Developers of the huge resort planned to reopen a local ski hill and put hundreds of units of housing, a hotel and various luxury amenities on a little-used property. They faced a challenge to get approval from the state Adirondack Park Agency. Also, a recession hit as the permit process heated up.
But the Gleneagles project that was proposed for the former Lake Placid Club property in Lake Placid followed a very different storyline than the Adirondack Club and Resort in Tupper Lake.
As the large-scale development project planned for the Big Tupper Ski Area and the land around it heads to the APA board for a final decision this week, the Enterprise talked to people involved with the Gleneagles review to compare and contrast the biggest project ever to go before the APA board with the last proposal of the same scale.
The projects
The biggest difference is that Gleneagles, which was in play in 1989 and '90, never went before the APA's Board of Commissioners, as the ACR will again this week. The project's APA permit application was never even ruled complete.
The Gleneagles Hotel Lake Placid was supposed to rebuild a hotel on the Lake Placid Club property, plus build a number of townhouses and single-family homes around it. Amenities planned for the project included golf, a renovation of the Mount Whitney Ski Area - a small ski hill about the size of Mount Pisgah in Saranac Lake - and an equestrian center.
The Adirondack Club and Resort involves similar plans, with an inn, a few hundred townhouse units and single-family homes. It also includes an equestrian center and plans to overhaul the Big Tupper Ski Area. The town-owned golf course, while not a direct part of the project, sits on adjacent land and is expected to be a draw for ACR buyers and renters.
Jeff Anthony, part owner of the Saratoga-based landscape architecture and engineering firm the LA Group, was involved in both the plans for Gleneagles and the ACR. He said the ACR site, which is about 6,200 acres, is much bigger than the 1,000-acre site planned for Gleneagles. The Lake Placid Club site is fairly wide open, visable from the state highway and Mirror Lake, and historically, it's already been a resort, Anthony said.
The ACR is being proposed for a greater area but would only build on about 400 to 500 acres of it aside from the ski area. Small bits of the property have already seen development - Preserve Associates wants to overhaul Big Tupper and a marina nearby - but for the most part developers would build on timberlands.
John Quinn is a Tupper Lake resident who was the senior project review specialist at the APA and coordinated the Gleneagles review among the agency's different experts. He's since retired. Quinn said the main difference he sees between the two projects is that Gleneagles was proposed for a settled area, mostly in space zoned as hamlet, while the ACR?property consists mostly of lands classified as moderate intensity and resource management, which are more restrictively zoned.
The centerpiece of the Gleneagles plan was the hotel, while the ACR is putting a big emphasis on its "great camp" lots, large lots where developers plan to build luxury single-family houses. There was nothing comparable to those in the Gleneagles proposal, Quinn said.
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Investors
Another major difference, Anthony said, was the investors. Two different groups were investing in Gleneagles: Guinness PLC, which owned the original Gleneagles resort in Scotland that the plans were modeled after and was interested mostly in the Lake Placid hotel, and U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty insurance, which was more interested in the condominiums.
Anthony said the two investment groups often seemed to be competing for density allocations for their portions of the project and didn't have a coordinated front. But with the ACR, investors seem more unified, headed up by Pennsylvania-based attorney Michael Foxman and resort developer Tom Lawson, who lives in Florida and Tupper Lake.
"They've got one direction, and I think they know where they're headed," Anthony said.
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Review process
Anthony said the review process for each project was similar.
"Obviously the APA review procedures haven't changed a lot," Anthony said.
Some of the technical and scientific information he and his staff provided for Gleneagles was not as specific to the site and as detailed as for the ACR, Anthony said. But he said that's become common in every case nowadays.
"What's being asked of us today for any application is far greater detail than 22 years ago," Anthony said.
LA Group engineer Kevin Franke, lead engineer on the ACR proposal, had just started at the LA Group around the time the Gleneagles project was in play. He said the major difference he saw in that review process was that after an early meeting between Gleneagles developers and APA staff, the agency put together a 25-page document that specified the information it wanted to see in an application.
"That's, in my experience, a little bit unusual to get that type of prescriptive document from the Park Agency saying, 'This is what you need to have,'" Franke said.
Normally, agency representatives will offer some comments verbally but not give any sort of written document.
Both Franke and Anthony said it was helpful to have that detailed list of expectations from the APA.
"It's almost like being handed a cookbook," Anthony said. "Just follow the cookbook."
Both projects saw additional requests for information. For Gleneagles, the APA made a request for 321 areas where it wanted more information, and it made three requests for additional information from ACR developers.
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Opposition
Many blamed the APA's extensive request for more information for killing the Gleneagles project. Developers pulled out of the Lake Placid property, instead investing in the Equinox Resort in Manchester, Vt., without ever answering all the questions asked by the APA.
But Quinn would disagree.
"I think the economy is what did that project in," Quinn said. "The press back then thought that the APA's extensive requests for information is what killed the project, but I don't believe that to be the case."
Anthony said he doesn't recall as much organized public opposition to Gleneagles as there has been with the ACR - he said it seems like every environmental group has taken an interest in the Big Tupper project - but then again, Gleneagles never got to the stage where it faced a public hearing.
Instead, Anthony said the APA commissioners at the time had a different attitude. He said he doesn't think they liked the project, while commissioners seemed more positive about the ACR after they gave it a conceptual review in 2004 and '05.