Millville Lake Dam repairs to begin next month
Town councilors allocated $144,000 in APRA funds Monday night to help offset costs associated with repairs and rehabilitation of the Millville Lake Dam.
In 2016, the town received a letter of deficiency from the state citing falling and cracked concrete and seepage. Officials took immediate engineering steps that included downtown mapping for impacts of flooding, survey and topography for dam levels and concrete structural analysis, said Roy Sorenson, director of municipal services.
“This is a high hazard dam, meaning if it overtops, it could threaten life downstream,” Sorenson said. “It impacts quite a bit of property if it does give way.”
As part of the repairs, engineers will draw down the reservoir, reinforce the river downstream, and extend some of the walls of the dam and bring them up higher, said. Areas will be de-watered as needed to secure the work areas.
The dam has been owned by the town since 1982, which means the town is responsible for repairing and maintaining the structure. A grant application submitted to the state won the town up to $1 million in reimbursement fees, which will be given to the town when the project is finished.
The total cost of the project, which was quoted for $2.2 million by an engineer and supported by voters in March, has since increased and the town was in need of additional funding.
With the passage of the funding request, contractors and construction crews will be notified that repairs can begin after Columbus Day, when the town has had time to notify and speak with abutters, Sorenson said. Repairs should be completed by early next year. — Jamie L. Costa, Eagle Tribune
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen tours Derry Oak Village Cooperative, New Hampshire’s 150th resident-owned manufactured housing community. (Courtesy photo)
New Hampshire celebrates 150th resident-owned community, leading the nation in affordable homeownership
New Hampshire is the first state where residents of a manufactured housing community purchased their park, forming a cooperative to retain control over bylaws, like lot rent, to maintain affordability within their community.
Derry Oak Village, a 27-home park, celebrated a milestone this week as the 150th resident-owned community in the state.
Owning a manufactured home can be a path to affordable homeownership – and a way for many to downsize – but purchasing a home in a park means that the resident owns the structure, not the land it sits on.
Across the country, investors are buying manufactured housing parks in droves, and squeezing cash out of those who live there. In Belmont, an investor purchasing a park forced a Vietnam war veteran to turn the keys over to the bank when he moved out of state. He could not find a prospective buyer due to his lot rent surpassing $1,000.
And while the idea of a “mobile home” may lead some to believe changing location is simple, it isn’t. Although manufactured and mobile homes are often used interchangeably, the latter is a misnomer. The cost of dismantling siding and moving a home can quickly surpass thousands of dollars.
Yet New Hampshire leads the nation in providing an affordable alternative to homeownership with these resident-owned communities. State law dictates that when a manufactured housing park is for sale, residents are required to receive a 60-day notice, which offers them the right of first refusal to purchase the park.
The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund helps residents navigate the process – providing training on how to form a cooperative, information about their rights under state law and financing assistance.In Derry, residents of the Derry Oak Village Cooperative first learned their park would be sold in December 2022. The community loan fund helped them organize and purchase the park.
The milestone cooperative builds on a rich New Hampshire history that has evolved since 1984 when residents in Meredith purchased their park, forming the first-ever resident-owned community in the country.
Now, roughly 330 communities exist in 21 states – and vary in size from four homes to more than 400, according to ROC USA, the national arm that tracks these purchases. Homes in New Hampshire make up nearly half of this.
The trend of investors purchasing parks has also garnered the attention of federal legislators, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launching a program to help preserve manufactured housing, with $235 million in funding through the Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement program – providing grants to help repair and replace homes in parks.
Eligibility for the funding is restricted to resident-owned communities, tribal applicants, parks under non-profit or state ownership, and other qualifications that notably exclude private ownership.
The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, in partnership with the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority, applied for a $75 million award.
Since 2016, out-of-state investors have purchased at least 10 New Hampshire parks, home to nearly 3,000 units, for a total of $245 million, according to the application submitted by the community loan fund.
