The Aug. 15 edition of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise had two interesting articles, one on the Adirondack Park Agency’s release of reports on its proposed move to downtown Saranac Lake, and the other on NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s recent remarks at the Adirondack Community Foundation’s annual dinner in Lake Placid. The Comptroller’s remarks made me more certain that a new Agency headquarters, if constructed, will be in Ray Brook rather than downtown.

The Comptroller confirmed that New York is in fiscal peril, the condition anticipated by Governor Kathy Hochul when she visited Saranac Lake on June 27. With the passage of “the big, beautiful bill,” the state is projected to lose a substantial amount of the $96.7 billion in federal funds that accounted for nearly 39 percent of the NYS budget in FY 2025. The just-approved FY 2026 budget totals $254 billion. While a substantial reduction in federal money for New York was expected, the Legislature nevertheless failed to make any reductions to the amount requested by the Governor in January. Instead, it added $1 billion. Now, it is expected that the legislature will meet in special session to redo the State budget in order to make cuts necessary to soften the impact of federal revenue reductions to critically important State programs, including Medicaid and SNAP.

When the legislature returns for the special session, it will be very hard for anyone to justify the extra $10 million provided to the Park Agency to supplement the previously committed $29 million for a new downtown headquarters. The $10 million was added to cover necessary repairs to the foundation of the Village’s Power and Light Building, a structure that is not critical to the APA’s relocation downtown. The Agency’s headquarters will be in a new 19,000 square foot structure to be built against Petrova Hill on the 1-3 Main Street site. Albany’s pull back of at least the $10 million to repair the Power and Light Building should be “low hanging fruit” as the Governor challenges each of its department and agency heads to identify necessary cutbacks before negotiations begin with the Legislature.

Notably, the NYS Senate had nixed the $10 million in its own March 2025 budget bill, and it only returned in final negotiations with the Assembly and the governor. This time, it will be very hard to include it in a revised budget because the governor and comptroller have both pointed out that even with substantial State budget cuts, federal funding reductions will hurt a lot of New Yorkers and threaten the viability of urban and rural hospitals and health systems. This includes Adirondack Health, the Adirondack Park’s largest private employer.

Based on late 2022 estimates by the APA, a new headquarters building in Ray Brook would cost about $20 million. In that same year, the cost for the downtown alternative was projected to be $29 million. This year’s addition of $10 million by Governor Hochul has now raised the budgeted cost of the downtown project to at least $39 million.

After reading the Enterprise article about the Agency’s Saranac Lake building project, I looked at the recently released APA materials. While the reports are collectively characterized as “the feasibility study,” the reports merely present geo/technical reports to help answer the question, “Can we build downtown?” Nothing at all is provided to answer the question “Should we build downtown?” No cost comparisons (Downtown to Ray Brook) are provided. It is also noteworthy that the recently released Inspector General’s report quoted a NYS Budget Division official who said that the economic impact of an Agency move downtown would be insignificant. So the question must now be asked, “What fact-based documentation does the Agency have to explain why downtown is the State’s ‘preferred alternative?'”

From the outset, I have believed that the proposed move downtown was a bad idea. Bad for the agency, bad for the village, and most certainly, bad for New York state taxpayers. But with that thought aside, the state’s current fiscal crisis makes the move downtown truly unaffordable. While the APA can perform all its important work for the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park from a new headquarters in Ray Brook, New York’s taxpayers are being asked to ante up an additional $19 million to instead build an APA headquarters downtown. For what? After sounding the fiscal alarm in person on June 27, we should expect Governor Hochul to make the wise choice of abandoning the agency’s proposal to relocate to downtown Saranac Lake.

Steve Erman was the Adirondack Park Agency’s economic advisor from 1982 until he retired from State service in 2010