Charlie Sjobeck lives at the end of a two-mile dirt road in Randolph, a town that still doesn’t have a traffic light. Though Interstate 89 runs alongside his property, the place feels cut off from the outside world. Sjobeck likes it that way, but he knows things might soon change. His land is at the center of what could be the biggest and most argued-about development in Vermont since Taft Corners in Williston.
Jesse “Sam” Sammis, a wealthy developer from Greenwich, Conn., has big plans for 178 acres of open land around Exit 4 in Randolph. On it he aims to build 274 homes, a 180-room hotel and conference center, more than 500,000 square feet of office and light industrial space and a 10,000-square-foot fitness center. To sweeten the deal, he’s offered to construct, staff and maintain an interstate rest stop with an attached retail outlet — so the State of Vermont doesn’t have to.
The project, which Sammis has dubbed the Green Mountain Center, has won support from Randolph’s selectboard, development review board and bigwigs from Gifford Medical Center, Vermont Technical College, GW Plastics and Lake Sunapee Bank. Local business leaders are convinced it would bring two things the town of 4,800 covets — jobs and visitors — and have inundated state regulators with letters breathlessly cheering on the development.
But, as state regulators begin their review of the project, opposition is building among local farmers, conservationists and residents. A grassroots group, Exit 4 Open Space, has gathered more than 700 signatures on a petition urging regulators to reject the proposed project.
Critics say it’s far too big for Randolph and will siphon away business from the already struggling downtown while destroying vital farmland around the interstate. Brian Shupe, executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, said, “It’s a huge, out-of-scale project for the location.”
Randolph is in something of an economic no-man’s-land — it’s 30 miles northwest of West Lebanon, N.H., a thriving commercial center in a state without a sales tax, and 20 miles southeast of Montpelier and Barre. Jobs are scarce. The town is dependent on small farms and a few local businesses in a downtown with too many empty storefronts.
“We need a shot in the arm,” Town Manager Melvin Adams said. “We need something to encourage young people to stay in Randolph. There’s definitely a need, and I think the critics out there think with their blinders on.”
In a letter to regulators, Gifford President Joseph Woodin wrote: “We envision the Green Mountain Center will be a huge boost for all of Central Vermont and particularly will be a positive benefit for the entire Randolph community, from farmers to restaurants to retail stores to the Randolph Historical Museum to the Chandler Center for the Arts to the Vermont Technical College to the Gifford Medical Center and many other businesses in the area that desperately need more foot traffic to survive.”
Sammis is something of a big fish in little Randolph. He rides in the Fourth of July parade every year and is currently the town’s largest property owner. He and his wife control approximately 1,400 acres of property valued at more than $12.6 million, including the Three Stallion Inn and neighboring Montague Golf Club, a few downtown retail buildings, several homes and huge swaths of undeveloped farm- and forestland. The part-time Randolph resident maintains a large home tucked behind a brook in the woods off Lefebvre Road, not far from the proposed development site.
Real estate is his business. When he’s in Connecticut, seventy-something Sammis is focused on New England Land Company, which he founded in 1971 to focus on high-end projects in the New York area. The company has had leasing arrangements with Eastman Kodak and IBM, and developed the 750,000-square-foot “Center at Greenwich,” which includes a 400-room Hyatt Regency Hotel.
His success has won him a mixture of admiration and wariness among Randolph locals.
“Sammis has a lot of influence in town, and he throws his weight around. People do what he says,” said David Hurwitz, a Randolph woodworker and leader in the Exit 4 opposition group. But his proposed development, Hurwitz warned, “is disconnected from reality” and will likely hurt the downtown, which is three miles from the highway exit. “The pitch is, it will bring millions to downtown Randolph. There’s nothing to back that up. It’s PR hype. I don’t buy it. Nobody is going to go downtown. You get off, buy gas, take a bathroom break and get back on the highway.”
Opponents liken the Green Mountain Center to one of Vermont’s most notorious development projects: Taft Corners off I-89 in Williston. After a decades-long struggle with conservationists, developers eventually secured permission to transform tracts of farmland there into dozens of big box and chain stores in several strip malls just off Exit 12.