“Unfortunately, without low-cost financing, in most of these situations, low-income homeowners stand little chance,” they wrote in the application.
The funding would provide $60 million in infrastructure repair grants for 15 to 18 communities, which the fund estimates would help up to 1,650 homeowners in the state. The grants would include water, sewer and electric improvements for parks.
The request also outlines a $5 million preservation fund which would be used to help low-income parks compete with buyers when a park is for sale, $3 million in loan or gap financing and just over $600,000 for repairs on vacant lots.
All New Hampshire resident-owned communities would be eligible to apply for funding if the grant is awarded. The community loan fund expects to learn about awards in October.
Last year, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen introduced legislation to make the funding a permanent fixture and has celebrated New Hampshire as a leader in the resident-owned model.
“We need to do all we can to preserve the affordable housing we have now, and resident-owned communities like Derry Oak Village Cooperative are helping to do just that,” she said in a statement. “New Hampshire has led the way in the resident-owned community movement for forty years and I hope residents of other states can benefit from its success.” — Michaela Towfighi, Concord Monitor
Additional remediation efforts identified for Stony Brook development
The Jaffrey Conservation Commission has reached a consensus for a remediation plan for further violations found at the Stony Brook development, an approved 28-house development on Route 124 adjacent to the Shattuck Golf Course.
The commission met Sept. 3 to conduct a site walk on the property, and again on Wednesday in an off-schedule meeting to discuss remediation efforts for the additional violations.
The Stony Brook development has already been under scrutiny for violations that include removing at least 70 trees and 10,000 square feet of soil from areas either outside of the property lines, or within wetland buffers. The Conservation Commission met in June to discuss the violations, and at that meeting noted that since the first review of the property, there had been additional violations found, including encroachment on the opposite side of the property, near Stony Brook, and an illegal road leading to a pump house on Shattuck Golf property, which in part touches a wetland conservation area.
During the site walk on Tuesday, the Conservation Commission reviewed the additional violations, including the road.
Conservation Commission Chair Tom Ahlborn-Hsu said during Wednesday’s meeting that the original thought of the board was that the leaving the road in place would be the least-damaging option, but members have come to a compromise solution that will reconfigure the road to remove it from the wetland buffer, while leaving the majority of it in place.
“I think we came up with a good solution,” Ahlborn-Hsu said.
The board also discussed the issue of a planned conduit that would run to the pump house. The approved development plan for Stony Brook requires that all conduits be buried. The Conservation Commission recommended that developers amend that plan to allow overhead conduits just for the purposes of reaching the pump house, noting that it would allow for a pole to be placed in the wetland conservation area, as it would be a less-damaging option than burying it and avoid having to bury several hundred extra feet of cable if developers were to have to avoid the conservation area.
“I think that’s a reasonable compromise,” Ahlborn-Hsu said. “It’s by far the less damaging option and it doesn’t interfere with anyone’s views. This is a win-win for everyone. It solves the problem, doesn’t cost crazy amounts of money, and is the least damaging to what’s there.”
The commission further agreed to a plan that the wetland area near the pump house be reloamed and replanted with a suitable plant mix. That work was directed to be done by NativeScapes, a company already hired to do remediation work on the other areas of the site where tree cutting had been identified.
Related to the encroachment on the side of the property adjacent to Stony Brook, the commission discussed that cutting and removal of soil had reduced a portion of the area to silt that could wash into the brook.
The commission directed the area must be reloamed and also replanted with suitable vegetation. This work will also be done by NativeScapes.
NativeScapes had previously bid $87,500 for the remediation of identified encroachments. Ahlborn-Hsu clarified that that bid did not include reloaming and replanting either the area disturbed by the illegal road, or the encroachment near Stony Brook. He said the town would direct the company to evaluate those areas and come up with an additional quote to restore those areas, with the cost to be paid by the developer. — Ashley Saari, Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
