BALLSTON SPA — At its monthly meeting at the county complex in Ballston Spa on Oct. 15, the Saratoga County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved adding more than $185,000 to extend to two years a previous $110,000 one-year agreement between the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services to provide 2 school-based Certified Recovery Peer Advocates.
With the approval, the new agreement between the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Sheriff’s Office extends the contract between the Sheriff’s Office and Captain Community Human Services, Inc. through Dec. 31, 2026 with funds up to $295,260.
The New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS) has made available ongoing Opioid Regional Abatement Funds to Local Government Units for initiatives to reduce the impact of addiction and opioid use disorder, according to the resolution.
*The Board authorized the approval of a $165,000 agreement with The Segal Group, Inc. of New York City to provide health insurance consultant services.
The agreement will run for an eight-month period, Jan. 1, 2025 through Aug. 31, 2025, and the consultant services will assist with the provision of an analysis that will compare health insurance claims past and present, analyze membership networking and utilization information, and evaluate potential cost-saving opportunities with prospective health insurance carriers for 2026.
“Whispering Sky “ – a new album by Tenzin Choegyal, who will perform in Saratoga Springs Nov. 3.
by Thomas Dimopoulos
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Tibetan artist and composer Tenzin Choegyal will journey to Saratoga Springs to stage an intimate performance on Nov. 3 in support of his just-released album “Whispering Sky.”
The album, released on the community-focused label 4000 Records, clocks in at 50 minutes and features eight tunes laced with instrumental tones known to western ears – pianos and winds, guitars and a string quartet among them, as well as beautifully foreign sonics of the bansuri and tabla, tuned glasses and gongs that mesh In the altogether as a soundscape of the collective subconscious.
“Tashi Delek and many greetings to you,” he writes from his home base 10,000 miles from New York and on the opposite side of the world. “Hope this finds you in a great space of being.” The space is “Whispering Sky.”
“I created this album in my home studio and it turned into a global project – featuring some of my closest friends and collaborators,” says Choegyal, who produced the album that features his voice, dranyen – a Tibetan lute, and lingbu – a bamboo flute, throughout. The album first took shape in his home studio in Brisbane and welcomed an international cast of talented collaborators who accompanied him in recording studios in Toronto and London, and Tokyo to New York.
“It was a time of challenge and opportunity,” Choegyal says, “and creative collaborations with artists worldwide.”
The Tracks
A simple pluck sets the baseline beat of the album’s opening track “Rawang Freedom.” Eighteen times the beat repeats, inspired by the Heart Sutra and welcoming as companions the strum of an acoustic guitar and the harmonious chanting of hidden angels traversing across a silhouetted terrain, trusting a guiding light to illuminate the path to freedom and in the process gifting listeners with the graceful yearning to phonetically chant along.
At the crossroads of silence, more passengers are invited join along on the ride, each offering a different perspective:
“Kyema The Roof is leaking” provokes thoughts of a vast room where workers are at play with their noisy tools of reconstruction. Once inside, they present a curious contemplation: While a leaky roof may appear a hinderance at the visible surface, beyond it awaits the blessing of open-sky dreaming, urging the listener to experience previously undiscovered things.
The mediative and transcendent “Dolma Whispering Sky” reveals tight vibrant chants to set the rhythm foundation, rising in open-throat voicings and resulting in the elevation of spirit to fill the vanishing point of the most ancient of halls.
Jhala A Big Hug. Happy melodies, a changing of time, playful, bright and augmented and accessorized with pleasurable time-changes. “Jampa A Big Hug” – Tenzin sends big, warm hugs to everyone.
Nightingales. The sound of a flute streams through the darkness its trailing embers lined with the awakening of a new day. To western ears, the landscape is tinged with a familiarity of Peter Gabriel’s travels to the African continent, and sparse East Asian piano of Kitaro-isms.
Gyallu Tibetan Anthem, composed around 1950 and sung in Tibetan communities-in-exile around the world. Here. It is performed with no lyrics, serving as a reminder that singing this anthem is prohibited throughout Tibet.
