Seastreak Discussion
Photo by Yuriy Herhel
It was a full room and a lively discussion at Riverview Restaurant for the November Breakfast Meeting on the impacts of the Seastreak tour boats which dock in Cold Spring Village for six weekends from October 1 to mid November. There were a total of 35 attendees, including Francine Murphy of the Cold Spring Village, Kathleen Abels of the Putnam County EDC, and Vinny Tamagna of Putnam County Transportation. The new priest at St. Mary’s Church, Father Steve, was also introduced to the group. The breakfast sponsors, Lori and Jim Ely, generously provided a top notch breakfast including coffee, juice, lox, capers, bagels, fresh fruit, whipped cream, granola, and quiche. Thank you, Riverview!
THE OVERVIEW: The discussion opened up with Eliza Starbuck, the president of the Cold Spring Chamber of Commerce, expressing the importance of tourism, the strongest area of economic growth in the area. It was noted that when visitors go home after a positive experience in Cold Spring they are likely return at other times of the year which helps to even out the peaks and valleys of seasonal business traffic in the village. She explained that the added income that tourism provides to the local businesses gets pumped back into the region’s economy in the form of home renovations, local services and shopping, and fuels donations for much of the area’s education, historic, and cultural arts programs. She also thanked the Village of Cold Spring for funding and managing weekend Main St. garbage removal, the Visitors’ Center bathrooms, and negotiating a deal with Seastreak allowing the boats to dock in the village and providing additional port-a-toilets on those weekends.
THE EFFECTS ON BUSINESS: The retailers in the room shared that they saw sales increases of around 30% during boat weekends, which helped them purchase holiday stock and helped to cover expenses during the winter months when sales traffic is at its lowest. Restaurants acknowledged their key role in hospitality for the tourists, and many expressed the frustrations that come with success: having reached their maximum capacity for doing business well before they could serve everyone during lunch hour rushes, they lamented having to turn away loyal, local customers in order to serve packed restaurants of visitors on a first-come-first-serve basis. Restaurants also bemoaned being short staffed and finding their restrooms overwhelmed with refuge by the high traffic volume. Other business owners on Main St. relayed that visitors complained of hunger and bemoaned the long waits for seating and food at the restaurants.
THE CHALLENGES: The main issues that the room identified were:
A lack of bathroom availability, clean up & maintenance.
A shortage of prepared food available for customers to grab and go.
Limited restaurant seating turn around and capacity during the peak-tourism rush hours when the boats were docked.
Limited way-finding tools to direct traffic to prevent bottle-necking and crowds at restaurants that had already reached maximum capacity.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: The room had many ideas to share for solutions. Here were some of the suggestions that came up:
Find a way to fund an employee for bathroom cleaning and restocking of the village Visitors’ Center bathrooms and additional port-a-toilets.
Work with the village to ask Seastreak to stagger the times when the boats docked on days with two boats to give restaurants a time gap between waves of customers.
Work with the village to come up with street signage and proper way-finding tools to direct visitors to hiking trails, museums, and landmark attractions that will help prevent bottle-necking at peak hours on Main Street.
Provide tourist kiosks at the dock to help with way-finding and town navigation.
Create a “food services menu” to distribute to visitors on the Seastreak, to provide a way-finding tool that would explain the different food offerings and encourage Seastreak’s customers to call in advanced reservations or pre-order boxed lunches for pickup.
Restaurants offer boxed lunch kiosks and outposts to serve the overflow of business.
Businesses put into place a bathroom cleaning schedule among their staff during high traffic times to keep restrooms clean and in order.
Restaurants encourage local and loyalty customers to make advanced reservations on busy weekends so locals don’t have to wait of feel pushed out.
Pursue local outlets and businesses to provide pop-up food services, such as hot-dog stands and BBQ fundraisers at the firehouse or boat club, food trucks, or other pop-up food services during peak hours of high-volume traffic weekends.
St. Mary’s Church parish hall has offered businesses an opportunity to use it’s commercial kitchen, tables, chairs, and restrooms, for pop-up food services during peak visitor traffic periods of the year.
WRAP UP: While not everyone in the room agreed on the solutions, the group agreed that keeping an eye on the greater goals of supporting economic vitality in the area and not putting any one business group’s best interest first, but rather considering how to support the greater good for the community and local economy was necessary to overcome these challenges.
NEXT STEPS: The following were proposed next steps:
Follow up meeting in January for food services businesses to discuss how they can better manage the increasing demands during high traffic times of the year.
Chamber Board members meet with the Village of Cold Spring’s Mayor and Trustees to evaluate gaps in the budget and village structure that need to be filled in order to manage and cover the extra demands made on the village by tourism.
Create a budget proposal request plan to bring to the Putnam County E.D.C., Department of Tourism, and Economic and Energy Committee, and Legislature for tourism management funding.