Sammis said he admires Taft Corners, but bristled at the comparison between his proposal and the Williston development. “I like Taft’s Corners. I think they did a good job. They’ve got nice looking buildings, they’ve got nice landscaping. I don’t see anything wrong with that project,” he said in a brief telephone interview.
But his would be different, he said. More than 60 percent of what you now see at the proposed site — mostly open land and woods against a Green Mountain backdrop — would remain unchanged, according to Sammis. Currently the site, which includes both sides of Route 66, is home to a driving range, a McDonald’s and a gas station.
Referring to his opponents, Sammis said, “They ought to have their arm around me saying, ‘Holy smokes, what a good job you’ve done!'” Speaking about himself, he emphasized, “I’m a conservationist. I’ve saved the most valuable land as open space.”
Instead, most of the local enthusiasm — and press attention — has been focused on the proposed welcome center and attached Vermont Products Showcase Center, where local businesses would be able to promote themselves and sell products. Sammis would pay for its construction and maintenance — an estimated $15 million to build and $300,000 annually to maintain.
In a state that has closed interstate welcome centers in recent years to save money, it proved a persuasive pitch.
“It will not cost Vermont taxpayers one single dime,” Gov. Peter Shumlin said at a January 2013 press conference announcing the project at the Three Stallion Inn. Sammis made $2,000 donations to Shumlin in August 2012 and September 2014 after a lifetime of donating to Republican politicians, including Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, the Valley News reported in May. His only other local campaign contribution was $1,000 to James Sault, a Republican from Randolph who ran for state representative in 2010.
Sammis has made it clear that he will not build the welcome center unless his entire project wins approval. And like any major proposal or renovation, Green Mountain Center must win clearance from the local district environmental commission, which enforces Act 250, Vermont’s sweeping land-use law.
The first battle in the lengthy Act 250 process will be over whether the development conforms to local and regional plans, which call for the preservation of valuable agriculture land. The project would later have to meet other criteria.
Local regulators say the project seems to comply with existing plans. But Shupe and others say dozens of acres Sammis proposes to develop boast rich soils: Sammis has, over the years, leased his land to local dairy and vegetable farmers.
“If this happens,” Shupe said, “no farmland is safe anywhere.”
Sammis has been visiting Vermont since the 1940s. As he built his real estate business in Connecticut, he said he was determined to keep one foot in the Green Mountain State. “I love Vermont,” he said. “I saw Vermont as a place I wanted to bring my family. I’m back and forth. I’m not a newcomer on the block.”
Indeed, almost everyone interviewed for this story was able to reference a personal encounter with the man they call “Sam.” But that doesn’t mean they understand his motives. Plenty are curious why seventy-something Sammis is pushing for the Green Mountain Center while he has kept the proposed site posted “for sale.” The Three Stallion Inn has also been on the market for a while.
Sammis said he has no plans to pull up stakes — the signs have been there for years and could help him lure prospective tenants to his project. But ultimately, he said, everything is for sale, and his land would be far more lucrative if it came with permits allowing for a major development.
“In real estate,” he said, “everybody has a price. I would sell it at the right price.”
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2015.
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I appreciate this article but I think the picture painted of Randolph is a bit dire. There are very few empty storefronts in downtown Randolph, in fact I’m trying to think of a single one right now except the building Sammis owns. For a town of this size there are a number of local employment opportunities including the newly expanding hospital, the soon-to-be-expanding VT Tech. It’s a perfect place for families where one parent works in the Montpelier area and another works at Dartmouth or one works locally. Great school system, great cultural options.
I don’t think people are arguing so much about the fitness center or even the hotel but the sheer amount of housing that comes with this plan, housing that is not needed. There are roughly eighty vacant properties in the Randolph area right now and home sellers are having a hard time selling them in this market. That can only change for the worse with 274 additional homes. The multi-family units currently in Randolph are the ones that are the hardest to sell. People have approached Sammis to try to compromise on a more right-sized development and he’s been uninterested.
