Author: Thomas Dimopoulos

BALLSTON SPA — A decade ago, Gateway House of Peace opened the doors of its two-bed resident home with a dedication to provide a safe, comfortable, caring residence for terminally ill patients in need of a home during their final days. 

For residents, it is a peaceful, healing place where people and their families are provided compassionate and dignified care that supports the natural processes that occur in the final days of life. For those who work at the home, spending time with a person in the final days of their natural lives inspires life lessons of their own to carry onward. 

“It’s not something to be afraid of,” said Kathleen Graham, a volunteer member of the care staff. After becoming caregiver to her husband, who passed away six years ago, Graham says, “I felt like I was called to do this kind of work. And I’ve learned just to love people. Just to be there for them. To help them understand what is going on and to let them know I’m there to help them and love them and be with them.”

To Teresa Kessler, a licensed practical nurse of 20 years, it is a place where healing takes on an expanded definition. 

“For those with experience in working to help heal people, it is a different kind of healing involved,” Kessler says. “When you’re a nurse, the idea of healing means recovery. To get people better. Success is when someone is well, and they go home. With hospice that definition is kind of turned on its head. We aren’t looking any longer at the body recovering, but the healing still happens, and it happens for family members,” she says. 

“This idea of tending to the person – it’s not about the machines, it’s not about the paperwork or rules-and-regulations per se, it’s more about: What does this person need as far as care, and how do we best give that to this person in this particular time in their life?”  

Gateway House of Peace was founded by Joni Hanchett who incorporated the community support home for end-of-life care following her life’s desire to serve those in need, and after dedicating many years of volunteer work in hospice care. The Ballston Spa home was remodeled to offer ample space for families and friends to gather, a fully equipped kitchen for home cooked meals, and bedrooms designed with both privacy and accessibility in mind.

“I think my own formation happened in grade school and high school – I went to Catholic schools that influenced me to seek performing service in the community; to have a vocation not just a job,” Kessler says.  “Those of us who work in hospice have come to an understanding that’s a little outside the mainstream. For myself, I tend towards a Buddhist philosophy – the idea of the acceptance of suffering, and understanding what that is. It very much normalizes the process of what death is. And in the journey to that, being available for people to have a safe place to talk about some of these things that are very difficult should they want to. We get to know them. We get to know their family. It’s a privilege.” 

Gateway House of Peace does not receive any funding from the government or insurance reimbursements, relying solely on the grace of the community through donations, memorials, fundraising, grant writing, bequests and gifts. The organization’s 2024 Butterfly Ball held earlier this year raised more than $70,000 to support the mission of the home.  The organization also stresses that volunteers are the heart of the home, and that anyone interested in seeking volunteer opportunities or other information may do so via their website at: https://www.gatewayhouseofpeace.org/.

“I have a really strong feeling to be able to help people,” Graham said, “to help them pass peacefully and to be there for the families also.”  

“My intention is to provide an environment for someone to be their true self and have an accepting place of whatever it is they need and whatever it is they’re going through,” Kessler says, adding a quote by the late spiritual teacher, psychologist and writer Ram Dass. 

 “One of my favorite quotes by him is: ‘We are all just walking each other home.’ And I think that sums it up quite beautifully,” Kessler explains. “We’re walking with this person, and we’re just walking them home.” 

SARATOGA SPRINGS —The City of Saratoga Springs will host a 9/11 Commemoration and Remembrance Ceremony at High Rock Park on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at the Tempered by Memory Sculpture. Attendees are asked to arrive at 8:15 a.m., with the ceremony slated to promptly begin at 8:30. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people and injured more than 6,000 others in what the U.S. Department of State refers to as “the worst attack against the homeland in our nation’s history.”

The ceremony in Saratoga Springs will take place at High Rock Park, which since 2012 has been host site to a 25-foot-tall sculpture created from 9/11 steel.  

The sculpture was commissioned by Saratoga Arts and created by artists Noah Savett and John Van Alstine from five twisted pieces of Trade Center steel. Four pieces came from the North Tower, one came from the South Tower. 

The High Rock site was selected after a lengthy public and political discourse regarding the location placement of the “Tempered By Memory” sculpture.   

Initially slated to stand in front of the Saratoga Springs City Center and to be unveiled on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, that location was nixed shortly before the ceremony was to take place when some officials said it would interfere with the view from out front of the center. 

Instead, the sculpture remained in a parking lot in Northumberland at artist Noah Savett’s metal company yard, awaiting a permanent home. It was there that a ceremony was held to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks in 2011.  

“We took the broken pieces of that day, we raised them up, we let them soar – we gave them a place to rest,” Yaddo poet Joan Murray read during the 10th anniversary ceremony attended by more than 100 steelworkers and celebrating the healing power of art to transcend grief and sorrow.

Then-city Mayor Scott Johnson appointed a committee that same month and charged it with recommending a location for the sculpture. Sites next to the state military museum, the city firehouse and near the city school campus had been considered, as well as alongside the Saratoga Springs Heritage Area Visitor Center on Broadway and in Congress Park. 

High Rock Park was eventually selected which has since September 2012 served as the city’s annual remembrance ceremony location.   

SARATOGA SPRINGS — The “Pay To Park” signs have been removed and the standing meters soon to follow with the conclusion of the Spa City’s first seasonal paid parking program. 

