The North Elba Town Hall is the home to the Lake Placid village offices. (Enterprise file photo)

LAKE PLACID — Craig Randall, a Republican, has been the village of Lake Placid’s mayor for the last 12 years, but he has reached the three-term limit and is not seeking reelection. Art Devlin and Jamie Rogers are each asking voters to pick them for the job for the next four years.

Both are experienced in the ways of village government. Rogers was a village board trustee for five years — two of those as deputy mayor, which means he filled in to chair meetings when the mayor was absent — and was then elected mayor for a term, from 2005 until Randall won the 2009 election.

That was also the vote in which Devlin was elected trustee, running with Randall and Zay Curtis as the “Committee for Teamwork.” Devlin has been on the Board of Trustees ever since, and has been deputy mayor for the last eight years.

“I’m proud of what we accomplished in 12 years, and I’d like to see it continue,” Devlin told the Lake Placid News in December 2020, when he announced he would run for mayor.

At the time, Devlin named a few challenges and projects the village board will tackle in the coming years, including affordable housing and dealing with the pandemic.

“With COVID, people struggling to stay in business, I just think these are really, really trying, tough times and it’s going to take all of our smarts to overcome and survive,” Devlin said. “Especially with the Main Street project that’s coming up, working with the merchants and trying to get the people up there so the businesses aren’t going out of business.”

Rogers announced his candidacy in January. He is currently doing carpentry work for Steve Sama Construction in the summer and boat restoration for Tri-Lakes Marine in the winter.

He told the Lake Placid News at the time that he’d like to see the village board meet at 7 p.m. once again so more people could attend. Currently the board meets at 5 p.m. the first and third Monday of the month.

“I think we need to improve communication,” he said. “I think we need to make our government a little bit more transparent.”

He named workforce housing as an issue and noted that he has been working with Steve Sama and the Homestead Development Corp., which has proposed a major subdivision off Wesvalley Road called Fawn Valley. It is donated property that would be developed specifically for workforce housing — 16 four-plex condominiums and six Cape Cod-style modular homes. Three of the condos would be set aside for low-income housing, according to the paperwork submitted to the Lake Placid-North Elba Joint Review Board.

Randall, meanwhile, has sold the Lake Placid motel he owned, ran and lived at for 44 years, and he’s moving to the Clinton County town of Peru.

He and his wife retired from their primary careers years ago — he a banker, she a hospital administrator — but now they’re really retiring.

In an exit interview with the Lake Placid News in January, the 78-year-old mayor said he and his wife had planned on staying in Lake Placid when they sold the motel but found that houses suitable for a couple their age — preferably without stairs, for instance — were no longer in their price range.

He told the News he is glad people in Lake Placid are now addressing the issue of housing for workers, “But I think equally critical, if we’re going to keep our older, aging residents in the community, is providing housing that meets some of their needs. I’m not hearing much conversation about that, and I know it’s a concern of our seniors. Because there are other seniors like us that are going to downsize, that are going to give up their home that requires a lot of maintenance. But yet they have to have a place to go. And frankly, that’s exactly what we ran head-on into.”