I Fly To You. A glee-filled four-minutes which in a perfect and just world would settle atop the charts of pop hits, in an expression of the longing to be with loved ones once again.
Kailash Roof Of The World. Ascending the Himalayas with syncopated foot-stepping and soaring up, high as the mighty mountain itself when suddenly sidewind in the emotional cross-stitch of simultaneous turmoil, glory, blessings and curses.
Tenzin Choegyal will stage a solo performance at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 3 at the Arthur Zankel Music Center on the campus of Skidmore College. The intimate show seats the audience onstage with the artist and will utilize the setting sun as backdrop in the showcase.
Tickets are limited and are $20 general public; $5 Skidmore community (students, faculty, staff, alumni, and retirees). For ticket info, go HERE or call the box office at 518-580-8381. For more information about the artist, go to: https://www.tenzinchoegyal.com/.
Saratoga Springs, NY – USA – Mar. 6, 2021: A landscape view of the Saratoga Springs City Hall, an ornate three-story brick Italianate building built in 1871 by Cummings and Burt of Troy.
SARATOGA SPRINGS —Two measures that could have potentially filled the fifth-seat vacancy on the City Council failed to garner majority approval on Oct. 1 at City Hall, resulting in a deadlocked council in disagreement about the best way to move forward.
The first measure, proposed by city Mayor John Safford, sought to appoint an ad hoc advisory committee charged with interviewing candidates and subsequently leading to the eventual council-appointment of an interim Commissioner of Public Works.
That appointed position would be seated on a temporary basis until a councilmember is elected by city voters to complete the term through 2025. The most recently amended resolution calls for four members to be on the ad hoc advisory committee, with each councilmember appointing one person to the committee.
The second measure, proposed by Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran, sought to set a date for the “special” election as Dec. 10, with that newly elected commissioner presumably being seated on the council Jan. 1, 2025.
The council opened its Oct. 1 meeting by recognizing Tom McTygue, who died last week at the age of 83. McTygue, a longtime city Commissioner of Public Works, served 16 terms and a total of 32 years in service to the city. His tenure spanned the early 1970s to 2008, when Anthony “Skip” Scirocco was elected to the DPW Commissioner’s seat – serving from 2008 until his passing in 2022.
“Think about the loss we’ve had over the past couple of years,” Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran said, at the start of this week’s council meeting. “The loss of Commissioner Scirocco, the loss of Commissioner McTygue. And we sit here today flummoxed as a City Council trying to replace Jason (Golub),” said Moran, referencing the city’s most recent DPW Commissioner who stepped down in mid-August.
“I would love all of us this evening to reflect both on Commissioner Scirocco and Commissioner McTygue’s contributions to this community, and I would like to see us do the right thing to advance both – the election, and the appointment process,” Moran said.
However, it was not to be.
Following a 57-minute discussion regarding both measures, the resolution seeking a Dec. 10 election date was tabled after seemingly lacking the necessary votes for approval. Additionally, a council vote to appoint an advisory committee to help put an interim commissioner in play failed to pass, resulted in a 2-2 deadlocked vote largely because there was no election date agreed upon which would signal the end-date of the interim commissioner’s appointment.
The process will presumably be revisited at the next regularly scheduled meeting of the City Council on Oct. 15, although budget workshops held weekly in October ensure councilmembers will come together at City Hall every Tuesday through this month.
Universal Preservation Hall is partnering with the Saratoga Book Festival to present “Warren Zanes Celebrates Springsteen’s Nebraska in Song & Stories,” On Saturday, Oct. 5.
SARATOGA SPRINGS – When it came that last Thursday of September in 1982, it was something of a surprise.
It came wrapped in a photograph captured out the front passenger window along an otherwise tenant-less road that scrutinized the bleak prairies, foreboding fenceposts and ominous clouds on the horizon. The image itself was bordered by a black frame and red block letters that read simply: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. NEBRASKA.
“It felt like a foreign object in my hand,” recalls writer, educator and musician Warren Zanes. “It affected me at the time – but the first was feeling alienated from it.”
