Mayor Noble
KINGSTON – Big bucks have arrived in Kingston, with a $10 million
first-prize competitive grant awarded by Governor Andrew Cuomo last week.
“I have the check in my office, I haven’t been able to take
my eyes off of it,” joked Kingston Mayor Steven Noble.
Noble gave his 25-minute grant synopsis at the Ulster County Chamber of
Commerce breakfast Wednesday.
The cash will be used to transform the city’s Uptown Stockade Business
District into a thriving 21st Century metropolis, with funding from the
state’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI). Mayor Noble outlined
his vision for the city, which earned Kingston the windfall.
“When you follow the rules, and write a really good application,
you’re able to go ahead and be successful,” Noble explained,
describing how Kingston was an ideal match for strict program requirements.
The team members, including both city and county experts, partnered with
private sector stakeholders, last year prepared an in-person presentation
for Albany officials, with just 48 hours notice. Their optimistic pitch
carried the weight of recent setbacks, coupled with decades of hard times.
“We haven’t always been successful. We for many years, put
all of our eggs in one basket,” Noble said. “We remember,
back in the heyday, when one major employer decided to leave Ulster County,
it had a tremendous impact,” Noble said, speaking of Spring 1993,
when IBM suddenly cut over 7,000 local jobs.
The mayor said it took “an extremely long time to try and recover.
One of the things that makes Kingston so particularly perfect, to exemplify
across New York State, is that as soon as this happened, Kingston looked
inside, we looked at each other, and said, how are we going to fix this?”
Kingston embellished its application effort with narrative business videos,
and community participation through quasi-public equitable development
seminars.
The “downtown” neighborhood delineated in the winning proposal,
for Kingston is known as the Stockade Business District, considered by
locals as historically-rich Uptown, also county governmental seat, and
regional transportation hub.
Officials expanded the original Dutch Colonial Stockade, in drawing the
Stockade Business District boundaries, to include nearby Kingston Plaza
shopping mall; Washington Avenue up to the sinkhole; Chandler interchange
at St. James Street; and of course Dietz Stadium with Forsyth Park.
Central to the Kingston DRI vision is a new parking garage, to be built
at the intersection of North Front and Wall Street. The private project
plans to piggyback hotel rooms and residential units.
Part of the $10 million will also benefit other private developers, with
an unspecified additional portion spent towards improving neighborhood
parks, and restoring an historic site at Frog Alley.
Kingston Plaza is earmarked for an overhaul of the supermarket building,
with additional mapping and consulting to allow commercialization of the
berm area behind Col. Chandler Drive.
Other projects mentioned in the application include a Kingston Food Exchange
at the old Woolworth’s store on Wall Street; and several more boutique
style hotels developed for Uptown.
Noble spoke of emerging industries for the region, including a nascent
film production kick-start sparked by the expanded tax incentive; a new
soccer team at Dietz Stadium; and the re-birth of local manufacturing.
More info: https://www.ny.gov/sites/ny.gov/files/atoms/files/DRIKingtsonApplication.pdf
