Concord City Hall held up zoning reforms, habitually made overreaching demands on certain projects, or took an inappropriately strong stance against them, and delayed development approvals with unnecessary bureaucratic back-and-forth, according to its now-former city planner.
Anne Marie Skinner left her role earlier this month, making this the second departure of a city planner in the capital city in less than two years. Skinner’s new position is a title demotion in a smaller city for a 40% cut in pay.
“I was hired as a city planner, and my boss did not allow me to fulfill the role of city planning,” she said. She emphasized that she didn’t want to leave Concord, but said that “if I can’t fulfill my role, there is no point in me being there.”
A vacancy at the top of the planning office complicates imminent plans to update Concord’s Master Plan and overhaul the city’s land-use regulations. As a housing crisis continues in Concord and statewide, those updates are pinpointed as priorities of the City Council. The current zoning ordinance is widely regarded as out of date and an obstacle to development, especially housing, in the city.
These issues – whether Concord is pursuing housing reform fast enough and its relationship with those looking to build here – were at the heart of her friction with city administration.
After Skinner told people in Concord she was leaving, she said the private development community, from project leaders to land use lawyers to surveyors to architects, reached out to her and to city leaders, praising her work or trying to get her to stay. This was confirmed in emails obtained by the Monitor.
“This is truly a loss for the city, and if there is any chance she might reconsider, it would be in the best interest of the Concord community that you not let her go,” wrote Jonathan Halle, co-owner of Warrenstreet Architects, in a message to the current mayor, city manager and longtime former mayor Jim Bouley. “I would urge you to look at the reasons why she is leaving, it’s not Anne Marie. Allowing her to leave does not solve any underlying issue.”
Others shared the sentiment.
“Having worked with a slew of planners and planning staff in Concord over the years, I can say that she’s been the best,” John Arnold, a land use lawyer in Concord, wrote to the city manager. “She’s always been even-handed, and plays by the rules. She has a good understanding of the regulations, and is consistent in her interpretation and application of them, which is critical for developers looking to do projects in the City.”
In an interview, Laurie Rauseo, part of the team behind the Merchant’s Way complex at Exit 17, said she enjoyed working with Skinner because she “paid attention to what the rules were and just interpreted the rules directly.”
“We knew going in what we needed to do to satisfy those rules,” she said. “There was no other hidden thing to worry about.”
Perhaps no name is more synonymous with successful development in Concord than that of Steve Duprey: from helping guide the makeover of Main Street to his two latest projects – the Arts Alley block and renovation of the downtown Holiday Inn into a Doubletree. He found Skinner’s departure regrettable.
“Anne Marie was the best planner I’ve seen and worked with” he said, describing her as practical, fair and by the book.
Duprey underlined that he saw no ill intent in the way the city operates, enjoys working with everyone in city staff, and wasn’t privy to the workplace dynamics behind Skinner’s departure.
At the same time, Duprey said, “It is generally regarded that Concord is one of the most difficult communities to do development in.”
Duprey said the city is missing “an urgency to get things done.”
The Monitor attempted to contact others in the development industry, including but not limited to those who reached out to City Hall. Many declined to be interviewed, citing a fear of retribution from city administration if they made a public critique. They worried it would be impossible to do future business in the city.
Skinner pointed to the leadership in City Hall, namely Deputy City Manager of Development Matt Walsh and City Manager Tom Aspell. Both declined to comment for this story.
“Your story involves city personnel matters,” Walsh said in an email. “Therefore, the city has no comment. “
To Skinner, Concord’s thorny reputation is deserved. Whether a project will get its approvals depends not just on whether it meets the city’s written standards, she said, but whether it bends to the preferences of city hall leadership. When she tried to do things differently, she said she was overruled and told that she was bad at her job.
Aspell declined to be interviewed for this story, refusing to discuss the city’s development strategy or Skinner’s departure, saying they were personnel matters.
Mayor Byron Champlin took a similar stance. “I am not going to comment on personnel issues,” he said.
Skinner was hired in October 2023 as an assistant planner. She was quickly promoted to the lead planning position after the departure of Heather Shank at the end of 2023. Skinner has worked in planning for 28 years, about half of that in municipal positions, and when she was promoted in August, she was praised as a “seasoned professional” who would lead the city through an upcoming overhaul of its long-term planning vision and zoning regulations.