On Saturday, Oct. 5, Zanes will celebrate Springsteen’s “Nebraska” with song and stories at Universal Preservation Hall. The event showcases his acclaimed book about the making of the album – as well as the multi-star PBS special and the movie-in-the-works the book has spawned. The Saratoga Springs show is an invitation that promises to immerse attendees in a fully American experience.
“Nebraska” was Springsteen’s sixth album but his first solo record, dropping after the E Street band releases “Born To Run, “Darkness on The Edge of Town,” and “The River,” and two years before what would become “Born In the U.S.A.”
Music critics used words like hopelessness, brooding, stark, doom and loss to verbally relate the album’s somber strums of a campfire guitar and storytelling accented by the lonely wail of a harmonica floating craggily across a sepia-toned terrain. Forty-two years later, aided by time and a patient willingness to listen, “Nebraska” is today often celebrated for the brilliance it is, and frankly always was. It just took a while for many of us to get there.
“’Born to Run’ – we were all over it. ‘Darkness on The Edge of Town,’ we’re all over it. We were in the coach crossing the prairie and then ‘Nebraska’ comes and the first feeling was: this isn’t what he was supposed to do. It didn’t make sense to my young mind,” Zanes recalls.
“I went running for ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’ but – even as a young fan you find that you’re committed to the artist. So, I went back to it. And I think it was the mood and the lack of redemption that started to speak to me. I also put it in with the punk rock that I liked. It seemed to be about refusing the easy way.”
Nebraska lists 10 songs in all. For listeners, moments wrapped in a sonic surprise came before you’d even have to get up and turn the record over.
Last song, side one, twenty-four minutes and forty-five seconds in comes tumbling the startling Bruce-howl that never failed to shake the bejesus out of you no matter how many times you’d heard it before and would practice preparing for it.
The Saratoga Springs show – which partners UPH with the Saratoga Book Festival – is an outgrowth of Zanes’ latest book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” which garnered merit as a 2023 NPR Best Book Of The Year.
The book gave birth to a recently filmed PBS special with Eric Church, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Noah Kahan, Lyle Lovett, and the Lumineers. “You know that was probably the biggest night of my career and they weren’t there because of Warren Zanes, they were there because of ‘Nebraska,’” says Zanes who wrote and directed the TV special.
It also spawned a movie adaptation of Zanes’ book to be distributed by 20th Century Studios and Disney that will be directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Hostiles, Black Mass) and casts Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) as Springsteen.
“Believe me when I say the unthinkable happens for this writer. You write these things and hope a few people read it,” Zanes says. “You don’t think someone’s going to take your book and turn it into a movie. And the best news is that Bruce is excited about it.”
I Can’t Say That, I Am Sorry, For The Things That, We Had Done
“If he hadn’t already established himself as Bruce Springsteen, if he hadn’t been the guy who had done ‘Born To Run,’ who had done ‘The River,’ no label would have accepted ‘Nebraska.’ But he was already Bruce Springsteen, so Columbia (Records) was not in a position to turn down a Bruce record,” Zanes says.
“Was this what they were looking for? Those who say it was what they were looking for – they are liars. It wasn’t just that he turned in a record that was imperfect, unfinished, muddy. He also said he was not going to tour behind it and he wasn’t doing any press. I make this point in the book: if you can make a list of all the things a label does not want to hear…he had them all. The way Bruce describes it, he wanted that record to go directly to the fans and they needed to make up their minds about, to understand what it was. He didn’t want anyone explaining it to them.”
Zanes’ hands have touched many things: guitarist for The Del Fuegos, biographer of Tom Petty, avid bicycle racer, solo musical artist, college professor, father, dog owner (a shelter dog from Mississippi named Toby), writer, decade-long Executive Director of Steven Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, and former VP of Education and Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
“I have this portfolio of somewhat diverse interests and how they went from being just interests to parts of a career is fairly haphazard,” he says. “I would describe myself as a late bloomer. My brother asked me to join a rock ‘n’ roll band (The Del Fuegos) when I was 17, so from 17 to 23 there really was nothing else to think about; radical monotony,” Zanes says with a laugh.
