LAKE PLACID — The Helping Hands Community Hub went before the Lake Placid-North Elba Joint Review Board on Wednesday and will be taken to a public hearing on June 5.

The project, slated for completion by fall, will be a new combined space for the Lake Placid Ecumenical Food Pantry and the shuttered Helping Hands Thrift Shop. It has received support from Homestead Development Corporation, Lake Placid Village Board of Trustees, the North Elba Town Council, Lake Placid Central School District, the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism, the Ecumenical Council and the Adirondack Foundation.

The 3,000 square foot building is planned for the space next to the Shipman Youth Center, where LPCSD’s basketball courts were formerly located. Expected to arrive in June, the building will come from Simplex Homes, a modular construction company based in Pennsylvania. Homestead Development, which is overseeing the project, previously worked with Simplex to build Fawn Valley, a 22-unit housing development for essential workers.

The review board expressed concerns about a potential uptick in traffic and loss of parking spaces as a result of the new community hub. Steve Sama, Homestead Development president, said that the building would not cause a loss of parking spaces in the Shipman Youth Center parking lot, as it’s going to be built on the footprint of the former basketball courts.

Additionally, the town of North Elba recently commissioned a feasibility study regarding building a sidewalk on Wesvalley Road, which would extend up Cummings Road and end at the Shipman Youth Center. Though the project has no official timeline, after the feasibility report and conceptual design is received by the town council, they will need to complete any other preliminary planning and begin to apply for permits and grant funding. The timeline of the project relies on the availability of funding, Councilor Emily Kilburn Politi said in March.

The Ecumenical Food Pantry, currently located in the basement of St. Agnes Church, serves about 70 local households per week. The project comes with a price tag of $755,000, with about $575,000 already committed. There is a restricted fund at the Adirondack Foundation set up to accept tax-deductible donations to the project.

The project application can be viewed at tinyurl.com/2ejw7sxt. The public hearing is scheduled for the review board’s June 5 meeting at 5:30 p.m. in the North Elba Town Hall’s third-floor meeting room.

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Hotel

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A Holiday Inn Express and Suites is proposed to go up at 1980 Saranac Ave., the current site of Pirate’s Cove Adventure Golf, which has been closed since 2019. The mini golf course is owned by George Banta Jr., a hotel and restaurant franchiser based in Poughkeepsie and the developer behind the proposed Holiday Inn.

The proposed hotel would be four stories tall and similar to other Holiday Inns’ franchise architecture. The review board took issue with this design.

“If you go on the Holiday Inn Express website and look at all their hotels that they have all around airports all around the country, you will see that this is their corporate franchise architecture. They all look basically just like this, and in our code, it clearly states there is no franchise architecture allowed,” said board member Chip Bissell. “I don’t see this (design) flying here.”

He added that other Holiday Inns in mountain vacation towns similar to Lake Placid often have more unique architecture, citing the franchises in Park City, Utah and Fraser, Colorado.

Board chairman Rick Thompson said that the board also disliked the hotel’s signage and its four-story height, which is above the maximum allowable height for a new building in the village.

“I know we’re going to have a problem with your sign work,” he said. “We’re just not going to act on anything that’s above our height limits, and I have to say I do agree with Mr. Bissell in terms of, we’re asking for something that’s more appropriate, more in character with a mountain town.”

Thompson advised Banta’s representatives to either revise the design’s height or apply for a height variance with the North Elba town council and Adirondack Park Agency.

“You’ll have those two hurdles before you ever come back to us again,” he said.

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Restaurant

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The board unanimously approved a new Indian restaurant, Heritage Indian Grill, to move into Cold Brook Plaza, which also houses Hannaford, Marshall’s, Gold Medal Laundromat and the Wine and Spirit Shoppe. Owners have not yet set an opening date for the restaurant.

Conditional use is typically not approved upon an applicant’s first appearance in front of the board; applicants must issue notice to neighbors and return to the board a second time before the board approves a conditional use. However, since the space has previously been used as a restaurant, the board agreed to approve the project without the typical delay. Developers will need to return to the review board to have the restaurant’s signage approved once it’s closer to opening day.

The restaurant is slated to be open from 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. every day except Tuesday, when it will be closed. It will seat 60 customers. It’s slated to serve beer and wine. The majority of the renovation will consist of building a kitchen in the space.

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story cited an incorrect amount of money the Helping Hands Community Hub has raised based on outdated figures in board documents. The project has received about $575,000 in direct donations as of Wednesday, not $240,000.