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Target not being interested in Saranac Lake is not entirely true. According to Tom Michaels, who is currently running for mayor, they are NOT INTERESTED AT THIS TIME. They are working their way up North. They want to build in Plattsburgh, and get past Albany. In about 3-5 years they would be looking at our area.
Tom also says that Wal-Mart is NOT OUR ONLY ANSWER. He came to a local merchants meeting yesterday. He did tell us that the sand lot will probably get zoned commercial. But Wal-Mart is not the only company interested in coming to our town. He feels that we shouldn't accept the first company that gets here. We should as a village make the decision as to what is best for everyone concerned. He also has some FABULOUS IDEAS for working on the downtown. He wants to see additional commercial built. The upper Broadway area would be ideal for this. Property that could be considered for this is part of Church street where the Tops/Grand Union is, Depot Street, and further up Broadway. Some of the property owners would be gone for the right price. Then their building comes down and in the new construction, the ground floor becomes commercial and the upper floors become residential. Great idea. Tom says that we have developers who come here in the summer because they have camps up here. They could be contacted and the village could work with them.
Most of the property on upper Broadway past the stop light at Bloomingdale Avenue next to the Rusty Nail bar could be considered. The area is already zoned commercial so no problem there.
Our main problem with the downtown is that many storefronts are too small. You can't have a good selection of product when your store front is barely 1,000 square feet. And all the larger store fronts are taken up. What becomes available on a regular basis are store fronts too small to do much of anything with. We need to build larger commercial square footages. And another problem we have had in the past is many buildings burned that were downtown, and they didn't get replaced. When we lost the old Berkley Hotel in the 1980's we lost a considerble amount of retail space. We've also lost other buildings and they haven't gotten replaced either. We need to build "new" commercial space.
And we need to get Tom Michaels, Christy Fontana, and Susan Waters elected so it can be done. The Republicans can only see Wal-Mart in their picture. They DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER AGENDA. They are one-issue candidates!!