Braymer said.

Braymer will continue to advocate for a stronger environmental focus at the Adirondack Park Agency, which is charged with long-range planning for the park. She believes the APA has lost its way since former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration.

It’s focused more on economic development and less on natural resource protections, she said. That tendency may be changing, she hoped. In the latest round of new state land classifications, the APA included some parcels in the most protective zoning, wilderness. “We love that,” Braymer said.

Braymer will strive to raise Protect’s profile, encourage more people to join and promote teamwork.

She wants Protect to work with local governments and communities and do more to assist them, while remaining true to the organization’s mission of protection and stewardship of public and private lands. 

Braymer, her husband, their two children and the pets will stay in Glens Falls on the outskirts of the park, at least until her sixth grader is finished with school. Then, she hopes, they’ll move to the Adirondacks.

“I feel like I am going to be able to lead the organization into the future,” Braymer said. “We have an amazing legacy, but we’ve got to look forward because there’s new challenges coming up every day.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with corrected title information for Diana Palmer.

Top photo: Claudia Braymer, future executive director of Protect the Adirondacks, is a two-time World Cup rugby competitor. Photo provided