“Before rock ‘n’ roll, I went to boarding school. I was at the bottom of my class until Ward Just came along,” he fondly recalls of his teacher who had been a Vietnam War correspondent at the Washington Post and would become a prolific novelist.
“He came into the classroom smoking Camel non-filters and with the gift of taking young people seriously. He made you feel that maybe what you were writing mattered in some way. And that was crucial. There was a very significant moment when I was a teenager, probably taking myself too seriously, and I wrote this passage about what made Elvis Presley important. I was a little embarrassed about it, but I had to turn the pages in for an assignment,” Zanes recalls. “I was alone with him in the classroom, and he’s smoking and says: This Elvis stuff… Really works. It was a moment for me. It was the first time where the stuff I loved outside of the classroom was suddenly welcomed into it. And that seed definitely stuck. There’s this cultural collision where music somehow is making it all make sense in that one moment…it all matters, and that’s what I got from him and that’s what would come back to me later on as I started to work as a professor,” Zanes says. “It was crucial that he gave me that little push.”
A bachelor’s degree, two master’s and a Ph. D. later, Zanes says he still conjures those positive feelings received from a receptive teacher to try and inspire his own classroom. “When I’m standing in front of my own students do I hope for that? Always. I think every teacher does.”
I’m Tired Of Coming Out On The Losing End, So Last Night I Met This Guy And I’m Gonna Do A Little Favor For Him
“I was a teenager when I met Bruce, a teenager when I met Tom Petty. Before I met them, I’d been listening to their records as a very committed fan and these guys mattered a lot to me,” says Zanes, who is 59, and in 2015 would see publication of his book ”Petty: The Biography.”
“Before I became his biographer, he could have picked whoever he wanted. I think what he liked when he picked me was the diversity of my background, that I could come at the subject as a musician, as a writer, as a historian,” Zanes says. “Make no mistake, Tom Petty sometimes had a man-of-few-words quality, but he was a deep thinker and very sophisticated. I remember standing in his driveway when he asked me, and I was like: by all means. And he immediately set up the parameters: ‘This will not be authorized, I think any biography that says authorized is bull… It’s your book, your contract.’ He just laid it all out. He didn’t want to get in the way of a truth about him as an artist that he might not find palatable.”
Down In The Part Of Town Where When You Hit A Red Light You Don’t Stop
“When I went to work on the Bruce stuff, talking with Jon Landau (Springsteen’s long-time co-producer and manager), I said, ‘Here’s how Petty laid it out.’ And Jon just looked at me and said: yeah, that works for me.
“On ‘Nebraska,’ Springsteen was thinking in a cross-cultural way, as I talk about in the book,” says Zanes, whose book on the topic “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” was published in 2023. “He’s looking at movies. He’s reading short stories. He’s looking at photographs and he’s thinking in a way as a writer that is rarer than I think is acknowledged.”
The event at Universal Preservation Hall will incorporate words and music.
“When it comes to a book about ‘Nebraska,’ the songs are so important that I started putting together book events that included me – not just reading from the book, but talking about the making of the book and going beyond, leading to particular songs and having the music punctuate everything. And that’s the way I’ll do it in Saratoga,” Zanes says.
“If I’m talking about ‘Mansion on the Hill,’ it leads into someone playing that song. Although I have a partial life as a musician, I didn’t want to play. I want to have other people playing songs. It’s a moveable, shapeable thing and that’s what I’m bringing to Saratoga,” Zanes says. Musicians scheduled to appear include Chris Hartford, Kate Fenner, Scott Moore and locally based Thom Powers.
“Ideally the audience goes away with a feeling of being immersed in the topic of one of popular music’s strangest and most beautiful records.”
For more information about the Saratoga Book Festival, which runs Oct. 4-7, as well as specific ticket information regarding Warren Zanes’ celebration of Springsteen’s “Nebraska” at UPH, go to: https://saratogabookfestival.org/ or HERE.
Champlain Hudson Power Express Project, terrestrial project route depicting N.Y. municipalities. Photo: Champlain Hudson Power Express.
SARATOGA COUNTY The noises you hear emanating from wooded areas across Saratoga County are the building sounds of one of the largest investments in New York state history.
