Lake Placid’s Main Street is seen in this photo from Jan. 8. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

LAKE PLACID — A public information session where local officials planned to present designs for an $8 million Main Street overhaul has now been postponed.

The meeting, originally scheduled for next Monday, has now been postponed indefinitely at the request of members of the Main Street task force, a group of more than 15 people chosen by Mayor Craig Randall to offer input on the village’s plans for the streetscape redesign and infrastructure project.

At a meeting of the task force at the Beach House Wednesday morning, Mary Jane Lawrence — a member of the group and chief of staff at the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism — said she didn’t believe the group had all of the information and visuals necessary to present the plans to the public next week.

“I don’t think we’re ready for a meeting in five days,” she said.

Other members agreed.

“We have no target date for the public information session yet,” Mayor Craig Randall said.

The task force is slated to meet again at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 5 in the Beach House community room to discuss the project. Randall said it’s likely they’ll set a date for the public information session then.

The first phase of the project is expected to go out to bid in March, with construction set to kick off in the spring, and to last for the next two years in the lead-up to the 2023 World University Games.

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Project scope

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The village’s plans for Main Street include the installation of new water pipes. This is expected to improve service capacity, including the capacity for the village to provide water connections for buildings’ sprinkler systems. Not all of the buildings on Main Street currently have code-required sprinkler systems, according to Randall. The plan also includes the installation of bioretention basins. These are typically plots of land set at a lower elevation, with layers of gravel, soil, mulch and vegetation. Randall has said the basins will help mitigate salt contamination in Mirror Lake by filtering stormwater runoff, and they are a requirement of some of the state grant funding the village has received for this project.

As the underlying water infrastructure of Main Street is updated, section by section, the village is planning to replace the existing sidewalks and add updated crosswalks with bump-outs. Those bump-outs may be bordered by some landscaping, with space for streetlights and parking meters, and possibly some seating.

The sewer main under Main Street was replaced in 2018.

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Task force members

repeat concerns

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At the task force meeting Wednesday, concerns from members over the removal of parking spaces, and the two-year construction timeline, resurfaced again.

“We’re taking away parking and we don’t have a short-term solution,” said Marc Galvin, co-owner of Bookstore Plus and a member of the task force. “Taking away that parking is not a good idea for the north end of the street, I think.”

The task force and members of the Lake Placid Business Association have different estimates for how many on-street parking spaces would be removed with the latest design draft. Both estimates outline fewer than a dozen spaces lost.

Randall said that in the future, the village could consider altering loading zone hours to free up more parking on the street earlier in the day. He also reiterated that the village is currently discussing two different possible parking solutions on each end of the Main Street business district, in collaboration with two private businesses, the High Peaks Resort and Crowne Plaza. He also said there’s potential to expand parking on the upper municipal lot across from NBT Bank, with the installation of some sort of parking deck. But those discussions are preliminary.

“We’ve talked about a parking garage forever, since the ’60s,” Galvin said. “If we can get a parking garage done in the short-term, great, but…”

Village Engineer Ivan Zdrahl said that from an engineering standpoint, he “cannot add any more parking spaces” to the designs on the north end because of the elevation changes as a result of the village installing a subsurface filtration system at One Main Park — which a requirement of grant funding the village has recieved for the project. That system is designed to filter stormwater runoff from Saranac Avenue before it enters Mirror Lake.

Multiple task force members also spoke again about the two-year construction schedule, which would likely run throughout the summertime — a peak tourism season in Lake Placid. Lake Placid Highway Superintendent Brad Hathaway has said that the village has spoken with potential contractors about the possibility of limiting construction during peak tourism periods, but members of the task force said that there should also be a focus on both clearly communicating the schedule to businesses and providing public transportation to pedestrians to offset some of the inconvenience of the construction zone.

Tim Robinson, president of the Lake Placid Business Association, general manager of Terry Robards Wine & Spirits and a task force member, said the town and village should consider hiring a dedicated government employee to act as a business liaison throughout the construction period.

Randall stressed the importance of moving forward with the project soon.

“At the moment, we’re okay, but we won’t be okay if this process drags on,” he said.

In response to a task force member asking if the timeline before the grant funding for this project expires could be extended, Hathaway said the village has requested the expiration date for the project’s grant funding be extended before.