Fitzgerald is all about quality of life in the community. She’s seen the Lake Placid community deal with the good and the bad in recent years — a housing crisis, short-term vacation rentals, a multi-million dollar revitalization to the village’s downtown and state-owned winter sports venues — but she believes the community can pull through with some effort.

“We can all figure it out together if we try,” she said. “It just takes time and energy.”

That’s why Fitzgerald is the chair of the Lake Placid/North Elba Community Development Commission, a volunteer board created by the town of North Elba and the village of Lake Placid in 2014 to implement a comprehensive plan for the community. Since then, the commission has also served as an advisory board to town and village boards on issues related to quality of life — housing, STRs, the arts, environment and sustainability, and more.

It’s been about a year since Fitzgerald took on the role of commission chair after Dean Dietrich, the previous chair, resigned. He’s still around and volunteering on some commission committees, but Fitzgerald said she’s got big shoes to fill. Dietrich spearheaded the commission from its inception until last year, and Fitzgerald said he’s worked on projects like creating the town/village comprehensive plan since the late 1990s.

Dietrich believes the development commission’s community-based, partnered approach is in good hands under Fitzgerald’s leadership. Throughout his years as the chair, he said there were certain people he could count on to be at meetings, while there were others he could count on to do the work. Fitzgerald was always a “worker bee.”

“She’s always been there,” he said.

From serving on the Appearance Committee and as chair of the Lake Placid Arts Alliance to helping out with communications in a public forum, Dietrich said Fitzgerald’s name pops up “quite a bit” when he reflects on the commission’s accomplishments.

Fitzgerald got involved with the commission shortly after it started. She was serving on the Lake Placid Business Association — a volunteer board that she’s chaired in the past and still serves on today — when the commission got involved in helping the LPBA rewrite the town and village’s signage ordinance. She became a member of the appearance committee as an LPBA representative, too, and she keeps getting more involved with the community.

Fitzgerald has been a leading organizer for the annual Holiday Village Stroll in Lake Placid, and she’s volunteered on the Lake Placid Horse Show Association Board of Directors. She’s also volunteered for the Ironman Lake Placid triathlon and the annual Joy to the Children benefit at the Mirror Lake Inn. In 2020, when Lake Placid celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games, she was the chair of the 40th Olympic Anniversary Committee.

Volunteering with the Community Development Commission is a lot of work, Fitzgerald said. Right now, its committees are looking at community projects such as creating affordable day care, implementing art installations in the town and village, revamping the 1980 Olympic cauldron at the North Elba Show Grounds, starting a visioning process for an updated comprehensive plan, and looking into housing deed restriction programs and dark skies initiatives.

“That’s just a few of the things that we’re working on, like, today,” Fitzgerald said on March 22. She planned to spend the whole day on development commission initiatives.

But for Fitzgerald, the motivation behind the work is worth it. The development commission is rooted in community feedback — not just in the decisions of a few board members — and its goals are intended to ultimately improve the quality of life for the community in a time when many feel their community is dwindling.

“I know people are concerned about the sense of community in Lake Placid,” Fitzgerald said. “The development commission is working hard to try and maintain that sense of community and recreate it where it might have gone away a bit. We want to do what’s right for the community, and not for any entity or one group of people.”

Until recently, Fitzgerald was the head of accommodations for the 2023 FISU Winter World University Games in Lake Placid, and she’s worked as the director of sales at the Hotel Saranac and director of sales and marketing at the High Peaks Resort.

She moved to Lake Placid from the Capital Region in 2010, and she felt welcomed by this community. She wants others to feel the same, and she doesn’t want anyone to take Lake Placid for granted. This village, with its rich history, is a place to be proud of, she said.