To the editor:

I write as a grateful father and Saranac Laker this holiday season.

My children have all chosen to live here and to be part of our wonderful community. I realize every day how fortunate Leslie and I are to have them here.

I thank everyone, past and present, for everything we have done and continue to do individually and collectively to make Saranac Lake the special and unique treasure that it is. As a poignant example of what the village’s history of thoughtful planning can mean, my son and daughter-in-law recently purchased their first home in Saranac Lake, three doors down the street from us. It is hard to express how blessed this makes Leslie and me feel. Their new home was on track to be a short-term rental until Saranac Lake put a moratorium in place to stop the use of village homes for commercial purposes. But for the moratorium, my kids would not have had to opportunity to buy their new home. Their neighbors, by the way, are a couple with a young child that own a home used as a short-term rental until the moratorium was adopted.

And there is another dimension to the short-term rental discussion that needs to be kept in mind — every short term rental in one of our homes means that one or more rooms in our existing hotels or other tourist accommodations is not being filled. We rely on our hotels to provide a solid and reliable commercial property tax base to help lessen the burden on those of us who pay village taxes for our homes, including now my kids. If these businesses do not succeed, our residential property tax burden will increase substantially.

To prevent this from happening, before we create more short term rentals in our neighborhoods, depriving our kids or other young families from the opportunity to live in the village, we should also make sure that our hotels and other tourist accommodations are filling enough beds to be sustainable. Let’s keep working to provide a desirable and sustainable Saranac Lake, where our children have the opportunity to buy a home and the Hotel Saranac and other commercial tourist accommodations in the village are thriving.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Paul Van Cott

Saranac Lake