Yay Lisa, she is great and Vermont and the young people in the Burlington area are so lucky to have her enthusiasm and smarts.
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 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.