By Christine Graf

It’s been 10 years since First Fairfield Associates, a social enterprise investment firm, announced plans to redevelop a vacant property at 53 Putnam St. in Saratoga Springs.

 Now an ownership group, Putnam Resources, LLC, is proposing construction of a 60-unit mixed-income condominium building called Putnam Commons. More than $3 million has already been invested to acquire, manage, and clean up the site.

Local author Jason Letts is among the partners.

The property is located across the street from the Saratoga Springs Public Library. A dilapidated one-story building that sat on the property was built in 1905 and once housed a dry-cleaning business. The building was razed and several underground petroleum storage tanks were found on the 0.3-acre property.

Soil testing revealed significant ground contamination that resulted in the property being declared a Brownfield site—a parcel contaminated by low concentrations of hazardous chemicals. The contamination likely resulted from a combination of petroleum and dry-cleaning chemicals

After five years of chemical remediation, cleanup of the site is complete. It is now certified as a successful state Brownfield cleanup project.

By Paul Post

Rob DeMarco’s firm, AgroChem, got a toehold in the dairy industry with a foot bath solution that keeps cows healthy and productive.

The product, Healmax, is now one of about 100 hygiene and sanitizing products the Saratoga Springs-based company sells to farms throughout the U.S. and around the globe from China and Japan to Eastern and Western Europe.

“Most people don’t realize just how big the dairy industry is in the U.S. and the world, and how many hygiene-type products are required,” said DeMarco, who founded AgroChem with his father, John, in 2005.

Dairy, with about 3,500 farms, is the largest component of New York’s $5 billion agriculture industry. Nationwide there are nearly 9.2 million milk cows and New York ranks fifth in production behind California, Wisconsin, Idaho and Texas.

In response to fast-paced growth and a quest for more efficient operations, AgroChem has plans for a 25,000-square-foot addition to the firm’s 36,000-square-foot facility at W. J. Grande Industrial Park, which it moved into seven years ago after starting out in a trailer and small rented space.

By Paul Post

By some estimates there are 1,500 unfilled jobs in and around Saratoga Springs including vital positions such as teachers, police, firefighters, nurses and public works employees.

Part of the problem, local officials say, stems from lack of housing that allows people to live where they work.

A Central New York firm’s proposal, called Liberty Saratoga Apartments, could help the  situation by providing 212 affordable housing units at the corner of Jefferson Street and Crescent Avenue, near Saratoga Casino Hotel.

“The need is huge,” said Stephanie Ferradino, an attorney for Rome, N.Y.-based Liberty Affordable Housing Inc. “The more housing we have, the better able we are to meet that need. Look at the hospitality industry. So many restaurants now aren’t open seven days per week, in part because they can’t find the staff.”

Ferradino, of Saratoga Springs, said the 250-unit Intrada Apartments off West Avenue had a wait list of 300 applicants last summer. 

“They’re full,” she said. “They went to capacity almost as soon as they were built.

The Washington-Saratoga-Warren-Hamilton-Essex Board of Cooperative Educational Services (WSWHE BOCES) announced a new name and direction for its Career and Technical Education (CTE) machine tool technology program.

The new title—Industrial and Performance Machining—reflects the industry today and better positions the program to prospective students, officials said.

Officials said the program places a heavy emphasis on high-tech equipment and precision in the machining of component parts for automobiles, performance vehicles, industrial machines, and more. This consists of fabricating component parts to specification for these applications using milling, drilling, grinding, and boring machines.

While “Machine Tool Technology” is often used by technical colleges, WSWHE BOCES administration and educators said that students did not immediately identify the program in line with career goals.