The ad-hoc committee tasked with reviewing development suggestions for a city-owned property on Old North Main Street will meet again on Thursday, May 22.
Committee members will meet at 5 p.m. to walk the site, then will gather at 5:30 p.m. in the city council chambers at City Hall downtown.
At their last meeting on April 22 at Lakes Regional Mental Health Center, members of the committee, comprising city leaders and residents, heard a presentation from Lakes Region Community Developers, the only one of four organizations who submitted letters of interest which garnered enough committee support to hear their ideas.
The purpose of the May 22 meeting, according to the agenda, is to discuss the presentation made by LRCD a month earlier.
In September of last year, the city invited developers to express interest regarding a roughly 10-acre parcel of city-owned land at the corner of Old North Main and Route 106, near the State School property. The lot is essentially vacant, other than an existing pump house, and the city received four letters of interest from various real estate development organizations.
At the Jan. 13 meeting of the city council, councilors created an ad-hoc committee to open and review the four letters of interest received, which sat unopened until the committee’s first meeting on March 11. At the same meeting, councilors approved Mayor Andrew Hosmer’s request to appoint Ward 1 City Councilor Bruce Cheney, Eric Hoffman (Ward 3) and himself to the committee. Councilors nominated citizens to sit on the committee, as well.
The city originally took ownership of the parcel in exchange for breaking a 99-year lease with the State of New Hampshire on a property located off Meredith Center Road. The Old North Main property has access to municipal water and sewer utilities.
LRCD, with a long history of developing affordable housing locally, was the only group from which committee members agreed to hear a proposal. The city also received letters of interest from Kushner Studios, Anagnost Companies and Pennrose by their Sept. 19, 2024 due date.
At their April 22 meeting, committee members heard from LRCD Executive Director Carmen Lorentz and Real Estate Development Director Kara LaSalle, who described their concept for 36 residential apartment units, providing housing options for individuals within a broad range of incomes.
Members of the public attended the meeting, some asking questions regarding the aesthetics of their proposed development, others regarding logistics, timeline and potential effects on the Laconia School District. There were also questions regarding potential impacts to wetland areas, and some comments expressed displeasure with the land being developed at all.
At present, it’s not clear if the city will move forward with developing the property or not. The committee’s purview — to open and review the four letters of interest — starts and stops at that responsibility.
“This is very conceptual. And if we were to move forward with something like this, any questions about the appearance or the exact site layout are probably best saved for a planning board meeting,” Hoffman said at the April 22 meeting. “Even developing this property at this point is not set in stone. This committee was formed to hear the concepts of developing it, and then decide if it’s something we want to go forward with.”
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