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ORDA hosts forum on Mount Van Ho upgrades

From left, Olympic Regional Development Authority Communications Manager Jon Lundin, Assistant Manager Olympic Sports Complex & Olympic Jumping Complex Rebecca Dayton, Mount Van Hoevenberg Cross Country and Biathlon Center Manager Kris Cheney-Seymour and ORDA President and CEO Mike Pratt hear public comments on planned upgrades to Van Hoe’s Nordic ski, biathlon and sliding sports centers. The public hearing was held at the Conference Center in Lake Placid Thursday night, and 40 people attended. (Enterprise photo — Griffin Kelly)

LAKE PLACID — Mount Van Hoevenberg could see some big changes soon.

The Olympic Regional Development Authority hosted a public hearing at the Conference Center in Lake Placid Thursday, and presented an amendment to the 1986 Olympic Sports Complex at Mount Van Hoevenberg Unit Management Plan and a draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement.

The goal is to provide upgrades that will allow for year-round recreational and competitive opportunities.

All this information and more can be found at “http://orda.org”>orda.org under the “corporate” section. However, the document is 280 pages, so this article highlights some of the major components of the plan.

What’s new

Here’s a short list including some of the new projects and amenities — an alpine coaster, a transport coaster, more cross-country ski trails, a welcome center, an 8 million gallon snowmaking reservoir and storage structure and developed trailheads that would connect Mt. Van Ho to Cascade, Porter, Marcy and Pitchoff mountains. Most of these aspects would also be provided with updated lighting systems.

One of the larger projects will be a new biathlon stadium, which would be able to host competitions at the World Cup and International Biathlon Union levels. The trails connecting to the stadium would be smaller so that biathletes can loop by crowds and audiences more often.

Also, the document on ORDA’s website doesn’t contain final design plans, so some layouts could change over the next few months.

All other existing cross-country ski trails will be maintained.

Cost

ORDA President and CEO Mike Pratt said the total cost of the phase 1 upgrades — new trails, snowmaking projects, the mountain coaster, biathlon improvements — is about $20 million. ORDA has already allocated about $12 million, a piece of the $62.5 million in state money Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged to the authority earlier this year.

Timeline

Pratt said ORDA is hoping to have Adirondack Park Agency and state Department of Environmental Conservation approval in accordance to the State Environmental Quality Review Act by the end of the summer. He said ORDA would like to start phase 1 construction this fall. It would pick up spring 2019 and possibly finish by winter of that year. Pratt said the entire project would take a couple of years to complete.

Concerns

About 40 people showed up to the hearing, and fewer than 10 spoke, praising the changes and raising questions as well. [Clarification: An earlier version of this story may have overstated the overall level of concern about the plan and didn’t mention that some praised it as well.] For instance, Saranac Lake village Trustee Rich Shapiro questioned how well the staff could keep up with grooming the ski trails.

“This past season was a good example of this,” he said. “When the staff is available, there’s an excellent job of grooming done. Probably the best around. We tell people we love it and how great it is, but there are also many times where there isn’t enough staff to do it, or the staff is told, ‘You’ve worked too many hours. You have to go home.’ We had that this year. It was some of the best snow of the season, and the place wasn’t groomed for days. That’s ridiculous. You have this world-class venue, you’re improving it to the current world-class levels, and if you don’t do the day-to-day maintenance, if you will — the grooming — it’s all for naught.”

Shapiro said he and his wife moved to the Adirondacks specifically to cross-country ski and that he is a huge fan of Van Ho, but he felt like its regulars are being disregarded with the new plans. He said the upgrades would cater more to big events, rather than the folks who’ve been going there for years.

“The sense a lot of us have — although we really do appreciate all the work here — is that the focus is on the big events and that the daily skiers and regular season pass holders are just this afterthought. We resent it, and I think you’ll end up losing a lot of your daily business if you don’t maintain the facilities for us on a daily basis.”

Mount Van Hoevenberg Cross Country and Biathlon Center Manager Kris Cheney-Seymour said Van Ho is a world-class venue, but the requirements to host a world-class competition have changed dramatically since the center’s construction for the 1980 Winter Olympics.

“A lot of the plans and processes we’re going through,” Cheney-Seymour said, “are not just to meet the current standards to host international events but to be hosting events for the next 20 years.

“What these upgrades at Mount Van Hoevenberg do from a facility standpoint, from an operational standpoint and from a lodge standpoint, actually allows us to meet the needs of all user groups more appropriately,” he said. “Currently, when we have large scale races, which can have 400 to 600 athletes, it is not uncommon that we are unable to provide the recreational programs that the community relies upon. Likewise, we are currently not able to host world-class events that are coming from the highest level of the World Cup or the IBU because we have these other needs that we need to meet to the recreational public. This is going to allow us to do both.”

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