His all-or-nothing approach puts people off. His current business ventures are a combination of successful and less successful but people from town are rightly concerned that he’s not going to be able to pull this off. Sure he’s a friendly guy and I don’t think people have a lot of personal animosity, they just say “This doesn’t make sense, business or otherwise” and if the only options are all or nothing, many would prefer nothing.
I support Jessamyn’s comments! We don’t need a development of this size for all the above stated reasons. Also the potential loss of the beautiful vistas and farmland is very upsetting. “It’s a huge, out-of-scale project for the location” says it all and more. Randolph is a wonderful village-lets keep it that way.
Please go to http://www.Exit4OpenSpace.org to sign the petition opposing this unneeded development that will ruin the amazing vistas along 89, destroy prime ag soil of the highest grade, hurt downtown businesses, and cause severe damage to both Randolph’s and Vermont’s brand. The only people who want this are a handful of business owners who are in Sammis’s pocket. There are many business owners who oppose this project, and tourists have been saying loud and clear, they do not want to visit a place that looks like the suburban settings they come from. And Jessamyn is right to point out the 274 unneeded housing units when there are over 80 houses on the market.
This project is ill-conceived in so many ways. It’s ugly, uninspired and completely lacking in vision. Exit development has been shown repeatedly to cause great harm to small downtowns. There are examples of that all over the country. There are several industrial sites in the downtown that could be redeveloped for manufacturing, several vacant office buildings, and the two largest vacant retail locations in the downtown are both owned by Sammis. One of them has been sitting vacant for the past 13 years, with the exception of 18 months a few years ago when a Verizon store was in about 1/3 of it.
But Randolph is not a dead town. There has been a recent renaissance in the downtown with the opening of the Black Krim restaurant and bar, One Main Tap and Grill, and Art of Vermont fine craft and art gallery. Both restaurants offer locally grown food, and local craft beers, and both of them are thriving.
Pay close attention to what happens to this project. If this goes through it will set policy that will affect the character of Vermont for years to come.
I agree with comments above. Also, no one has mentioned the transportation implications of this development. If all of the housing is built, virtually all of those folks will drive to do errands, get kids to school events, etc. I’d like to see more focus on the downtown and making use of existing developed land. Living in the village at least makes walking and bicycling possible for some of the many trips needed for daily living.
Speaking of transportation, Randolph hasn’t even had a Greyhound bus stop in years, though we do have the terrific Stagecoach system that can get us a few places, and an Amtrak stop in town. Jon Kaplan is right, if we want to do community planning right, we’d be looking at some sustainability plan for the village as well as a development for the developers.
“”…I think the critics out there think with their blinders on.””
I could not help but to be infuriated by that quote. I realize that there are 2 sides to any debate, but it seems so clear to me that it is the supporters of this project who are wearing blinders and not the opposers. Permanent destruction of gorgeous, iconic land for a project is just too big for an area this sparsely populated, one that will more than likely hurt our downtown community seems terribly narrow-sighted to me.
The only thing I have heard supporters say is that they like growth, commerce and jobs. On BOTH sides of the issue, we all want that, but it has to be the kind that best suits the community. This project simply is not and I can’t wrap my head around any argument suggesting that it could be.
“Referring to his opponents, Sammis said, “They ought to have their arm around me saying, ‘Holy smokes, what a good job you’ve done!'””
How arrogant. And no.
A 180-bed hotel and conference center is proposed here, which is more than TWICE as large as the Comfort Inn in Berlin (89 rooms) and would blight the area, sculpting it to look just like every other interstate exit in the country. Outsized, even more so than Rinker’s replacement.
265 housing units? Randolph has a long list of homes for sale…yes, let’s all hug Jesse for helping us out with that. The Vermont we have known and loved is rapidly slipping through our fingers… and this project will speed that process.
Randolph has long had (but is rapidly losing) a reputation as a farming community but this project would make three projects in a year’s time that propose building (or have built) on prime ag soil. Farmers and farmland will be nothing but more important in years to come…it’s time we treasured it for all of its environmental services.
