Category Archives: Business News

By Christine Graf

Attorney Steve Perkins, who worked for five years at he worked for McPhillips, Fitzgerald & Cullum in Glens Falls,  has started his own firm, Perkins Law PLLC in Saratoga Springs. 

He started in the real estate department before moving into trusts and estates. 

The Siena College and Albany Law School graduate handles cases in Saratoga, Albany, Warren, and Washington counties. 

Perkins, a native of Saratoga Springs, works from home in order to keep overhead costs low. He meets with clients at 524 Maple Ave., Suite 2, a space he leases from attorney Rita Young.

During law school, Perkins interned at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York, litigation firm Wilson Elser, and Ayco, a Goldman Sachs Company. After graduating in 2016, he worked for McPhillips, Fitzgerald & Cullum in Glens Falls. He started in the real estate department before moving into trusts and estates. 

Five years later, in the fall of 2021, Perkins made the decision to open his own firm. 

SUNY Empire State College’s School of Business has been approved by the State Education Department to offer a new Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree.

The program will launch in the fall term, with the option for students to be enrolled fully online.

 Officials said the BBA is a comprehensive business degree designed to serve adult learners working in business-related fields who want to advance their career by pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business or prepare for a MBA.  

The BBA program will require fewer liberal arts credits, making the new degree program an attractive option for students who want a strong knowledge base in all facets of business and community college graduates with an Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.) degree, officials said.

 SUNY Empire State College Officer-in-Charge Nathan Gonyea, Ph.D., said the launch of the new BBA degree program “reflects SUNY Empire’s ongoing commitment to helping students fulfill their academic dreams and professional ambitions, while also addressing the employment needs of the economy. The BBA will fit around the busy lives of adult learners and enable them to shift their careers in exciting new directions.”

The Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce announced its 2022 Four-Seasons Travel Guide is available, celebrating the organization’s 70th anniversary and introducing a special logo for the year to commemorate the milestone.

The Chamber produces the Travel Guide in house and prints 70,000 copies annually. They are strategically distributed around the state, at AAA offices, and across the U.S. and Canada through direct mail by request.

“With new data from where our visitors were coming from, we were able to readjust our distribution plan in 2021 to place the guides where they’d be most likely to be picked up. In 2022, we made similar changes to our distribution plan to match current intel,” said Executive Director Gina Mintzer, CMP, MHA.

This year’s cover features a photo of Paradise Bay by F. Cavone Productions as well as a photo strip showcasing different seasons and activities. The cover design was chosen with the help of the Chamber’s social media audience, who voted on two different designs.

Northern Insuring Agency Inc. recently expanded their Glens Falls office, moving from 136 Glen St. to 21 Bay St.

The 1,200-square-foot office was previously occupied by Equitas Realty.

 The insurance agency had been located in Whitehall since the 1970s, but moved into Glens Falls in January 2019. 

Northern Insuring has been in business since 1930 and has two other offices in Plattsburgh and Potsdam.

By Christine Graf

The city of Glens Falls will embark on the creation of a vertical farm—an indoor farm designed to grow vegetables and herbs. 

The city received a $97,600 grant in 2020 to develop it. Glens Falls was one of 10 municipalities in the state to receive a share of the $1 million in grant money made available by the Empire State Development Smart Cities Innovation Partnership. The partnership is a pilot program to facilitate the development and integration of emerging technologies into public services.

According to city Economic Development Director Jeff Flagg, the idea of creating some type of urban/vertical farm is one that officials have discussed for several years. Not long after applying for the grant, the COVID pandemic led to business shutdowns and supply chain issues. Then the idea made even more sense.

“We knew we might be faced with empty spaces in downtown areas that needed to be repurposed, whether temporarily or permanently,” said Flagg. “We wanted to come up with a model where we could—relatively quickly and relatively easily and with minimal alterations to an interior space—create what I call a box-in-a-box. You build a cube within a room and that becomes your farm. It fits the contour of the room that you are building it in.”

The box-in-a-box design is one that can be replicated in any building with sufficient access to water and energy. It can also be easily packed up and transferred to a new location.

By Paul Post Hilltop Construction Co. epitomizes the phrase, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The Hudson Falls firm, handling commercial and residential projects since 1975, is growing fast and recently purchased 3.6 acres at Airport Industrial Park on which  to build a new 10,000-square-foot base...

By Paul Post

Athletes from across the country are converging on Gore Mountain this month, setting the stage for one of the world’s largest sports spectacles a year from now.

The Holeshot Cross Tour (held Feb. 5-11) and USASA Futures Tour ( held Feb. 11-18) give the nation’s top junior freestyle skiers and snowboarders a chance to earn points in their quest to race professionally.

“These are two types of events, ski cross and slope style, we’ll be hosting for next year’s World University Games as well as big air,” said Stephanie Backes, Gore Mountain marketing director. “It’s putting Gore on the map for this caliber of competition and exposing us to people from around the country who have never been here before. It definitely helps lodging and restaurant business.”

World University Games are surpassed in size only by the Olympics, with about 1,600 athletes from 50 nations expected for next year’s competition based in Lake Placid. But Gore will host all freestyle skiing and boarding events, further enhancing its already prominent role as an economic engine in Warren County’s winter tourism industry.

Gore hosted 217,000 guests last winter, up significantly from the 189,000 who visited in 2019/20. Backes attributed this to the COVID-19 pandemic that sparked a major rise in all types of outdoor activity as many other forms of entertainment weren’t available.

In addition, the pandemic gave people working from home more opportunities to take time off. Last year, Gore saw a huge rise in midweek, non-holiday period visits, which have leveled off a bit this winter, but are still higher than pre-COVID attendance.

By Paul Post

Only a week after opening, more than 75,000 tickets had already been sold to a major new winter attraction that officials hope can contribute to transforming Lake George into true year-round tourist destination.

Visitors to Ice Castles—a 1.5-acre man-made sculpture with frozen 25-foot-high archways, tunnels and slides—are expected to spend more than $4 million for lodging, meals, fuel and similar services.

Located at Charles R. Wood Park’s Festival Commons, 17 West Brook Road, it coincides with this year’s 60th annual Lake George Winter Carnival, featuring a slate of fun activities each weekend in February.

“This is big, really big,” said long-time Mayor Robert Blais, who has worked  to promote winter tourism for many years. “All the businesses that have been open all these years, that have struggled through the winter and supported the Winter Carnival, I say thanks to them. Now you’re going to be rewarded. To the ones that don’t stay open and take advantage of it, I say, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’.”

In addition to Utah, where Ice Castles is based, the company has similar attractions in Minnesota, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. This is its first time in upstate New York.

“We researched it very carefully,” Blais said. “I called communities wherever Ice Castles has been or still is, and talked to the mayors and supervisors. It fills every (hotel) room that’s available.”

Room reservations at Fort William Henry Hotel & Conference Center are up nearly 20 percent, said Tom Wysocki, sales and marketing director.