The $2 per hour to park plan involved several city-owned garages and surface lots and offered city residents and downtown businesses free parking permits. Those residing outside Saratoga Springs were required to pay for parking in the garages and atop the lots.         

The pay stations were unanimously approved by the City Council in April, and installed and implemented into service in mid-June, with a post-Labor Day Weekend conclusion date. 

An initial plan – titled the “tourism parking” program – proposed converting more than 1,300 on-street and nearly 800 garage parking spaces into either “permit” or “paid” spots for a five-month run annually between May and September. That proposal was scaled back to involve city-owned garages and surface lots only, with all on-street parking remaining unchanged. 

When it approved the plan in April, the city reported it anticipated nearly $1.6 million as first-year estimated revenue, with about $450,000 in expenses.

In mid-July, roughly one month into operation, the city announced it had to that point generated approximately $82,000 in new revenue, and issued just over 11,250 “free” parking permits. Updated revenue amounts have yet to be announced.  

The city’s Public Works and Public Safety departments collaborated to get the plan up and running. Its initial year concluded, it is expected the program will be evaluated regarding its effectiveness and for any potential changes deemed need to be made prior to 2025.    

SARATOGA SPRINGS – The city of Saratoga Springs is exploring building a new police station to replace its current home in the basement of City Hall which has served as its headquarters for nearly 150 years.  

“The discussions are preliminary but it’s clear that eventually we need to plan for a new police station, and that’s what the Capital Budget (Plan) is for,” said city Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll. “We’re looking at two possible locations at this time –one is right behind City Hall where the city employees park, and the other would be the old Senior Center.” 

The city owns the land at both locations. 

The 7,800 square-foot former Senior Center site at 5 Williams St. is currently in use on a short-term lease by RISE Housing and Support Services as the human services agency’s administration offices, while their own offices are under construction.  

A plan eyeing 5 Williams St. would seek to demolish the building on site and construct a new three-story facility and relocating all police services and the communications center from City Hall to Williams Street.  The general cost estimate – which includes demolition, construction, and the furnishing of a new 30,000-plus square foot facility lists $14 million as a Base Budget Estimate, with contingencies and allowances at a total cost of $23 million to $25 million. 

The lot behind City Hall meanwhile has seen many designs that had previously proposed it as a location for a new public safety facility. At various times those plans have included a multi-parcel public-private collaboration to include a cinema, a 500-car parking garage, and other amenities. A City Center Parking garage and pocket park have since been developed along a good segment of the location, and a cinema sited a few blocks away. 

The Public Safety Department’s long-range proposal specifically details $21.8 million in a Capital Plan over a five-year period beginning in 2025 to fund a police department facility, according to documents submitted by the 2025 Capital Program Committee to address priority city needs from 2025-2030. 

Historically

On April 26 1887, the State Legislature approved an act that created the Saratoga Springs Police Department. The department employed 8 men to serve and protect a population of 11,500 in the days prior to fingerprinting systems, computer databases, radio communications and DNA technology, when  police technology largely consisted of the gun and the nightstick. The annual salary of the men started at $500, with higher-ranking officials earning as much as $1,300 per year.  

More than a century later, the department in 2024 staffs 98 men and women to serve and protect a city of about 30,000 residents year-round, with a visitors’ capacity that grows in multitudes when the temperature grows warmer and the sun hangs longer in the sky. In 2023 SSPD officers handled 27,643 calls for service, 3,606 cases, and made 851 arrests.  

The growth of the department has resulted in significant operational challenges inhibiting organizational efficiency and effectiveness in the current station location, according to officials. The lack of workspace forces the sharing of desks and the usage of single spaces for multiple public safety purposes not always conducive or in concert with one another. As well, it places SSPD’s Command Staff Offices in the century-old basement of City Hall in windowless rooms. 

Feasibility studies related to the development of a new public safety facility in the city date to the mid-1970s, and more than a half-dozen reports were conducted during the decades that have followed. In 2006, a committee was formed to help develop a new station and the City Council seated at the time explored multiple proposals for a new facility, but no majority approval could be secured for any of the plans. Subsequently no action was taken.   

Renovations and upgrades have been made to City Hall in the time since, but the restrictive space of the current police department is less than ideal, officials say.   

“It’s not a modern-functioning police station,” Commissioner Coll said. 

“I take insurance company recommendations to heart, and their recommendation was that we need to have a new facility. We can’t have prisoners walking up and down Broadway – you look at modern policing, they have a sally-port,” said Coll, referring to a secure area used to load and unload prisoners. “The police department is in the basement of City Hall (and) It’s really not conducive to modern policing.”

Every year, the city prepares a six-year Capital Budget plan that includes a prioritized list of capital projects the city wishes to get done and costs associated with those projects. Even as the plan stretches over a six-year period, the council votes on the Capital Budget one year at a time and may be altered year-to-year. 

Overall, the construction cost for the new police headquarters facility is estimated to range from $23 million to $25.5 million. About $1.5 million in sitework and demolition costs are anticipated to be required at the department’s existing space at City Hall.   

The preliminary long-range plan for a new police station looks to set aside funds in this proposed timeline: $1.5 million (in 2025), $5 million (in 2026 and again in 2027), $10 million (in 2028), and $300,000 in 2029. The City Council is expected to host a Public Hearing and hold a discussion and potentially vote on the 2025 Capital Budget and Capital Program at its meeting on Tuesday night Sept. 3.