REVITALIZING
DOWNTOWN
BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN TI
In January 2023 the Secretary of State visited a packed room in the Ticonderoga Community Building to deliver the great news. Ticonderoga would be receiving the State's coveted "Downtown Revitalization Initiative" grant (The DRI). It's a $10,000,000 grant to be used to revitalize a designated downtown area. In the next 10 months a local committee of town leaders, economic development organizations, business owners, and civic group leaders led the town through the creation of our DRI Strategic Investment Plan submitted to the state in November.
The process was amazing. We had to define a small walkable boundary within which we would work - along the Montcalm Street corridor from the monument to the covered bridge in the park. An open call for projects within the boundary produced 42 projects from the town, private businesses, and non-profits requesting over $34 million in funding. So began the process of prioritizing just $14 million in projects to put forth for our Strategic Plan.
Through several months of committee work, many rounds of community input, and great guidance from our state partners, we did it. The State will decide the final $9.7 million in projects they will fund. That final award is expected in the Spring of 2024. It will take several years to implement the projects, but evidence of downtown transformation can already be seen as new businesses and new private investments appear in anticipation of a new vibrancy that will be the future of downtown Ticonderoga.
Thank you to Mark Wright, Jim McKenna (North Country Regional Economic Development Council), and our Empire State Development partners for their leadership through this process, to all the committee members who dedicated a year and a half of their time to the application and committee process, and to all the community members who came out for meetings and input sessions to help guide the priorities and to all of you for allowing Ti-Alliance to be part of the process.
In January of 2020 Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance (Ti-Alliance) received a $20,000 grant from the State of New York’s Main Street Grant Program to conduct a feasibility study on three downtown Ticonderoga buildings. The study was undertaken in two parts. The first part, performed by Saratoga-based Camoin310, provided a thorough market study of our residential and tourist markets and recommended potential sustainable uses of the buildings. The second part of the study, provided by Perry, NY-based In.Site:Architecture, performed structural assessments, code analysis and order-of-magnitude budgets to help current owners create and advance strategies for redevelopment of their buildings.
The buildings that received the analyses included the Agway Building (74 Montcalm St.), the Sears Building (85 Montcalm St.), and the Rathbun Building (110 Montcalm St.). View the full report HERE.
The goal of Ti-Alliance is to assist these building owners in creating strategies for these great buildings. Through partnership with the owners and the Ti Area Chamber of Commerce we hope to find or build the right businesses that can add to the character and sustainability of downtown Ticonderoga.
The $20,000 from the state was matched with $5,000 from Ti-Alliance. There was no cost to the town or to the building owners for this excellent professional analysis.
PREVIOUS PLANNING PROJECTS
