After Bohler Engineering and Liscotti Development representatives finished their proposal for a Dollar General store in Boscawen on Tuesday night, planning board member Rhoda Hardy had one thing on her mind.
“Is there any way to mitigate the bumblebee appearance of the Dollar General store?” she asked.
Hardy was referring to the signature black-and-yellow design of the chain variety store, which has been looking to plot several new locations in the area. Some Henniker residents are putting up a fight against the chain setting up shop on Route 114. Abutter Chris Bremer is leading the charge, looking to preserve the peace, tranquility and noncommercial quality of his town.
Other residents say they want to see local businesses like Henniker Pharmacy thrive in town, despite the lower prices offered by commercial chains, such as Dollar General.
If Dollar General is successful, the Henniker store will join the 900 new locations the business plans to open in 2016.
It may be joined by yet another in Boscawen. Tim Cranston of Bohler Engineering and on behalf of Lisciotti Development gave a preliminary presentation to the Boscawen planning board Tuesday.
“The project is on King Street, just north of Queen Street,” Cranston said. It would be on a 61,000-square-foot lot along Route 3, just across the street from a funeral home.
He said that a full site development plan should be submitted to the planning board within one or two months, though there are some areas he said may be missing. Dollar General likes to apply for signage separate from the building itself, Cranston said.
In the meantime, the project will require a traffic study.
The sign may present some complications, since Dollar General signs are usually back-lit, and Boscawen allows for only dark-sky, or non-lit, signs.
But most of Tuesday night’s discussion focused on the appearance of the store, specifically, it’s “bumblebee yellow” color.
“It’s really not part of King Street Boscawen to have yellow and black,” Hardy said. “Even a softer yellow.”
She said that was one of the main points of opposition to the Dunkin’ Donuts in Boscawen, which eventually changed its design to the tan, wooden-looking building it is today.
“It’s not as gaudy as it used to be,” Hardy said.
But the Lisciotti and Bohler Engineering representatives said that the colors are part of Dollar General’s marketing strategy and are likely not to change.
Hardy also wondered about traffic issues around Queen Street, which she and other planning board members noted is already difficult to turn off of during certain times of the day.
Cranston said the store shouldn’t be too busy, however, with an anticipated 10 transactions per hour. Loading trucks would only be there once a week, about 7 a.m. on Mondays.
Planning board members had few other questions, and the dozen or so members of the public didn’t raise hands or voices either.
If the store plan goes through, it will join the existing 17 Dollar General stores in New Hampshire. One of them, as planning board member Doug Hartford noted, is just down the road from the proposed site, along Fisherville Road in Penacook.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)