Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Ben Westcott, Chronicle Staff Writer
Ed Moore, Tyler Herrick, Gina Mintzer, Robert Nemer, Christie Alexander and Rosemary Royce were businesspeople who addressed Mayor Bill Collins and the Common Council at its Tuesday night meeting at “The Ed” on South Street.
“I have a great office, and I get to look over City Park every single day,” said Mr. Herrick, general manager of the Queensbury Hotel. “And what’s happening over the past two years is just very sad, and it’s tragic. What I see every single day out my windows in the park is getting worse and worse.
“Our guests are saying to us on Expedia reviews that it was a great, beautiful hotel, but I did not feel safe walking down Ridge Street. That is a sign that we need to act and do something.”
“I’m all for programs and trying to help people that want to be helped,” Mr. Herrick said. “But I think there’s a lot of people that are City Park dayspenders that unfortunately don’t want to be helped.
“There are basic rules and laws that we already have in place. And I’ve had conversations with the police department, and to be honest, they point upstairs. That’s the response I get from our city police — that the Common Council has to do something to enable them to be able to clean up what we have.
“There are basic things, like you cannot smoke cannabis in a public park. And I can tell you right now, it happens regularly, every single day.”
Gina Mintzer, executive director of the Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce, said people coming in next week on a “quasi site tour” for a “major conference” said, “We might have to have our meal at the hotel, and not go out, because we don’t feel safe.”
Queensbury Hotel owner Ed Moore said, “We watched this place come up, and the concern for me is where do we go from here? Are we going to go back down? We’re concerned we’re going south.
“When citizens can’t go into the library with comfort…they can’t take their grandchildren to the library. Where are we going here? We need to fix it. We all know what an amazing place this is, but we’re asking for help. We have to do something. And the only place this can get done is right here.”
Mayor Collins said the city is working on assigning additional police officers to City Park, looking at language for a public intoxication law, and adding a new position at City Hall dedicated to providing service coordination for people that need help in the park and the city at large.
The mayor said, “It doesn’t seem like enough. I just wanted you to know that these conversations were ongoing. As we address problems, new ones crop up. I wish I had some simple answer at my disposal, and I do not. This is not a simple problem. Homelessness in our country rose 18% in the year 2024. And I saw a statistic today that showed that as property values in a community increase, the rate of homelessness can increase almost as much as 8% per $100 increase of the average rent of that community. And our community’s rents are going up, so we may be seeing even more of these trends.”
Copyright © 2025 Lone Oak Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved
