At their regular meeting on July 8, the Saranac Lake Village Board was presented with a letter from Mark Schachner, an authority on New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). The letter warned the board that by signing a $340,000 contract for design of the complex without first conducting a thorough review of the project’s impact on the environment and the surrounding neighborhoods, the village was out of compliance with state law. The letter also recognized previous points in the project where the board failed to comply with the same law. As important as SEQRA is to quality of life in our village it is equally critical in safeguarding scarce financial resources from being committed to projects that have been pursued without proper public input.

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How we got here

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The design contract goes into effect on July 23. As that deadline approaches, it would be useful to review how the project arrived at this point. More importantly, this is the last opportunity for the board to consider corrective measures before its members knowingly violate New York law and their sworn oaths to uphold it.

¯ In June of last year Mayor Jimmy Williams told the Enterprise that the Adirondack Park Agency reached out to the village shortly after he took office in 2022 with the idea of taking over 1-3 Main St. for agency headquarters. A deal with the APA would displace the Saranac Lake Police Department, which currently occupies part of the building.

¯ In April 2022 the village board created a “Public Safety Facility Committee” that would comprise the mayor, a trustee, representatives from police, fire and rescue squads and qualified members of the general public. Within a month, the committee had been reformed, omitting public participation.

¯ In late May 2022, the board sent Police Chief Darin Perrotte, Fire Captain Dominic Fontana and Rescue Squad Director Ben Watson to a facility design conference in Chicago. They reported back a 20-year programming service need for a combined facility of 35,000 square feet, a size which the present Broadway locations of the Fire and Rescue squads could accommodate.

¯ In August 2022 the village board hired a Buffalo-based contractor to conduct a feasibility study, despite the firm’s failure to meet the qualifications set out in the village’s RFQ. By mid-October the firm had doubled the services’ 20-year programming need without explanation from either the contractor or the village, practically guaranteeing the removal of public services from downtown.

¯ By the end of January 2023 the contractors had created a conceptual design for the emergency services complex at the former Pius X site, with emergency vehicle access across the wetlands to Route 3. Mayor Williams told the Enterprise at the time, “if they can’t build a road (to Route 3), then they can’t build an emergency services building there. The price tag for the project: $27 million.

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Sticker shock

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One of the largest hurdles facing the emergency services project is its cost. Last year the village failed to raise the $28.5 million it had hope to raise from the federal budget, by far the largest pot of money available for projects like this. Instead the village raised only $4.5 million. Most of the balance of the project’s price tag will have to come from local taxpayers, likely in the form of a loan that will double our already oversized debt load of $23 million. Annual payments of the principal of any new debt, coupled with operating and maintenance expenses for the 70,000 square foot building will cripple our budget for a generation. Estimated cost of the debt burden and long-term costs to taxpayers, promised by the contractor for the feasibility study, were never delivered.

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Feasibility

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In October last year, the project’s contractor delivered its feasibility study based on the original conceptual plan showing access to Route 3. According to the study, Route 3 access is critical to preventing bottlenecks through neighborhood streets in emergency situations.

Within two weeks of the study’s release, Mayor Williams and Deputy Mayor Matt Scollin published a letter in the Albany Times-Union (directed to the attention of those who will determine the fate of the APA headquarters move), stating, “… If 33 Petrova Ave. is determined to be the best solution (for the complex), the village will design a project that does not require an APA permit.” This assurance eliminates access to Route 3, a feature which would require a permit.

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The path forward

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Apart from the question of which of the mayor’s assurances to believe — the promise not to build the complex if it cannot access Route 3, or the promise not to access Route 3 — Saranac Lake’s village board faces a dilemma. On its current trajectory, we will incur a fiscally ruinous debt on a project that by all measures is twice the size needed for a community of 5,000. Alternatively, the trustees could return the project to a reasonable size and price — the figure arrived at by our public safety and emergency personnel at the start of the process. If it chooses the latter path, options open up for less expensive and better alternative solutions for our emergency services. For example, a 2018 study commissioned by the village board recommended expanding the police department into the entire ground floor of 1-3 Main St. at a cost of less than $2 million.

New York’s SEQRA, in mandating that a thorough study of a project be done with public input as early in the process as possible, was established to prevent the very problem confronting Saranac Lake at this moment: the commitment of public money — the $340,000 contract that will go into effect next Tuesday is merely a down payment on a $1.78 million design phase contract — on a project whose feasibility is still in question. Conducting a full review of the project at this point is not only wise, it is the law.

In order to correct the flaws that have marked the process of improving Saranac Lake’s public safety and emergency services facilities from the start (and to honor their oaths of office), village trustees have one narrow path forward. At their regular meeting on Monday, July 22, Saranac Lake’s trustees need to suspend the contract it approved on June 24, until a full and open review of the project can be conducted.

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Mark Wilson lives in Saranac Lake.