After giving notice in September, Skinner’s departure was effective October 7. She took a job to serve as an assistant planner with a $65,000 annual salary in Manitowoc, Wisconsin – a maritime hub on Lake Michigan with a population of 35,000. City records show she was paid more than $111,000 in Concord in 2024.
Meanwhile, development in Concord is showing signs of stress.
The city’s overall property valuation grew by less than one tenth of one percent last year, and the three largest proposed housing projects in the city, all on the east side of the river, have slowed or stalled altogether: One is held up in court, another was put on the market with its permits in hand, and the third has yet to get city permissions for the housing portion of its plans.
‘Concord Next’
After city administration scrapped a previous effort to update the city’s housing regulations under Shank’s tenure, Skinner was eager to help shepherd in short-term changes. The business community was eager to see them materialize.
“Here we are in October,” Skinner said, “And nothing’s happened.”
Beginning in 2017, the city hired a consultant to update its zoning rules. Dubbed “Concord Next,” it would have implemented what’s called a form-based code, one that focuses less on regulating land by its specific purpose – residential, commercial, industrial – and more on the physical appearance and fit with existing areas.
Before this new standard could go before the public, the planning board or city councilors for their official input, it was quietly scratched. The effort had consumed six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. A draft of a new ordinance was completed, but never formally reviewed. A website for the project was taken down.
In October 2023, Walsh told the Monitor his office was still reviewing the draft of the new code. A few months later, in early 2024, the city took the stance that it made no sense to overhaul its zoning rules when the city was about to update its master plan. Zoning should be informed by the master plan’s vision, not the other way around.
At some point in that stretch, Concord Next was set aside. What also changed during that period was that the city planner position held by Shank, who had led the charge on Concord Next, became vacant.
Shank declined to be interviewed for this story.
In a previous interview with the Monitor, Walsh described a handful of reasons that Concord Next didn’t move forward. The strongest was concern at City Hall that Concord wasn’t prepared for the housing density that the new zoning would bring.
“I’m going to use the word unwieldy,” Walsh said of Concord Next. “I think it became too big. I think it became too ambitious in some ways.”
If approved, the new code would have specifically allowed more condensed and multifamily housing in more traditionally single-family areas, as long as it matched the neighborhood’s overall look. One project in Penacook that used Concord Next as a guide proposed to build more than 200 housing units, but under the existing rules, the developer was forced to scale back to 83 condos.
Skinner, arriving in Concord during the tail end of Concord Next, said she shared Walsh’s concerns about its reach, but she disagreed with the decision to nix it.
“If planning board didn’t like it, and if City Council didn’t like it, then the planning board gives a recommendation to City Council to deny it,” she said. Walsh “never even let it get to that point.”
Instead, in early 2024, newly seated Mayor Champlin and city administration had decided to pursue interim changes to the zoning ordinance, short-term tweaks that would loosen some of the most pressing yet small-scale issues in the current rules.
Then, a year passed.
Walsh announced this March that the city was working on a first batch of interim amendments to the zoning rules and said they’d start going up for review the following month.
Allowing detached accessory dwelling units, or in-law apartments, separate from a main house, was near the top of the list.
Skinner said she had completed drafts of these amendments in December, after going through them with other planning staff and with the city attorney’s office. She was excited to see them move forward.
She knew at the time that state lawmakers were looking to make some top-down regulatory changes to encourage housing growth, including a rule about allowing detached accessory dwelling units. She was eager to beat them to it.
“I was hoping to get ahead of the state legislature,” she said. “I wanted to show that Concord is ahead and we’re being progressive, and we’re responding to the needs of the community. And, look, we’re doing something because we want to, not because the state is telling us we have to.”
She pushed for these new rules to go before the Planning Board sooner, and for other things to be considered, like allowing manufactured housing outside of parks. Walsh, she said, held them up.
“I don’t have the authority to present it to planning board or any of the committees,” she said. “He has to do that.”
Ten months later, only two such changes have been enacted.
The state beat Concord to the punch on in-law units and other housing-related rules.
The new accessory dwelling unit ordinance, which was required for the city to become compliant with state law, was approved by the City Council on Oct. 14.
Champlin, when asked by the Monitor at a recent candidate forum, didn’t give an explanation for why it had taken the city nearly two years to enact the short-term changes to the zoning ordinance.
