POTSDAM — A request by the St. Lawrence Health System to decommission and purchase a section of Cottage Street will undergo more scrutiny after an assessment found the potential plan could have moderate to significant impact on traffic.
An initial short environmental assessment requested by the health system and completed by the village showed the request for the hospital to take ownership of a section of Cottage Street between Waverly and Leroy streets may have “moderate to large impacts on traffic within the community.” The village will now likely move to require SLHS to pay for the commission of an independent traffic engineer to study those potential impacts further.
“There are two things that we would be trying to get at,” Village Planning Director Frederick J. Hanss said. “Number one is does that section of Cottage Street continue to serve a public purpose? Can it be decommissioned and transferred to Canton-Potsdam Hospital? Then the other part of it is what would the traffic impact on the neighborhood be?
“We want to make sure that if the village decides to transfer that — that roadway and sidewalk — that it’s not going to have a negative impact on traffic circulation through the rest of the neighborhood,” he added.
Once the contractor is hired and the traffic study completed, the village Board of Trustees will have to review it and vote to offer a positive or negative declaration.
With a positive declaration, the transfer process would move forward, but would require several other hurdles including another vote by the board until it would go through. The board could also offer a negative declaration and request stipulations as part of the transfer for the hospital to implement other mitigations for any potential traffic obstructions that would arise. These would likely be recommended by the independent engineer as part of the traffic study.
The village first began considering the plan to possibly decommission and transfer the section of Cottage Street to the hospital over the summer.
The village Board of Trustees held a public hearing about the project in September where several local residents expressed significant concerns about the lack of transparency of what the hospital’s broader plans were in the neighborhood.
“The problem with the master plan is every year it changes,” the hospital’s architect Brooks Washburn said at the hearing in September. “The current one is to grow here with the lands that the hospital owns south of Cottage Street and of course the lands that it has owned and has acquired north of Cottage Street. There is a kind of manifest destiny here that is actually coming to the point tonight to acquire that strip of asphalt called Cottage Street here so that the hospital can logically grow.”
A hospital official at that hearing said the hospital, which is a nonprofit organization and does not pay property taxes, at that point owned 26 parcels in the village. This includes every property on both sides of the area of Cottage Street in question and all but one house on the east side of Waverly Street, butting up against the hospital’s campus.
Hospital officials were supposed to present an updated version of their master plan for the facility at the village meeting on Nov. 16, but backed out after the meeting moved to being conducted via Zoom.
That master plan review hasn’t since been rescheduled, but a copy of some PowerPoint slides with potential plans appeared on the village’s website earlier this month.
A price tag has not been attached to the proposal to transfer the street at this point.
SLHS cut at least 71 jobs earlier this year after taking hits in revenue during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
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