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About 40 people, including 25 who voiced their opinions attended the session at the Norrie Point Environmental Center in the Hyde Park hamlet of Staatsburg.
Windham resident Nicholas Markow said the ban would prevent him from removing brush and tree limbs from about 100 acres of his land in Greene County.
"We have about three pits that we burn in surrounded by trough," Markow said. "If we don't have open burning, we've got to bulldoze it into the ground. If we don't bulldoze it, we'd have to haul it down to the transfer point, which is about eight miles away from us."
Olive farmer H. Shelton Boice said the proposed ban would create a hardship for an already struggling agricultural industry because of the cost of fuel that would be needed to move wood and brush rather than burn it.
Also, Boice said, "I never burn unless it's raining. I always wait, if it's raining a long time, until I know everything is soaked."
Boice noted, too, that the ban would create additional costs for the Mount Pleasant Rural Cemetery Association to clear its property.
The Department of Environmental Conservation has said the ban in necessary because about 40 percent of wildfires in New York state between 1986 and 2006 were caused by open burns. Such burning caused 98 wildfires in the state in 2006.
Additionally, the "emissions of dioxins ... from backyard burning alone were greater than all other sources combined for the years 2002-04," the DEC said.
The agency said it also found "that burning trash emits, arsenic, carbon monoxide, benzene, styrene, formaldehyde, lead, hydrogen cyanide and other harmful chemicals."
"Trash containing plastics, polystyrene pressure-treated and painted wood, and bleached or colored papers, can produce harmful chemicals when burned," the DEC wrote.
Robert Stanton, an engineer for the environmental department, said opinions about the proposed burn ban are split among people who have sent letters and e-mails to the agency.
"There are a few people that support the reg just as is," he said. "We have just as many, maybe more, who say we oppose it, and there's a bunch in the middle that say, 'Of course you shouldn't burn garbage, but let us burn our brush, please.' And in certain parts of the state, they want to burn papers, and they claim identify theft and litter" among the reasons.
