Charles V. Wait, 57, has watched Saratoga Springs and the surrounding communities grow over the years first-hand as he’s been right in the middle of it all in his position with the Adirondack Trust Company.

Though Saratoga is enjoying an abundance of prosperity, Wait does remember a time not so long ago when the city and its business structure was struggling.

“Before we built the (Saratoga Springs) City Center, we had to put together a downtown redevelopment plan. We had no money. This was Saratoga in 1974,” Wait recalls.

The former Pyramid Mall in Wilton was sucking all of the business out of downtown Saratoga Springs, half the stores were going out of business and the remaining stores had no money. Wait knew he and the other business leaders had to come up with a plan and find a way to fund it.

“Our first plan was $1.2 million. We had to convince the property owners and the store owners to put in a special assessment district tax. You see them all over the place now,” Wait said. “You can imagine what it was like trying to convince these people that were terrified of this competition, and had no money, to raise their taxes 5 percent.”

Wait held a weekly meeting in the lobby of the bank after closing and brought all of the property owners and merchants in. They met every week for the next year and a half.

“After the year and a half, they would’ve done anything because they got so tired of me,” Wait said laughing.

Eventually they bought into Wait’s vision and the city has never looked back. Wait’s father, who preceded him as bank president, died tragically in 1983 as the city was starting to flourish. 

“I do often think about how nice it would be for my father to be able to come back. He came here after World War II. The racetrack hadn’t run for three years. Nobody had any money. It was really dingy,” Wait said. “I remember him telling me that he thought he might have made the biggest mistake of his life because it was such a depressing town.”

Wait doesn’t think his father would be totally surprised by the development of Saratoga as that was his life work to improve the city, but he does believe his father would be caught off guard by all of the ongoing condominium projects.

Wait continues to monitor the national fiscal crisis.

“This isn’t a problem with regulated local community banks. This is a problem with Wall Street. This is a problem with Lehman Brothers. This is a problem with Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley,” Wait said. “They didn’t care whether people could pay them back because they packaged this under securities and they sold it, but what happened is they got caught holding some of their own paper. They started to believe in their own nonsense.”

He admits that the crisis hasn’t affected him or the bank as of yet other then that people are nervous.