FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 28, 2025
Saratoga Lake Homeowners Launch Website Demanding NYS DOT Honor Six-Year-Old Promise
NYSDOT-BrokenPromises.com chronicles ongoing dispute over destroyed lake access following emergency road repair
SARATOGA LAKE, NY – Four homeowners who lost their only safe access to their private lakefront property during a 2019 state emergency roadrepair have launched a website to pressure New York State to fulfill its written promise to restore their access.
The website, NYSDOT-BrokenPromises.com, details how the New York State Department of Transportation (NYS DOT) demolished the homeowners’ stairs to their docks while constructing an emergency retaining wall on Route 9P, then failed to replace them despite documented assurances.
“Six years ago, we cooperated fully when the state needed to address a dangerous road collapse,” said Peter Hopper, president of the Spruce Ridge Association, the neighbors’ HOA. “NYS DOT promised in writing to replace our stairs. Today, we still can’t safely access our own property.”
The emergency began in 2018 when large sections of Route 9P pavement broke away and slid 20 feet onto the homeowners’ docks below. After Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner alerted NYS DOT to the hazard, the agency constructed a 12-foot-high, 200-foot-long retaining wall in May 2019, destroying the existing stairs in the process.
Despite multiple meetings and correspondence over six years, NYS DOT has offered only a fraction of the replacement cost and insists the homeowners—all retirees—manage the complex engineering and construction on the steep terrain themselves.
“We’re not engineers or construction experts,” Hopper said. “The state has the expertise and resources to rebuild what they destroyed. We’re simply asking them to keep their word.”
The homeowners have contacted Governor Hochul and NYS DOT Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez, requesting their intervention. Those efforts generated no significant response.
“We’ve exhausted all other options,” said neighbor Charlie Murphy. “We’re four middle-class retirees in an exhausting fight with New York State, hoping public pressure will finally make them do the right thing.”
For more information, visit NYSDOT-BrokenPromises.com.
Saratoga Springs Politics 
I wish I was at that meeting too with CBS News since I’m part of the four and I was only told that you were meeting with them as a retired person and a senior citizen on a fixed income who only enjoyment during the summer months were to go down at the lake and just enjoy the views of the lake instead I’m stopped from it
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