SARANAC LAKE – It makes no difference whether a resort hotel planned for Lake Flower uses a River Street lot for overflow parking, the village board and a lawyer for the developers said Monday.

The piece of property at 203 River St. is part of a Planned Unit Development District the village board approved in March 2015 to rezone land for the resort. Since then, though, the project has changed investors, and the new ones claim to have enough parking spaces on the site of three current motels so as not to need the overflow lot. The River Street lot is now being sold, and a lawyer for the buyer has raised questions.

The new owners needn’t worry, Mayor Clyde Rabideau said in a phone interview Tuesday. Their land use can fall back on the parcel’s underlying zoning if the resort PUDD’s overlay zoning isn’t applied there, he said.

“The property is not encumbered by being in the PUDD district,” Rabideau said. “In fact, one could argue that it has added value and options because of it.”

The resort plan has many vocal critics as well as less-vocal supporters. Some in the community have said that if the River Street lot is not part of the resort, the PUDD should be amended to omit it. Some have also said this would be problematic because village law requires a PUDD to be at least 3 acres, and the motel parcels alone add up to just 2.97 acres of land – dry land, that is.

Matt Norfolk of Lake Placid, a lawyer for the resort investors, says that’s a non-issue because these motel parcels’ boundaries extend into the water, totaling 4.17 acres – and the PUDD sticks to property boundaries, not dry land, he said. Rabideau backed that up and said it was the legal opinion the village got from its staff attorney as well as the Glens Falls-based law firm of Miller, Mannix, Schachner, which it hired for this project. Lake Flower is a portion of the Saranac River, dammed by Pliny Miller in 1827, and Rabideau said many property deeds extend far out into the man-made lake.

Essex County’s online tax maps don’t show that, and they show the motel parcels adding up to 3 acres. Norfolk, however, said the larger, partially submerged property sizes are shown in the deeds and in a survey map by licensed surveyor Stacey Allott, submitted to the village.

“As attorneys practicing real estate law, we often find the tax map is at odds with the deed on acreage, especially in a situation like this, where the parcels are partially submerged due to the creation or expansion of a body of water as a result of the construction of a dam,” Norfolk wrote in an email. “But, the bottom line is that the deed always controls.”

Rabideau said he would defer to village lawyers on this question but added, “it is my experience that a survey by a licensed surveyor supported by an abstract of deed takes precedence over a tax map.”

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Board clarifies intent

The village board, at its meeting Monday, passed a resolution intended to clarify its aims in creating the Lake Flower PUDD. Rabideau read the “statement of legislative intent,” which was not discussed publicly.

The board stated it supported a zoning amendment for the hotel on the shore of Lake Flower “but wanted to be sure that adequate parking would be provided.”

“None of us wanted it, but we included it in case it was necessary,” Rabideau said in the Tuesday interview.

“The PUDD Law does not require that 203 River Street be used for project-related parking unless either the total required number of parking spaces exceeds 100 or the Planning Board concluded that use of 203 River Street for project parking is desireable,” the resolution states.

“This Board notes the Planning Board’s concern that use of 203 River Street for project-related parking may be unsafe and further notes that this is the very type of determination which falls squarely within the Planning Board’s scope of authority.”

The trustees’ resolution said several times that the PUDD law is already clear but that some people had raised questions about the board’s intentions.

“This is all clear in the PUDD Law itself and any confusion concerning these terms can and should be resolved by reviewing the PUDD’s plain language,” the resolution states.

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Confidential memo

Rabideau, in the interview, took issue with a person who stumbled upon a confidential memo to village officials from the Glens Falls law firm and then told an Enterprise reporter about it. The source, whom the Enterprise agreed to keep anonymous, claimed the firm had said the village might risk a lawsuit if it doesn’t revise the resort PUDD to exclude the River Street lot if it isn’t used for parking. Village Community Development Director Jeremy Evans later confirmed the memo said this.

Rabideau said the person “cherry-picked” that piece of information and fed it to the reporter.

An Enterprise editorial Monday said the memo should have been publicly available from the beginning because “all the people of the village are the clients of this law firm, and we all should have the privilege of seeing its advice.” Asked about that, Rabideau said, “We’re a republic,” in which people elect leaders to manage public affairs for the common good, rather than a direct democracy.

How would this memo, discussing legal risk, differ from a hypothetical engineering report saying a bridge was weak and exposed the public to risk? Wouldn’t such an engineering report be available for the public to see? Rabideau agreed it would, but he said that would be about more of a black-and-white risk, whereas “legal arguments are such shades of gray.

“We don’t want to alert the opposition to a weak point in a legal argument,” he said. “We have to use some discretion there.”

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Next meeting

The Planning Board is currently reviewing the resort’s site plan and is expected to convene and discuss it once again at 7 p.m. July 7 in the village offices on the second floor of the Harrietstown Town Hall, 39 Main St.

Both the new investors in the Lake Flower resort and the buyers of the River Street lot want to remain anonymous. The new resort developers do business as Saranac Lake Resort LLC, the River Street lot buyers as Malone Real Estate LLC.

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Staff Writer Adam St. Pierre contributed to this report.