This week, Concord residents can weigh in on the impact Northern Pass could have on places of scenic beauty or cultural significance in the capital city.
The state attorney general’s office will be hosting workshops the energy project across the state in the next two weeks, including one scheduled Thursday in Concord. Senior Assistant Attorney General Peter Roth is representing the public during the state’s permitting process and said these events will help with his review.
“We thought local people would have unique perspective about their own communities – what they consider to be scenic, what they consider to be historic, what they consider to be culturally significant,” Roth said.
A partnership between Eversource Energy and Hydro-Quebec, Northern Pass would travel 192 miles from Pittsburg to Deerfield. The transmission line would bring more than 1,000 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to the New England grid, enough to power roughly 1 million homes. The latest iteration would bury 60 miles of the route, including through the White Mountain National Forest. As proposed, however, its 8-mile path through the northern and eastern parts of Concord would be above ground.
The permitting process with New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee and the U.S. Department of Energy is ongoing. Concord and other individual communities do not have the power to decide whether Northern Pass moves forward. Proponents have argued Northern Pass is needed to reduce high electricity costs in New England. Critics say it will hurt the environment and property values.
Roth said he is not aware of Northern Pass representatives who will attend the workshop. The event will open with a presentation from experts hired by the state to provide evidence of the project’s potential impact. Then community members will break into smaller groups to identify those areas of interest on a map and fill out a questionnaire.
“People have been writing to me throughout the case, saying, ‘This spot is important,’ ” Roth said. “All the public meetings we’ve had, people have been telling me and showing me pictures that are important to them.”
A Concord city council subcommittee held a half dozen meetings last year to study the project, and in October, the full council recommended the line be buried through the capital city. Eversource, however, has said that option is too costly and cumbersome.
“The Northern Pass project has the potential to provide substantial benefit to New Hampshire, but only if it is affordable to complete the project,” Eversource spokesman Martin Murray said at the time. “We’ve worked hard with communities to determine what affordable steps we can take to reduce potential impact.”
Ward 10 Councilor Dan St. Hilaire represents a large swath of East Concord, where he said the line could impact the scenic Turtle Pond area.
“It would be a shame to see large power structures going through there,” St. Hilaire said.
Ward 9 Councilor Candace Bouchard, who represents the Heights, noted the route’s path across Loudon Road and near McKenna’s Purchase condos.
“I do think the workshop that’s going to be done is a great opportunity for everyone interested in the project to get an idea of what it may look like,” she said.
In the meantime, Concord is still contesting its place in the ongoing permitting process for Northern Pass. More than 100 groups, individuals and municipalities were granted intervenor status, which means those entities can file motions with the state’s Site Evaluation Committee. In hopes of streamlining the comment process, the regulators sorted intervenors into bundles with similar interests.
The capital city, however, wants to stand alone.
“We were always concerned as a city and the largest community on the route that we had interests that were distinct from other communities,” Carlos Bais, deputy city manager for development, said. “So we wanted to make sure that we had the full protection of allowing us to work as an independent entity.”
So last week, Deputy City Solicitor Danielle Pacik filed an appeal of that grouping with the New Hampshire Supreme Court. In that document, Concord asks to be a separate and independent intervenor. The court has not yet responded.
“This is such an important issue that I think every voice needs to be heard,” St. Hilaire said. “There’s no point in having these hearings if they aren’t going to hear from everybody.”
The Concord workshop will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Heights Community Center at 14 Canterbury Road. Other workshops are scheduled Monday at the Littleton Opera House in Littleton; Aug. 2 in the Colebrook Elementary School cafeteria; and Aug. 3 in the Lancaster Auditorium. Those events also begin at 6 p.m.
All information about the city’s Northern Pass subcommittee – contact information for member councilors, agendas, minutes, legal documents and maps – can be found at concordnh.gov.
(Megan Doyle can be reached at 369-3321, mdoyle@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @megan_e_doyle.)