BY ADAM ATKINSON
North Country This Week

POTSDAM -- For the time being, some of the work on the Village of Potsdam's DRI plan has been stalled by the coronavirus lockdown mandated by the state.

"The public process that's really central to the DRI process has been on hold," said Frederick J. Hanss, director of the village's planning and development office, in a phone interview with North Country This Week earlier this month. "While some back office work continues, the public process has been suspended."

The Local Planning Committee was last able to convene on March 17 via teleconference, but no new meetings have been scheduled in light of the pandemic shutdown.

No additional public workshops have been scheduled either.

Hanss said it is difficult to get the public engaged in the process in light of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions put in place across the state which require social distancing and meetings conducted across cloud conferencing platforms like Zoom.

He said the public portion of the grant process has been put on hold statewide in the other communities who have received DRI funding.

Hanss said M.J. Engineering and Land Surveying P.C., the firm contracting with the village to facilitate the process, is still working on putting together profiles for the various DRI projects that the village has prioritized.

However, the public LPC meetings are part of the process to develop the village's DRI Strategic Investment Plan required by the state to move the DRI process forward. The draft of that plan, with completed project profiles, was originally slated to be complete by the end of March, with a state deadline set for a final version to be ready sometime in late April or early May.

That deadline will now be pushed forward due to the pandemic. Hanss said the village does not expect any blowback from the state for moving the SIP deadline further out in light of the situation and the governor's PAUSE order.

"Everything is in a holding pattern at the moment," Hanss said.

The village was selected late last year to be one of ten municipalities statewide to receive $10 million in state DRI money to be used to revitalize downtowns by funding projects like streetscape improvements, business and economic development initiatives and infrastructure rebuilding. With the grant comes state requirements for public engagement in the project planning process and other benchmarks and deadlines to be met.

So far the DRI committee has identified a number of projects that are in a “ready to advance” state including a whitewater park, Potsdam Co-Op expansion, Fall Island Skate Park, renovations at the Perk Building and Snell Theater, and a Downtown Riverwalk Trail. See more of the project proposals on the village’s DRI website at https://potsdamdri.com/.

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