SARANAC LAKE — Despite a dire economy, one local company is looking to break ground for a multi-million-dollar facility.

That will create jobs and expand services.

St. Joseph’s Rehabilitation Center recently won a contract — one of four in upstate New York — to provide addiction counseling to U.S. veterans.

Soon to be renamed St. Joseph’s Addiction Treatment and Recovery Centers, the company also just won designation as a “Best Place to Work,” one of just 20 small-to-medium-sized businesses to earn the honor in all of New York.

REGENERATION

Regeneration is central to the momentum of success thriving here.

St. Joe’s accomplishments are reflecting internal operations and spreading into the community.

“Part of what we try to do is be a place where the agency responds to individual needs,” said CEO Bob Ross, who came on board a floundering organization less than two years ago.

As St. Joe’s started rethinking opportunity — both inside and out — Ross said, they realized the new veterans program to counter addiction fit the historic mission founded by Franciscans friars nearly 30 years ago.

In a similar vein, they began exploring an addiction counseling training program to retrofit Camp Gabriels, keeping it viable in the state prison system, a plan still under development.

They also are looking to launch a pilot non-hospital detoxification program with Adirondack Medical Center, reducing Medicaid costs by breaking a costly cycle of detoxification emergency care.

St. Joe’s already has operations in Malone and Ticonderoga.

But rather than being inundated by expectation, the company plugs each step back into the core mission.

The result is a kind of sustainable sense of potential.