The state's choices for projects to fund with a $10 million downtown revitalization grant for the City of Lockport are almost all controlled by private or not-for-profit entities, city officials say.
The city's requests for funds to develop municipal infrastructure largely went unfunded, except for streetscape projects on Pine and South streets and the reconstruction of the intersection of Pine, Lock and Gooding streets.
The rejected requests included a possible new marina west of the Erie Canal locks and continued work on the restoration of the 19th-century locks.
The city had suggested about $15 million worth of projects to Albany after Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last October that Lockport had been chosen as a recipient of the $10 million grant.
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Hochul returned to Lockport this week to announce the state's choices.
"They didn't say why they picked what they picked," Mayor Michelle M. Roman said.
Brian M. Smith, city community development director, said none of the projects will be funded entirely by Albany, and so the state probably was trying to encourage further private investment.
"For us, it's about these vacant buildings and being able to leverage public funding for significant private investment," Smith said. "We challenged ourselves to say, 'How do we turn $10 million into $40 million?' "
"I believe they want all the projects to be done in three to five years at maximum," Roman said.
The grants include $2.2 million to renovate the old Electric Building next to the locks, also called the Spalding Mill, into an event space that could include a rooftop banquet facility and a hillside amphitheater.
Smith said the city owns the building but has made a long-term lease to a not-for-profit group called Historic Lockport Mill Race.
The privately owned F&M Building at Main and Locust streets, vacant for half a century except for a bar in the basement, was chosen for $1.35 million in rehabilitation funding. The old post office a block away, which has been a multitenant facility for many years, was awarded $1.8 million.
Plans to reopen a restaurant in the privately owned Tuscarora Club on Walnut Street got an $800,000 boost from the state, and the ongoing renovation of the Historic Palace Theatre will receive $600,000.
Building 3 at Harrison Place, the former Harrison Radiator complex that is now a multitenant facility, will be turned into developable space with a $955,000 grant.
Although the Flight of Five project, the partially complete return of the old canal locks to working order, was not funded, the state will pay $275,000 toward five of the planned 14 bronze statues by Youngstown artist Susan Geissler to be erected above the locks.
The statues, called the Lock Tender Tribute, will depict the figures in a locally renowned photo of canal workers taken on the site in the 1890s.
