ARPA was signed into law in March 2021. It gives direct funding to all cities, towns and villages in the country and is administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. North Elba was given a total of $442,000 in ARPA funds available to allocate. The town now has around $45,000 left to allocate. It is required to allocate all funds toward expenditures by the end of 2024.

Glenn Glover, executive director of BETA, presented a proposal to update the Craig Wood trail system at the council’s January meeting. The proposal includes heavy maintenance on the trails to bring them up to modern standards and would require a $25,000 ARPA allocation from the town.

“You’ve all been on hiking trails that have deteriorated significantly, where it was old-style design guidelines, too much fall line, a lot of rocks exposed, that kind of thing,” Glover said. “That’s essentially the type of situation that we’re looking at here, where we want to not just restore it to what it was, because that’s also going to continue to have problems again in 10 years.”

Glover described the maintenance as a “long-term fix for much of the existing trail system,” including re-routing some trails, saying the improvements would help the trail system support more riders and hikers.

Councilor Emily Kilburn Politi asked Glover to describe how long-term the investment is. Glover said that BETA would likely not come before the town council again for a number of years regarding improvements, adding that the only situation in which he would reappear so soon would be to request an expansion of the trail network.

The town council unanimously approved the $25,000 allocation. BETA plans to contribute $8,000 of its own funding, for a total of $33,000 in funding for six to seven weeks of trail maintenance starting in late May.

“With the money the state’s put in to all the Olympic venues, we want … everything we can do (for) other venues to be top-notch, and this’ll give us that,” Councilor Dick Cummings said.

The town council also released $20,000 for a moveable two-shed storage facility for the Lake Placid Outing Club’s equipment. The sheds will be located on Lake Placid Central School District property. The funds for this project were allocated previously, but the club was not given the funds until the shed plan was finalized.

The Lake Placid Airport requested ARPA funding to purchase a point of sale system for its avgas tank. The town owns both the jet fuel and avgas tanks at the airport. The airport is leased from the town by flight company Lake Placid Airways.

“I am in favor, because we own the tanks, to put a reliable system on there,” said town Supervisor Derek Doty. “If we were ever in a position where a town employee had to go down there and take care of fuel sales, we would need that system.”

Cummings said that the negatives of the allocation may outweigh the positives.

“It may not be a bad thing if we don’t do it,” he said. “The reason to do it, other than request, is to have a proper accounting of everything, and unfortunately, it’s their responsibility, and when is that going to pay off? Even if we, unfortunately, had theft (of avgas) it’s less than if we had the POS system.”

The town council decided to table the discussion of the airport allocation for a later date.