The Village of Lake George will hold a vote later this year on whether to dissolve.
While village dissolution has been discussed before in the Adirondack tourism destination, the matter has never gone before voters.
Earlier this year, the Village and Town of Lake George took initial steps to study village dissolution. Bids were sought from firms interested in conducting a feasibility study.
But, as Village Mayor Bob Blais puts it, officials chose to postpone the study.
“We decided along with the town of Lake George to postpone it over our busy summer season due to the fact that the village was seeking financing for our $24 million wastewater treatment plant, and we also had two extremely important positions open in the village and we didn’t want to cloud that,” said Blais.
With the review stalled by officials, a group of village residents submitted petitions in May forcing a vote to allow community members to consider dissolution.
Doug Frost, a local business owner and lifelong village resident, was involved in the petition effort.
“It was like, well, if they don’t want do the study and they don’t want to give us an opportunity to vote as residents, then we should probably petition them which ultimately will force them to put it out to a vote to the residents,” said Frost.
Meeting later this month,the Lake George Village Board is likely to schedule a public vote on dissolution for September 13th, according to Blais.
The village mayor of more than five decades said the town and village have now hired a firm to come in and do a “very quick study” on dissolution in order to present information to voters within a short timeframe.
“The fact remains that we’ve had three extensive studies before, and each time the studies proved that dissolution would not work in the Town and Village of Lake George so it never went to a vote,” said Blais. “We never wanted to waste the time, the money, the effort to do that and the people agreed. This petition was submitted for entirely different reasons, I believe, and now we’ll have to go through the process – and we will – and we’ll try to put as many facts together as we can…”
Frost says he just wants voters to have the chance to make an informed decision on whether to dissolve the village. He says the village is restricted from economic growth benefitting the town.
“I look at the town, and the town has things going on all over the place. And I think for, as a village resident, I would want to be a part of that growth,” said Frost.
Frost believes relief from village taxes could also be a possible benefit.
“That’s certainly going to help people that are on fixed incomes. It’s going to help the younger kids hopefully, potentially come here and be able to find affordable places to live. And so to me it’s really about what’s going to be best for the future of Lake George.”
There have been concerns from town taxpayers about a potential hike in taxes related to dissolution. According to a study conducted in 2009, the 3,000-some town residents could have seen an 8 or 9 percent tax increase.
But today, New York has tools to incentivize municipalities seeking to consolidate.
As WAMC reported earlier this year, Lake George Village and Town Zoning and Planning Director Dan Barush said town taxpayers would not have to assume village debt, by way of creating a special district along the boundaries of the old village within the town. In addition, a state tax credit of up to a half-million dollars annually would effectively nullify an impact on town taxpayers.
Barush also told WAMC he’s looked into what would happen to village residents if the tax base is absorbed into the town. He thinks he has a solution for how the roughly 1,000 residents in the boundary of the former village can repay village debt.
“That solution that I have in mind is another special district, again, encompassing the boundaries of the village where they collect all of the parking revenue. That is, essentially, it’s all revenue in the village right now, the parking revenue, and they can create a special district for parking. And all the money raised each year from parking can be used to offset the existing debt service burden that they're going to have,” said Barush.
The Lake George Village Board is scheduled to meet next on June 20th.
