At the Sept. 13 city council meeting, Concord residents will have a rare in-person public hearing on two dubious development projects that were slipped through during the pandemic.
This is a special opportunity for city council candidates to differentiate themselves from the incumbents who supported them. During the budget process, city manager Thomas Aspell said that taxes had to go up because nobody supported any cuts to services.
Tell him to cancel million-dollar giveaways to developers that will raise property taxes in the short term and may never result in tax reductions.
The sale of the former DES building for over $1 million less than the city has invested in it, with a waiver of zoning regulations and a requirement that the new apartments can never be affordable, seems to be directly contrary to public policy. The winning proposal was selected from 17 by city staff without the opportunity for the public to comment or even know what the others were.
Apparently, it was chosen because it would result in the most money to the TIF district and higher-income tenants to shop downtown. However, it will raise current taxes the most because of the higher number of new children in school without the school district getting any more money and worsen the parking shortage in the South End which was already a concern at the recent parking hearing.
City staff should not be deciding which developer gets the million-dollar bonus. This project needs to be rebid with the public allowed to comment on the proposals.
And the Exit 17 grocery store was a bad project from the start. The developer should have been required to contribute half the money, and the unnecessary I-93 ramp to slow down traffic is foolish when the roundabout will already make traffic slower than it is. The double roundabout will make the intended industrial development of the area less likely. If the city wants to spend $4 million on a grocery store, why not put it downtown where people wanted it instead of where only a dozen homes are within a half-mile walking distance?
It will be particularly bad if, like Nashua, this third Market Basket results in the closing of their oldest store, in this case, the Storrs Street location which is within walking distance of over a thousand households. The Granite Geek suggested the project is non-green due to the need to drive there. And the taxes paid by the development won’t support the first years of project bond payments, so property taxes from existing buildings will be diverted to this project when they could be used instead for police, fire, schools, etc.
The city council was told that the developer couldn’t afford any contribution toward Concord’s cost, and the project was supposed to die if bids came in high. But apparently, bids did come in high and the developer suddenly found money to pay the difference which magically was found to be in Canterbury’s portion of the cost.
Does anybody like the smell of this? Maybe we should discover that another $126,000 is also in Canterbury’s cost and cancel the project if the developer won’t pay that too.
(Roy Schweiker lives in Concord.)