Andy Sanborn, former state senator and owner of Draft Sports Bar & Grill and the Concord Casino, a small-scale charitable gaming operation in downtown Concord, has proposed a 43,000-square-foot casino, bar and hotel on the city’s east side. (Courtesy photo)
With the need for housing dire, Concord is expected to see a new casino built on land that was once eyed for a multifamily development.
The Flatley Company folded on talks for a project in East Concord in 2021 in favor of a different opportunity downtown. Since then, the 13-acre plot gained Planning Board approval to be former state Sen. Andy Sanborn’s next casino.
In July of that year, the Flatley Company asked the city of Concord for a zoning change that would have allowed them to build housing on the site.
Months later, Flatley officials withdrew the request and abandoned the project in favor of purchasing the former New Hampshire Employment Security building on South Main Street. Despite the more than $2.5 million in public investment into the building, the City Council sold it to Flatley for $350,000. The new building is set to open as the Isabella Apartments later this summer.
With Flatley out of the east side development, Sanborn became the next interested party in the land.
Concord Mayor Byron Champlin was on both the City Council and Planning Board amid these conversations and said that both developments were in play at the same time.
While Champlin said he cannot recall the specific sequence of events with the projects, he knew the downtown development was a priority at the time, given the city had several failed purchasing agreements.
“Because that was such a prominent piece of property and potentially such a high revenue generating property, I think our focus would have been on that, he said. “But I’m not 100 percent sure that these discussions were going on at the same time.”
A year after Flatley withdrew from the site, in September of 2022, Sanborn requested a preliminary site design review for his 43,000-square-foot gaming hall, restaurant and bar.
To Champlin, losing potential housing to a casino development was not an outcome he favored.
“It’s unfortunate that the Flatley Company decided not to move forward with their housing proposal there and the next interested buyer was the Sanborns,” he said.
The city only has so much say in development outside of site review, compliance with zoning laws and safety, Champlin said.
“We only have limited control over what a willing seller and a willing buyer decide to do in terms of the future of a piece of property,” he said. “We’re limited in what we could do and that’s the situation we were in with the casino proposal… No one is more strongly against casino gambling in the city than I am.”
Estimates show that New Hampshire is currently short by about 23,000 housing units to meet current demand and that the state needs to build 60,000 units by 2030 to address the deficit. While over 1,000 units are currently in the works in Concord, a different builder pulled outof an adjacent site to Break O’Day Drive, citing development costs.
The East Concord site is still listed for sale for $1.5 million by Premiere Properties. To Scott Walker, the real estate agent, Flatley’s choice to pull out of the development is a product of juggling multiple sites at once.
“I think it’s nothing more than a developer that has lots of different irons in the fire,” he said. “They determine which ones they can do at a certain time, they can’t do them all.”
In a letter to Concord City Council from July 6, 2021, Kevin Walker, a civil engineer for the Flatley Company, said the developer had talked to a slate of Concord city employees about a zoning change at the site to build housing, including Deputy City Manager Carlos Baia, City Planner Heather Shank and Zoning Administrator Craig Walker, all of whom have left in recent years.
The only current staff member involved in conversations was Matt Walsh, who did not respond to requests for comment. Walker from the Flatley Company could not be reached.
Shank, now a senior planner for New Hampshire’s Department of Business and Economic Affairs, said Flatley was in talks with the city about the development but never submitted formal plans.
As city planning staff, their role is to help facilitate applications, Shank said.
“There is never a discussion about ‘either, or,’ anything like that,” she said. “When I was a city planner, there was no prioritization of projects. Our role at the time is to facilitate whatever application comes through the process and sometimes, when they come to that process they determine that for whatever reason, something is not penciling out for them.”
Richard Woodfin, the Concord Planning Board Chair, was unaware that the site was discussed as potential housing since formal proposals never came before the planning board.
Instead, Woodfin and his board dealt with an onslaught of public hearings, legal challenges and conversations related to Sanborn’s casino proposal.
Last year, Kassey Cameron, a Concord resident filed lawsuits against both the city’s planning and zoning boards over their approval of the casino, stating that residents were not notified about the continuation of a public hearing and raising concerns about zoning regulations.
Merrimack County Superior Court ruled that Cameron does not have standing to contend the decision, as she lives a about mile away.
Sanborn lost his charitable gaming license last year, after he fraudulently spent over $800,000 in COVID-19 relief money to purchase luxury cars. A judge ruled that he had to sell his Concord Casino, located downtown, although he received a 90-day extension to do so at the beginning of July.
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