SARANAC LAKE - The owner of Ampersand Bay Resort is asking the town of Harrietstown for a zoning change as part of a plan to further develop the property and sell off some of its cottages and condos.
Neil Hopkins of Montgomery Court Inc. wants the town to change the zoning on the 28-acre parcel from B3 resort business to a planned resort development.
The proposal is scheduled to come before the town board on Feb. 9. That will be followed by a pre-application meeting with the Harrietstown Planning Board on Feb. 15, according to town Code Enforcement Officer Ed Randig. Each board would have to hold a public hearing before the rezoning can be approved, Randig said.
With the help of architect and planner Jim Hotaling, Hopkins said he's drafted a development plan for the property that maximizes its potential and is also sensitive to the needs and desires of the community.
"It's an extremely unique property in many aspects," Hopkins said. "It has accessibility to both the highway (state Route 3), the village and the Saranac lakes. In the olden days, it used to be called 'the Gateway to the Wilderness.' We want to come up with a unique development plan to go with a unique piece of property, and we want the plan to have enough diversity to ensure our economic stability over the long run."
The resort currently has 26 units, which includes 10 cottages and 16 condominiums. Hopkins said that over time he wants to increase that to 40 units, 16 of which would be single-family and 24 would be multi-family. Most would continue to be rented, but some would be put on the market for sale, Hopkins said. The revenue from those potential sales would fund a series of other projects on the property, including a restaurant.
"Selling some units will allow us to develop the property and do other things there," Hopkins said. "We're not talking about just a restaurant but perhaps some tennis and fitness facilities, and maybe some small commercial facilities oriented around the community and the resort, like a community room, bait shop, maybe a small grocery store - a lot of public amenities."
Hopkins is working with Margie Philo, owner and broker of Adirondack Premier Properties, to market and sell some of the resort's units. Philo said it's still too early in the process to know what they would cost.
"I would imagine, based on the resort quality, most of it will be second homeowners," she said. "But there may be some people that actually want to live there year round, due to the beautiful views. The most important thing right now is there will be an ability for the community to come on to the property and start using the property more."
The entire resort was put on the market more than a year ago, and it's still listed with Adirondack Premier Properties for $13.5 million. Hopkins was asked if the current plan for the property was initiated because few people were biting on the resort as a whole.
"No," he said. "I think putting it on the market was maybe more like plan B. I think plan A has always been to sell individual units there; it's just that things were going slow."
In November 2010, the Enterprise reported that organizers of Patriot Hills at Saranac Lake, now called Homeward Bound Adirondacks, were interested in purchasing the resort and making it the site of the group's proposed veterans retreat and reintegration center. But those talks have apparently gone nowhere.
"I have had some conversation with them, and I told them my plans to go forward with the zoning change," Hopkins said. "Once we start selling units, that would be off the table because we couldn't sell the whole property to anybody if somebody already owns some of it. We've told them this, and they've indicated that they are not moving forward right now. But we can't wait indefinitely."
Hopkins said the change to planned resort development zoning creates more flexibility for what he wants to do.
"Traditional zoning, we feel, doesn't really satisfy the potential or the needs of the property itself," he said. "The current zoning is somewhat flexible. But the planned resort development (zoning) allows us to cluster the development. The current zoning doesn't allow for clustering."
"The current zoning does not allow us to do the sales of condos and cottages individually, which is what the end result would like to be," Philo said.
Hopkins stressed that what he and Hotaling have come up with isn't the final plan for the property. He expects it will evolve further during the town's review of his rezoning request.
