ORDA on Nearly $1B Investment in Olympic Venues: “We’ve Repainted the Picture”

About six years ago, the Adirondacks’ marquee tourism draw - the 1980 Winter Olympics facilities in Lake Placid - were at a crossroads.

"It was either continue with the status quo of deferred maintenance and continued deterioration and then end up with facilities, like Olympic facilities in other parts of the world, that are in complete disrepair," said Joe Martens, the board chairman of New York's Olympic Regional Development Authority, which runs those venues, "or invest in the facilities and bring them back to a state where we can attract national, international competition."

New York State, under the leadership of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, chose the latter, pumping $600 million into new state-of-the-art infrastructure, primarily for winter sports. ORDA also is expecting more than $100 million a year from Albany over the next five years.

An investigative article by NPR’s Brian Mann in Adirondack Life magazine asked tough questions about that taxpayer investment, about doubling down on winter sports at a time when climate change is warming the world, and about how ORDA will maintain its infrastructure when New York state's budget inevitably experiences a downturn.

Martens defends the decision. He points to a recent economic impact report that finds ORDA's venues generated more than $340 million in revenue and more than 3,000 jobs for the Adirondacks and Catskills regions and $25 million in state local tax revenue.

Martens, who is a former commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, told David Sommerstein that decision to invest in Lake Placid was and is a very good one.  Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

JOE MARTENS: We've repainted the picture here in Lake Placid and in the Catskills and we have a new slate to work with. And I think the opportunities going forward are exceptional.

DAVID SOMMERSTEIN: The Adirondack Life article talks about this risky bet, and uses the word 'risk'. It identified three places of risk. I mean, this is a lot of money. This is a lot that the North Country is getting [from Albany] that could be going to something else, in theory.

The first [risk] is climate change, that it's a big risk to invest in winter sports at a time when we're seeing wildfire smoke in the summers, and we're seeing big changes that endanger our ability to provide winter for these winter sports 40 years from now.

MARTENS: What we have by the way of facts is a recent study by the University of Waterloo in Canada that looked at what Olympic venues around the world could be reliably used by mid-century if climate change continues at the pace it's been going for the last couple of decades. And it concluded that there were four places in the world that would be reliable for use for Olympic Winter sports: Lake Placid, two sites in Norway, and one in Japan.

And I thought that was a great data point because that suggests that, at least through 2050, we could host a Winter Olympics here. And whether it's the Olympics or not, that means we can host all of the types of competitions that we are now hosting with regularity through 2050. And that suggests to me that the investment made by the state was not was a 30-year investment, not a one-year investment or a five-year investment.

SOMMERSTEIN: If the Adirondacks sustain two or three years in a row of almost non-existent winter, where people don't show up at Whiteface, you can't hold many events, how prepared is ORDA to handle and financially deal with that sort of 'no- show' if the snow just doesn't come, and it's a lot of slush and mush?

MARTENS: I'd say given current trends, we don't expect that to happen year to year. In fact, climate models suggest that while we will have less predictable weather, we will have more precipitation here in the North Country.

ORDA has also taken steps to basically winterize all of our facilities. We have refrigeration systems that are good to create ice at very warm temperatures. Our snowmaking capacity at higher temperatures is enhanced tremendously. So we've been road tested in that regard. We have held events here that other places could not host. Last year, there was a biathlon or a cross country event - a collegiate cross country event - that had to be moved from Vermont to [Lake Placid] because our snowmaking capacity at Mt. Van Hoevenberg was so good. We had plenty of snow to host the event.

Having said that, we also have to rely more on our year-round activities that are being used to generate revenue, which we've been investing in as well. We have zip lines, we have the roller ride at Mt. Van Hoevenberg. We have mountain biking at all three of our ski centers. So we continue to do that. We know we need to diversify and make our facilities usable year-round. And I think we've made great strides in that regard.

SOMMERSTEIN: What happens if the state experiences significant financial difficulties? If a lot of this money - $100 million a year - dries up? How does ORDA respond to that and be able to handle that?

MARTENS: So, the short answer is I think we will be able to handle it. Thanks to the significant investment we've had over the last five or six years, our facilities are in great shape. They always need work and repairs, and we have more maintenance projects to do. But we are constantly planning for eventualities. We know what projects are necessary for health and safety, and those obviously come first. We will prioritize whatever projects are in the pipeline after that and decide which ones can wait, which ones would help generate revenue. That'll help decide which ones go forward, and which ones have to stop. A lot of our payroll is seasonal staff, so we might have to cut back on seasonal staff.

So, we're prepared like every state agency. When I was at the Department of Environmental Conservation we suffered some very severe cutbacks. You triage.

SOMMERSTEIN: That leads to another question that was raised in the Adirondack Life article, that ORDA has invested so much and built so much infrastructure, that it's a lot to maintain. Does ORDA have a plan for hiring staff, doing maintenance, sustaining these big, a lot of them high-tech, things that require very technical know-how to maintain?

MARTENS: Yes, absolutely. Our staff has grown. It was pointed out in the Adirondack Life article that our costs have increased. And generating new revenue is obviously extremely important to us. And we know that in order to properly maintain our facilities over time, it will take staff to do that. We're going to keep a central staff on at all times to maintain the facilities as best as we possibly can. The good news, again, is that we've made a lot of improvements to our facilities. And while we want to maintain them, we don't want to let them deteriorate, but they are in great shape.

It's like buying a new house, you don't have problems for you know, 10 years. But after that things need attention, and we will have a maintenance plan, we have a maintenance plan for all our facilities. And our intention is to keep them in great shape.

SOMMERSTEIN: What happens after those 10 years, and if you're maybe not able to get the kind of funding that you've been getting recently from Albany?

MARTENS: So it comes back to revenue generation, making ourselves a more sustainable operation. I think we, in part, may always need some state support.

Another thing I wanted to talk about. We are not like ski centers in Vermont or New Hampshire, or other places around the country. We are in the Adirondack Park. We have very strict regulations and confined areas in which we can operate. And that's a good thing. The Adirondack Park looks the way it does and attracts literally tens of millions of visitors every year because of the beauty, the wilderness areas, the wild forest areas, and the other recreational opportunities.

But that limits what ORDA can do. We can't develop real estate, for example. We can't just willy-nilly develop our ski centers or our areas like Mt. Van Hoevenberg. It's all strictly regulated. We have to do unit management plans and get approval from the DEC and [Adirondack Park Agency].

So the state recognized when it created ORDA back in 1980, that's one of the reasons why it was created, why a public authority was created, and why all of this wasn't just turned over to a private enterprise.

SOMMERSTEIN: So what I hear you saying is ORDA, because it's a public entity, and because it's working in a sort of public-private, hybrid environment like the Adirondack Park, there are more things to consider than the bottom line.

MARTENS: Well, absolutely true. And one of the other things that I think we have to mention. We recently released an economic impact study that was prepared by a firm called Tourism Economics that found ORDA's annual impact for 2022-2023 was $342 million. So in my mind, investing $100 million dollars a year, or whatever the number is, returned those monies in spades. We generated $25 million in state and local tax revenues. So we have an enormous impact in the Catskills and the Adirondacks.

Originally reported by David Sommerstein for NCPR