Longevity on the lake
Blais’ experience as employee, mayor in famed Adirondack resort village started several decades ago
It was the summer of 1956 when Bob Blais showed up in this Adirondack tourist village, getting a job on the spot as a seasonal police officer, along with a hat, badge and for the first time in his life, a gun.
“I just prayed that I would not have to use it,” said Blais, 82, the longest tenured mayor in New York, and the third-longest in the country. First elected in 1971, he is running unopposed Tuesday for a 13th term as the top official in the village that draws millions of tourists a year.
He’s seen a lot and done a lot since he first arrived as a 20-yearold college student, looking for work after losing a seasonal job at a bottling plant in his hometown of Saratoga Springs due to an extended illness.
“My mother told me that they were always hiring up in Lake George, so I drove up,” he recalled. The Boston University sophomore walked into the village hall, where
the police chief saw the strapping young athlete and hired him to patrol the downtown the next day, complete with a revolver on his hip.
And how was he trained? “The chief told to walk up the main street and into every business, to introduce myself,” said Blais. Ironically, as mayor he was to dissolve that very police department three decades later in 1988, after a couple of seasonal cops overreacted and fired shots at drunken revelers. That incident helped provide the impetus to finalize a deal, already in the works, for the Warren County sheriff to take over policing the village.
As a younger man, Blais worked in the village as a bouncer at some nightspots during the wilder days of the 18-year-old drinking age, managed and then owned a bowling alley/restaurant, developed an amusement arcade, served as assistant chief in the volunteer fire department and worked as a Saratoga County deputy sheriff. He has seen some of the famous old establishments either torn down or burned down. He’s even suffered the embarrassment of wrecking his boat on a submerged shoal and having to be rescued.
Blais remembers how Canada Street, the main downtown thoroughfare, lined with shops and restaurants, used to be nearly all owner-occupied businesses. Owners either lived upstairs or nearby. “Now the vast majority are absentee owners,” he said.
An infamous incident on the night of July 4, 1970, when Blais was a newcomer on the Village Board, inspired him to run for mayor. That night, the mayor at the time decided to put volunteer firefighters on standby as partiers began filling downtown. Late that night, the mayor ordered the firefighters to hose down a rowdy crowd that had gathered in front of the post office.
Due to the presence of an Albany Times Union reporter, who was relaxing at a nearby tavern and who emerged to find his convertible car had been inadvertently filled with water, the melee hit the national news wires as a “riot,” Blais recalled.
“So I decided it was time for me to run for the job. And I won,” he said. Voters have re-elected him ever since. Blais sees his job today as balancing the needs of the village’s nearly 1,000 permanent residents with the demands of a tourist economy.
“People can see me here every day, they can see me buying groceries,” he said. “This is the closest layer of government to people, so you have to be responsive.”
But the village also has to ensure that outside visitors are catered to, he said. “I know some people might say it is honkytonk, but Lake George is like an amusement park. You can’t stay still, you have to keep adding new rides, new things to keep people excited and coming back.”
“I think at this point, Bob is unbeatable,” said Vinnie Crocitto, a longtime friend who owns the Holiday Inn and is a member of the Lake George Town Board. Blais ran unopposed in 1983, 1987, 1991, 1999, 2007, 2011 and 2015.
Blais can be found some evenings at the Holiday Inn lounge “holding court” and swapping stories, Crocitto said. “I have guests here who have met the mayor over the years, and ask for him. It is like ‘Cheers.’”
The mayor’s affability, passion for the village and the lake draw people to him, Crocitto said. “This place is lucky to have him.”
Over the years, Blais has spearheaded an expanding array of tourism events, including the Americade motorcycle rally, an Elvis festival, a muscle car show, a fishing derby, downtown concerts and summertime fireworks over the lake.
He pushed for a lakefront walkway, public docks, a downtown trolley system, and more recently, a six-story hotel, the tallest building along Canada Street.
And Blais has more mundane, yet critical things to keep track of, like making sure the village’s infrastructure can handle the needs of up to 50,000 visitors on a busy summer day. “Our toilet paper bill for the public restrooms is $25,000 a year,” he said.
Replacing the village’s 85-year-old sewer plant is atop the mayor’s list. Blais is trying to hustle up additional state aid to defray the anticipated $22 million cost. The old plant needs to be replaced because it is releasing elevated levels of nitrogen into the lake, which can fuel algae blooms that threaten the lake’s legendary clear waters.
The sewer issue has been a flashpoint in the village since 2014. That’s when it was discovered that the former official in charge of the plant had been forging pollution reports as far back as 2007 to make it appear that water standards were being met.
Blais said he and other village officials were caught flat-footed by that revelation, and have been struggling with how best to build and finance a plant that is sufficient to handle the busiest days of the summer tourism season.
“The lake is everything. It is the engine, and we have to protect it,” Blais said. To help do that, he headed the Save Lake George Partnership, a coalition of environmental groups and municipal agencies that created a boat inspection program in 2013 to keep invasive species from being brought into the lake.
“Bob is a force of nature and for nature,” said Eric Siy, executive director of the Fund for Lake George, a lake advocacy group that helped support the boat inspection program. “He has the ability to engage diverse people with that passion that he has and that this special place evokes.”
Siy said the boat inspection program, which he said is the strictest east of the Mississippi River, is “a crowning achievement” of Blais’ long tenure.
Now Blais is thinking that he might not finish this term, should the sewer plant issue get resolved soon enough. Construction of the new plant will start this summer. Blais has been busy trying to boost state support to save the village from having to raise sewer rates and taxes too much to cover the debt.
It is good that Blais is not aiming to become the longesttenured mayor in the U.S. That honor goes to the mayor of Booneville, Ky., who is still serving after 60 years in office.
Once Blais steps down, what will he do?
“I think I would like to get involved in more event planning for the village,” he said, citing the pavilion at the new Charles R. Wood Park on the site of the former Gaslight Village amusement park.
The park is another legacy of the mayor’s. It is next to West Brook, an important stream that drains from a nearby mountain pond into the lake.
A section of the former Gaslight Village amusement park was rebuilt into a nature area meant to slow down the creek, absorb any nutrients that might be in the water, and reduce the amount of sand washing through the creek and into what had been a growing delta near the docks of the Lake George Steamboat company and its three tourist dayboats.
Blais stood at the edge of the lake, looking approvingly at the mouth of West Brook and pointing to the sandy stretch. “Before the project, the delta had been growing, and was starting to make it difficult for the boats to dock. Now, the delta has stopped growing and things are just fine.”