Parking plan alarms board
SARATOGA SPRINGS — One of the two major downtown hotel proposals the city’s Planning Board heard Wednesday — the Rip Van Dam Hotel — was met with frustration by some board members.
The proposal is for a 180- room hotel and ballroom on the rear of the Rip Van Dam Hotel on Broadway, but some board members said the developers gave too much consideration to its design and architecture and not enough to traffic and parking.
“I had some significant concerns with this project and with that presentation I have more, not less,” Chairman Clifford Van Wagner told the developer’s representative, Anthony Stellato, after his presentation.
Developers proposed a six-story addition onto the rear of the historic Rip Van Dam Hotel that would rise above the current Broadway structure, which was originally built as a hotel. Currently, the building houses Starbucks, The Candy Co. and Jill’s Wandering Cowboys on the ground floor, Maestro’s
Restaurant on the next floor and office space on upper floors. The hotel proposal would encompass the space now devoted to offices.
Starbucks would remain, but the building housing The Candy Co. would be torn down to accommodate the proposed hotel, which would also be located in the Rip Van Dam Hotel’s current parking lot on Washington Street. A covered drop- off area to the lobby would be located on Washington Street.
Stellato outlined plans to locate parking off-site with a valet service for both the hotel and Maestro’s Restaurant but he did not have a definite parking lot chosen for that purpose.
He also showed a picture of a tractor-trailer trying to turn onto Washington Street from Broadway, a well- known difficulty at that intersection. Trucks often drive over the sidewalk and need to go into the oncoming lane in order to complete the turn.
“It seems like you put the cart before the horse here,” Van Wagner said. In past meetings, he has been supportive of the architecture of the project, but that was not his focus Wednesday. “You have a lot of money spent on engineers and you don’t have any place to put the cars.”
He called the valet plan “impractical” and also was concerned about the hotel’s potential impact on traffic for the already congested Washington Street. Those were concerns echoed by Public Safety Traffic Control Officer Mark Benacquista in his analysis of the project.
Stellato said the developers did not anticipate a major traffic impact, but the board disagreed. Planning Board members agreed that in order to move forward with the proposal, the applicant will need to pay for the board to hire a traffic consultant to do the analysis.
“We need someone who is working for us to assess this,” Van Wagner said. “That is a minimum.”
“The upside is you are proposing a wonderful improvement,” board member Tom Lewis said. “Most of the difficulty is not your fault, it is the existing situation.”
Stellato said he and the developers would work on more detailed plans for their parking and would coordinate with the Planning Department on the logistics of hiring a traffic engineer.