Remember Tropical Storm Irene? Should the Green Mountain Project be built-out and a similar superstorm arrive – the stupendous amounts of impermeable surface sitting atop Slack Hill would aim unusual storm runoff right down Slack Hill towards Randolph. That’s an image I’m sure we can all conjure.
why did the farmer sell it to samis ?why didn’t local farmers buy the land first ? why did brooks pharmacy vacate downtown ? why doesn’t someone start a fund to buy property from him? maybe gather farmers who want to lease land as a co operative long term and use lease money to buy property ? work on solution not problem
Offer in town commercial properties to potential businesses that would offer employment to locals . possibly state would bring some of their offices to town from waterbury split . think outside the box and pave those messed up roads ! Shumlin won’t unless there is a ski area at other end of the road .
The reality is Republicans and Democrats alike in Vermont have been serving the real estate developers for far too long. Constantly undermining Act 250 and weakening it, whether it is through “reforms” under Douglas that purposefully weakened citizen participation and took away citizen standing to challenge projects or through Shumlin and Shap Smith’s total exemptions for renewable energy, resulting in the destruction of our open spaces and mountain tops everywhere.
There needs to be a statewide movement to put citizens back in control and fight the developers who are well-organized and destroying Vermont. GMP, The Vermont Homebuilders Association, Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation, etc. have the constant ear of everyone in Montpelier and the citizens are ignored over and over again. Unfortunately many groups that used to protect the environment such as VPIRG, VNRC, CLF, etc. have not only given the farm (literally and figuratively) for “renewables” but have also mostly abandoned Chittenden County. Glad to see Brian Shupe getting involved here now & wish him success with this but also wonder where was he as hundreds of prime ag. acres devoured for sprawl in South Burlington the last 15 plus years? The same is looming in Hinesburg. The precedent was set in Chittenden County and now is moving to the rest of the state.
The Exit 4 Opposition Group should expect a ferocious, coordinated & well-funded counter-attack, especially if they try to elect sympathetic political representation. It happened here in South Burlington as former City Council Chair Rosanne Greco experienced multiple death threats, the most heinous physical vandalism, and record-breaking campaign spending against her and allies to the tune of several tens of thousands of dollars (funded by about 20-30 people, many of whom do not even live in our town). Sadly I just don’t see much difference between Democrats & Republicans in Vermont in fighting development.
wow, people in VT are crying for decent jobs and housing, along comes someone who is willing to put up his money to provide both and the community bites his hand. The same people crying about the “loss” of farmland are the one’s that cheer on these solar farms that also destroy farmland and are a blight on the VT landscape. Put solar panels on the roofs of these buildings and you have the best of both. The thought that act 250 is week is a joke, I’ve been in construction for over 20 years in VT and the permitting process just keeps getting harder and more expensive. I’m all for responsible building but it seems the vocal minority in VT is for no building. How are we going to get our young people to stay here if we remain trapped in the 1980’s. VT needs to become more business and job friendly, we need more tax payers not fewer. Open your eyes people.
Mr. Gillies, I agree that Vermont needs to do more to be more accommodating to growth that provides sustainable jobs; growth just for the sake of growth is not sustainable or attractive to the population we need to keep here.
If building 270 homes in a small community like Randolph is done over say 10 years or so, that may be worthwhile. The same may be true of the commercial space.
I grew up in Randolph, and what to do with Exit 4 has long been a subject of passionate debate. I think there is a way to develop the land and preserve the views, there is certainly a HUGE need for a hotel and conference center. Besides that, it IS an interstate exit, why should it remain empty? If that is the case, then the state should start buying up private land that people like Sammis are paying property taxes on every year.
However, what I would like to see, at least as part of a large development like this one, is make a large percentage of them small, starter homes that people can really afford. DON’T come up with plans to subsidize large houses that people with less money really cannot afford.
We need small homes that builders don’t like to develop anymore b/c they say there is no money in building them. That is not true, there is just less money, but there is a greater need and that is a need that must be filled in order to attract and maintain people and jobs.