They call it: Chippy.
The $6 billion Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line project ultimately sets two five-inch-diameter cables underwater or underground on a 339-mile run from the U.S.-Canadian border to New York City.
When completed in 2026, those cables are anticipated to speed 1,250 megawatts of electricity to a new state-of-the-art facility in Queens that will convert clean energy from direct current to alternating current power – delivering reliable clean energy from Hydro-Québec in Canada that will be fed directly into New York City’s power grid, powering more than 1 million homes.
Construction on CHPE kicked off November 2022 in Whitehall, and will continue into 2026, with work activities taking place in Washington, Saratoga, Schenectady, Albany, Greene, Rockland, and Queens counties. The work includes clearing trees and growth in preparation for project installation, digging trenches, installing conduit to house cables, and performing horizontal directional drilling.
A meeting between CHPE and local officials took place this week and “was very positive and included a detailed construction discussion related to the City of Saratoga,” according to a spokesperson at CHPE on Sept. 26.
“Construction continues at a steady pace throughout Saratoga County. Work includes site preparation (clearing trees and brush and creating access roads) Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) that is used to go under environmentally sensitive or congested areas, digging the trench where the conduit and cable will be placed, along with cable pulling and splicing. Work will continue through the end of next year.”
Trenching is scheduled to begin this week in Saratoga Springs, according to the company.
Once completed, the project is expected to reduce harmful emissions by 3.7 million metric tons – the equivalent of removing approximately 44 percent of the cars from New York City streets. Additionally, it is anticipated to provide $3.5 billion in economic benefits to New Yorkers and create approximately 1,400 family-sustaining jobs during construction, with a commitment to use a significant amount of union labor.
Local economies across the state will stand to benefit. Some Washington County municipalities and school districts will receive a combined $181 million in tax revenue over the next 30 years from the project, The Post-Star reported in 2021.
Plans for an Alternative Clean Power Transmission Project were announced in 2010, with the first public presentations held in Albany that spring. Five years later, Transmission Developers Inc. (TDI) announced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued a Department of the Army permit to allow the Champlain Hudson Power Express project to be placed in waters of the United States along the proposed route.
Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) project, was developed by Transmission Developers, Inc. (backed by Blackstone) and Hydro-Québec – the latter being the largest renewable energy producer in North America.
The first 24 miles of submarine cable destined for installation in Lake Champlain arrived from Sweden at the Port of Albany in October 2023. By August 2024 cables were floated across the US-Canadian border and the installation of the marine cables in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River began.
The “terrestrial route” – which may be viewed via an interactive map on CHPE’s website, enters Saratoga County shortly after crossing West River Road via Fort Edward, then traces a southwesterly path through the hamlet of Gansevoort, and proceeds across Ballard Road through Wilton Wildlife Preserve and the Northway near Gavin Park. The line continues just southwest of the Skidmore College campus and Saratoga Hospital, past Church Street and Washington Street in Saratoga Springs and moves to a parallel run alongside Route 50/ Ballston Avenue just south of SPAC.
The work then continues through the southern portion of Saratoga County before crossing into Schenectady and points beyond. Of the 339 miles, 60% will be in waterways and 40% buried underground.
“The transformation of a fossil fuel site into a zero-emission facility highlights the world of possibilities we have to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, mitigate the impact of climate change and accelerate our collective progress of shifting our power grid to go green,” Gov. Hochul said, standing in the shadow of Astoria’s Hell Gate Bridge last September to announce the start of construction on the converter station in Queens.
The 339-mile route from the north U.S. border to Queens was designed to minimize its impact on the environment, according to CHPE. Burying the line keeps it out of sight as well as providing protection from extreme weather. The underground cable installation work is ongoing in various stages in all 15 of the project’s construction segments.
Once it enters service in the spring of 2026, CHPE will be the largest transmission line in the U.S. built entirely underwater and underground, E&E News by Politico reported in 2023.
Overall, as part of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), New York state has committed to reducing GHG emissions by 40 percent by 2030, and 85 percent by 2050. At the same time, the state has committed to increasing the use of renewable energy to 70 percent of the market share by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040.
