RANDOLPH — For a while, it seemed like the town was going the way of many other rural New England towns.
The department store closed, the latest storefront vacancy on Main Street. The favorite local cafe and bakery shut its doors, then the one that took its place quickly folded. A downtown engineering firm cut out for the big city. Even the longtime local watering hole and music joint shut its doors.
But now things are looking up in Randolph. The town that recovered three times after separate fires destroyed vital downtown businesses is reinventing itself again. And this time it’s reflecting changes taking place elsewhere in the national post-industrial and -farming economy.
An 80-room hotel, conference center and restaurant project to be located on the east of Interstate 89 at Exit 4 has committed backers and is preparing for Act 250 review with state regulators. A 28,000-square-foot, $4.5 million manufacturing facility for a high-tech lighting company on Beanville Road is getting read for occupancy later this summer. A new co-working office space — the sine qua non of the gig economy — that opened last fall is now 80 percent rented.
And the cafe has reopened with devilishly wicked muffins and an $8,000 espresso machine.
“There’s a lot of positive things going on here now,” said Paul Rae, a Randolph real estate broker and longtime member of the town’s planning commission who is one of the partners in the hotel project. “People are investing their money.”
In order to boost business activity in town, last week Randolph hired its first director of economic development, Joshua Jerome, who comes from Barre, where he was executive director of The Barre Partnership. One of the first things Jerome’s first tasks will be developing more public events like the town’s recent Winter Fest carnival that occurred for the first time last month.
“Josh did a lot of marathons and special events in Barre,” said Adolfo Bailon, town manager of Randolph. “That’s what he’s going to do here to build density. We’re definitely interested in expanding our outdoor recreational activity.”
Rae last week got to show off to Vermont Gov. Phil Scott another project in town that he hopes will play a role in developing a tourism economy in and around Randolph.
Scott, who swung through Randolph on one of his “Capitol for a Day” tours where be brings members of his administration to meet members of the local community and talk up his administration’s economic agenda, stopped in at a gutted 1860 house on Pleasant Street that Rae bought and is rehabbing into a mountain bike repair and retail store.
The building, to be called The Hub, will also provide a dedicated room to the nonprofit Rochester/Randolph Area Sports Trail Alliance, which maintains recreational trail networks across the central part of the state. The Hub will serve as an informational resource for mountain bikers, hikers, cross-country skiers and snowshoers exploring the area, Rae said.
“I really think Vermont’s future is in recreation,” Rae said. “It’s what brings in the money.”
In what Randolph civic leaders hope is a sign of things to come, last month a group of residents organized the first Winter Fest at Farr’s Hill, the former rope-tow ski hill that Randolph businessman Perry Armstrong bought last year and wants to introduce snow tubing and other winter activities. The event attracted more than 1,000 people for a day of tubing, Nordic skiing, snowshoeing, music, food and a demonstration of antique snowmobiles.
Unlike most rural communities, Randolph has a solid economic base of institutions with Gifford Medical Center and Vermont Technical College along with robust manufacturers such as GW Plastics and LEDdynamics, foundry Vermont Castings, engineering firm Applied Research and specialty and natural food producer and packager Freedom Foods.
But the town’s village district has suffered a harsher fate. Last year, the town’s beloved department store, Belmains, closed, and its 10,000 square feet of retail space has been vacant ever since. Finding a new tenant has been difficult, the space’s owner Todd Winslow said, because the property’s assessed value results in a tax bill to the town of about $20,000 annually.
Winslow, during emotionally charged comments he made during a public meeting last week at the town fire station with Gov. Scott and members of his administration, recounted how his family has lost money on the property and business, which he said was made harder by having to pay a tax rate that is out of sync with the market value of the property.
Winslow said he is in discussions with an interested party to buy the ground-level retail space but the “new owner cannot afford the taxes.”
As a result, Winslow has appealed to the town for an abatement, to which the town is sympathetic, confirmed Bailon, the town manager. But reassessment on a single property has to be handled carefully, he said.
“It needs to be done in a way that won’t trigger a mandatory townwide reassessment of properties. That would happen if we do things incorrectly, which is why we are working with the state’s Department of Corrections to get it right,” he said.
Sam Sammis, a Randolph commercial real estate owner, said he’s detected a different frame of mind in the town toward development since he attempted a few years ago to build a mix-used development west of I-89 at Exit 4 and was battled by conservation groups to whom he eventually sold the property.
“I realized they were going to appeal my Act 250 application until I was in the grave,” Sammis said.
But he’s detected a change.
“I’ve seen more positive things happening. We’re on the upswing,” he said.
After the engineering firm Sanborn & Head vacated Sammis’ office building at 2 South Main St., he converted their former second floor offices into a co-working space with shared conference rooms and 17 mini-offices and last fall began renting the units for $200 to $400 per month. He now has 13 of the units rented; tenants include three lawyers, a nurse-midwife, a mediator and a financial manager.
When it comes to being a destination for recreational sports, Selectboard chairwoman Trini Brassard said she would like to see the town weigh ideas that would attract ATV riders on trail and class 4 road networks, similar to what Island Pond, Vt., has done in the Northeast Kingdom. She said that community has demonstrated that it’s feasible to balance environmental and conservation concerns with the off-road sports vehicles.
“We love motorized sports,” she told Scott and others who had crammed inside the downtown Randolph building that Rae wants to be a hub for outdoor recreation in the area.
“We’d love to have a racetrack,” she volunteered to laughter among the attendees, although she noted that such an idea might face some stiff opposition.
“You can imagine, given what happened with the hotel (at Exit 4), how difficult that would be to permit,” Brassard said.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
