BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

CANTON -- The St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators voted to release about $60,000 that the Fort la Presentation Association will use as a matching contribution on a project to mitigate future flooding at their site in Ogdensburg.

The board took the action during their Monday, Oct. 5 meeting streamed live online via YouTube.

The money will go toward a $1.2 million project, mostly grant-funded, that would stabilize the shoreline and raise the elevation of their walking trail. A 2019 flood submerged a good portion of the property that summer.

“For a time, the flooding cut off areas to the trail … and flooded the access road to the lighthouse,” Association President Barbara O’Keefe told the legislature’s Finance Committee a week prior. “If any development is going to happen on that site, we need to take care of this issue. It’s a no-brainer.”

Legislator Jim Reagen, R-Ogdensburg, said during the committee meeting that the association “just needs this money in order to preserve the trail system that they had just finished building when this high water issue came up. It will allow them to move forward on the first phase of the project.”

“To leverage $1 or $2 million with [$60,000] we had set aside… I’m all in favor of letting that money go. We’ve had it all these years,” Legislator Dave Forsythe, R-Lisbon, said at the Finance Committee.

County Administrator Ruth Doyle said the money the board voted to release goes back to the 2000s. She said the board was setting aside money annually, up to 2008.

“The idea being when they were prepared to move forward with the capital project, they would come back and that would be available to them,” Doyle said during the Finance Committee meeting.