According to CHPE, it will deliver more than 15 percent of remaining generation needed to meet New York state’s 2030 renewable energy targets, and result in carbon emissions reduction equivalent to removing approximately 44 percent of the cars from New York City streets.
Tom McTygue commemorated for his leadership during the unveiling of a plaque in Congress Park on June 29, 2022 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the carousel in Congress Park. File photo.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Longtime Saratoga resident and City Council member Thomas McTygue has died.
“Our beloved Dad and Papa passed away peacefully last evening surrounded by family. Although our hearts are broken, we know how blessed we have been for so many years with such a wonderful man,” daughter Sharon McTygue announced in a social media posting on Sept. 25.
“He had immense love for our mom, my sisters and I and his five grandsons. He was never shy in acknowledging how fortunate he was to have celebrated close to 61 years of marriage with our mom, and how she was the reason our family was so close. The only thing bigger than my dad’s laughter and smile was his heart,” she wrote. “He has left an indelible mark on the lives of countless people and in our beautiful community.”
In June 2022 a ceremony was staged in Congress Park that celebrated McTygue’s leadership role in saving the carousel, as well as his longtime service as city Commissioner of the Department of Public Works.
“When I first took over, this place was loaded with drugs, people sleeping under the trees, it was all overgrown. We decided we were going to get involved and clean this place up. And that’s what we did,” McTygue said during the public ceremony.
McTygue sat on the City Council for 32 years, serving with eight mayors during his tenure that spanned the early 1970s to 2008.
Planning is underway for a mass service and a celebration of life ceremony to take place early next week, Sharon McTygue said.
SARATOGA SPRINGS —The four sitting members of the City Council took steps toward filling a vacancy for its fifth member during its meeting on Sept. 17 at City Hall.
The vacancy occurred following the resignation of DPW Commissioner Jason Golub in mid-August. Filling the empty seat with an active member is vital. That person serves both – as the operational head of the Public Works Department, as well as a fifth and potentially tie-break voting member in the legislative body of city government.
Seeking to follow the precedence set by the city when recently filling a similar vacancy, the council has expressed its desire to in turn: appoint an interim fifth member to temporarily occupy the seat, and secondly hold a city-wide election to charge voters with selecting a replacement through the Dec. 31, 2025 conclusion of the term.
If possible, the city would like to avoid a scenario where the seat would be filled for a couple of months by an appointee, then go vacant again until a “special” election can be held.
Barring any future vacancies, normal processes should return in November 2025 when all five member seats are up for election and new two-year terms beginning Jan. 1, 2026.
On Sept. 17, a pair of resolutions – one brought to the table by the city Mayor and the other by the Commissioner of Accounts – were presented to the City Council to address the seat vacancy of the Commissioner of Public Works.
Mayor John Safford’s resolution seeks to appoint a person to temporarily fill the vacancy through the end of this calendar year and recommends forming a five-member advisory committee to interview potential candidates for that temporary appointment.
According to the resolution, each of the four sitting councilmembers (mayor included) would appoint one member to the ad hoc committee, with the mayor designating a fifth person as committee chair. At the end of the interview process, the committee would then make its recommendations to the council.
Following a robust discussion this week, that measure was tabled to provide ample time for council members to review it with legal counsel. Presumably, the discussion and potential vote on the resolution will be revisited during the next public council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran’s resolution requests an election be held “as soon as is practical.” The proposal initially expressed a desire for an election to take place during this calendar year – with the newly elected official seemingly replacing a temporarily appointed one and taking office early in 2025. Due to time constraints however, the resolution language was changed from a 2025 deadline date to “as soon as is practical.”
Moran’s resolution was unanimously approved by the council, pending approval from legal counsel. What that means is the city will actively seek a “special” date for an election from the Saratoga County Board of Elections to fill the seat from that date through Dec. 31, 2025.
