Lake Placid and North Elba Justice Bill Hulshoff (Enterprise photo)

LAKE PLACID — For the second time in nine months, people here voted to keep their village court system and not combine its caseloads with the town of North Elba’s court.

The village Board of Trustees had put the proposition up for vote at Tuesday’s regularly scheduled village election, and residents decided to keep the court by a tally of 132 votes to 114, village Clerk Ellen Clark said after polls closed at 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Clark said those numbers were derived from the 254 votes that had been counted thus far: 233 scanned electronically and 21 absentee ballots. Clark added that the Essex County Board of Elections will assess six more absentee ballots Wednesday morning — not enough to tip the vote in favor of court dissolution.

All four incumbent candidates up for re-election were selected to serve another term of office by village voters.

Lake Placid Mayor Craig Randall will serve his third four-year term in the village’s executive position, as he received 157 votes Tuesday. He also ran unopposed the last time he was up for re-election, in 2013.

Randall’s Deputy Mayor, Art Devlin, received 161 votes to be selected to his second four-year term as a village trustee.

Trustee Scott Monroe was also selected to serve a second four-year term, as he received 162 votes.

The village’s lone remaining justice, William Hulshoff, received 182 votes. If voters had decided to dissolve the village court into the town court, Hulshoff would not have served the new term and his final day in office would have been April 3.

Hulshoff, who also serves as a North Elba town justice, was a strong proponent of keeping the village court in the lead-up to this vote and before last June’s special election. Last June, the choice of keeping the court was only put to voters after Hulshoff circulated a petition to put the village board’s April decision to dissolve the court to a referendum vote.

People voted to keep the court by a tally of 104 to 72 in June. The village court meets in the same room as the town court at the North Elba Town Hall, and its two justices, Hulshoff and backup justice Dean Dietrich, are also the town’s two justices.

Along with the village board, Dietrich and his Lake Placid-North Elba Community Development Commission were the lead proponents in dissolving the court. The village’s main argument for dissolving was to save taxpayers money. Earlier this month, village Treasurer Paul Ellis said an estimated $45,933 — the cost of operating the village court — would be saved per year if the court dissolved.

Hulshoff disagreed adamantly, saying the savings would be minimal and that court services would be negatively affected due to a “clogging of the process” with just the town court. He was also critical of the village board for putting the measure to vote again so soon after last June’s vote. With no challengers running against incumbent candidates, he wasn’t sure Tuesday’s turnout would be much higher than June’s, when 176 people voted.

Randall had said he expected closer to 1,000 voters this time around, but as of Tuesday evening, 254 votes were counted.

The mayor was not in the village Tuesday as he is in Austria with a group from the Adirondacks conducting research to bring the Special Olympics World Winter Games here in 2021 and the World University Games here in 2023.

Hulshoff said Tuesday’s outcome reaffirmed last June’s results.

“I think it’s important for the people who have to come to court, because I think it will make the lineup in the court room shorter, rather than if everything had closed,” Hulshoff said. “Last June was valid because, I think, the numbers and percentages ought to be similar to what we had last June.”

One defense attorney from Lake Placid, Brian Barrett, disagreed, and voiced his disagreement with the voting majority less than an hour after the unofficial results were in.

“There was no value to keep the Lake Placid Village Court,” he wrote on Twitter. “This is ridiculous.”

At a village board meeting last month, Trustee Peter Holderied said if voters didn’t decide to dissolve the court, it would remain for at least another four years. Dietrich said the move was recommended by the Government Center for Research. Ellis added that dissolution would have saved village taxpayers seven-and-a-half cents per $1,000 of property value — approximately $14.80 per year for a $200,000 home.