The council also discussed how it may seek to avoid a once-again vacant seat after a temporary appointment is made, and prior to a “special” election being held. While city rules would seem to indicate that an appointee may only serve in the calendar year of vacancy (in this case: 2024),state Public Officers Law specifically presents a hold-over provision
Saratoga Springs addresses vacancies in an elective office following an incumbent’s resignation in its City Charter (section: 2.4), stating: “the Council shall appoint a person to fill such vacancy until the end of the official year in which said vacancy occurs.” It continues: “If the term of office of the officer vacating the office continues beyond the official year in which said vacancy occurs, a person shall be elected at a special election held after the occurrence of such vacancy to fill such vacancy for the remainder of the unexpired term.”
New York State Public Officers Law 5: “Holding over after expiration of term: Every officer except a judicial officer, a notary public, a commissioner of deeds and an officer whose term is fixed by the constitution, having duly entered on the duties of his office, shall, unless the office shall terminate or be abolished, hold over and continue to discharge the duties of his office, after the expiration of the term for which he shall have been chosen, until his successor shall be chosen and qualified; but after the expiration of such term, the office shall be deemed vacant for the purpose of choosing his successor. An officer so holding over for one or more entire terms, shall, for the purpose of choosing his successor, be regarded as having been newly chosen for such terms. An appointment for a term shortened by reason of a predecessor holding over, shall be for the residue of the term only.”
Champlain Canal Region Gateway Visitors Center in Schuylerville on Sept. 17, 2024. Photo by Thomas Dimopoulos.
BALLSTON SPA— With an eye on establishing a centrally located and easily accessible tourism destination in advance of a major regional upcoming anniversary, the Saratoga County Board of Supervisors on Sept. 17 unanimously approved a cooperative agreement to lease the Champlain Canal Region Gateway Visitors Center in Schuylerville to serve as a gateway for Saratoga’s 250th Anniversary Campaign.
Referred to historians as the “turning point of the American Revolution,” the campaign marks the 250th anniversary of the 1777 battles at Saratoga, and the subsequent sword surrender (in the village of Victory) and British Troop surrender (in the village of Schuylerville).
The grounds where those latter two events took place are each located within walking distance of the Visitors Center – which is owned by the Historic Hudson – Hoosic Rivers Partnership, a regional economic development organization.
The County has been a longtime supporter of the construction and use of the Visitors Center, including a currently outstanding disbursement of $250,000, according to the resolution.
The property, located at 30 Ferry St. in Schuylerville, consists of approximately 2 acres on the north side of NYS Route 29 East, bordered on the West by Fort Hardy Park. The plot once housed the Town Hall of the Town of Saratoga. That existing structure was demolished.
The County and the Partnership have agreed to fulfill the reimbursement of the $250,000 outstanding disbursement through a cooperative agreement to lease the Visitors Center at a cost of $2,000 per month for five years with an option to renew at a cost of $2,166 per month for an additional five years.
BALLSTON SPA — The Saratoga County Board of Supervisors during its Sept. 17 meeting authorized an agreement with Clear Ballot Group, Inc. and amending the 2024 county budget for the purchase of new voting machines.
Deemed as needing to replace the fleet of voting machines currently in use by the Commissioners of the County Board of Elections, the county approved the purchase of 241 voting machines, ancillary equipment, and corresponding software and support services, for a term of six years at a total cost of just over $1.76 million.
The six-year agreement was approved to commence Sept. 18, 2024.
25 New. St. Subdivision drawing submitted to Saratoga Springs Planning Board.
SARATOGA SPRINGS —A new project submitted to the Saratoga Springs Planning Board seeks to subdivide and redevelop an existing 6.5-acre parcel that currently sites an existing commercial building and parking lot, and would include 18 duplex lots resulting in 36 total units.
The parcel is roughly located opposite Espey Manufacturing and behind the Route 50/ Ballston Ave. strip mall near New Street.
The applicant is listed as McNeary Group LLC, of Cady Hill Boulevard in Saratoga Springs.
For more information about development projects under consideration and/or review, as well as the public meetings regarding them, go to the city’s website at: www.saratoga-springs.org, and find links for the city’s three Land Use Boards: Planning Board, Design Review Board, and Zoning Board of Appeals.