“There should be a sense of urgency,” he said of zoning and master plan changes broadly. ” I certainly will be working, if the voters allow me to over the next two years, in expediting that process.”
Allowing the city’s out-of-date rules to stand for so long, according to Skinner, slows housing growth.
“No one likes to hear this, but our zoning ordinance right now is so anti-housing,” she said, “The lot sizes, the frontage and the setback requirements are extreme, and they’re not housing friendly.”
The city was designated a Housing Champion by the state last year, meaning it checked certain boxes for being open to housing. City leaders have worn the title with pride.
However, according to its former city planner, “Concord is so not a housing champion.”
‘No consistency’
Fueling Skinner’s departure were regular clashes she had with Walsh over projects seeking approval from the city.
Frequently, she felt the city made requirements of projects to get approvals that weren’t mandatory. Other times, she felt the city put bureaucratic obstacles in the way of projects it didn’t like. In general, she said, the city’s method of requiring sign-offs from multiple division heads in addition to specific conditions caused hold-ups.
“There’s no consistency,” she said, “It changes the goalposts…And that’s why we’re difficult to work with, because whoever does the inspection, or whoever’s the city engineer or, you know, whatever whim Matt has for the day, that’s how it gets decided.”
The most recent of these disputes centered around an urgent care facility proposed for North Main Street at the former Santander Bank.
City regulations state that the Planning Board may require private property owners to give the city rights to use their land, called an easement, when the city’s long-range planning calls for the construction or expansion of a road in that area.
A September report – since removed from the city’s website – describes the city’s plan for the controversial Langley Parkway and its history. It urges that the planning board require an easement in case the road is ever built.
Skinner objected. City rules give the planning board members the option to require the easement, and she felt it was up to them to determine whether it was needed. Her original draft report, which she provided to the Monitor, outlined that option. She said she was reprimanded for it, and the report was rewritten by Walsh.
“I said that it’s the staff’s role to present the facts, present what the regulations state, and it’s the planning board’s decision,” Skinner said. “We’re not supposed to sway them one way or the other. He said that it’s poor planning to not do so.”
Skinner took her name off the rewritten report.
At the October Planning Board meeting, the report was replaced with a new one, after the city and the urgent care’s attorneys negotiated the easement out.
Planning Board Chair Richard Woodfin declined an interview for this story, saying he had no comment other than to say he had a positive working relationship with Skinner.
There were larger disputes between Skinner and Walsh.
Last year, the city stalled what had been its largest proposed housing development, called Monitor Way. The developer proposed building mixed use projects on two pieces of raw land along the Merrimack River, one held by the owners of the Concord Monitor, the other by the Wheelabrator trash incineration plant. The Monitor had no role in the development plans.
Two years after it had first been pitched, a downsized version of the project on the 40-acre Wheelabrator parcel hit a dead end when the Zoning Board voted against a variance to allow the proposed housing on industrially-zoned land.
A report to the Zoning Board stated that the project did not qualify for a variance because it was in the public’s interest to preserve the city’s industrial areas for future business. The board ultimately agreed.
“It is unnecessary to grant a zoning variance to allow for residential development at this industrially-zoned property as ample housing development is currently in production, and sufficient opportunities exist for housing development at other non-industrially zoned properties throughout the city,” the report stated.
That recommendation had Skinner’s name on it. She told the Monitor she did not write it.
She found it “inappropriate” that Walsh gave a 30-minute presentation to the zoning board arguing against the variance. It felt to her that he was testifying against the project.
“Staff is supposed to be neutral…It’s not the role of staff to act as the applicant or the applicant’s opposition,” she said. “That was unusual. It was wrong.”
Kevin Lacasse, the New Hampton-based developer who had been behind that project, recently sold the rights to the land that would have been part of the neighborhood.
“I’ll put it this way,” he said. “I wouldn’t do another project in Concord.”
Lacasse said this contrasted his experience in other New Hampshire cities, including Berlin, Claremont and, most recently, two roughly 50-unit projects in Laconia.
“It’s just been night and day different,” he said.
‘Love to stay’
Beyond her frustration about the city’s treatment of certain projects and its lagging housing reforms, she said she left her job because she found herself in a work environment where she was constantly shut down and degraded.
Skinner first raised her concerns about this culture with City Manager Aspell in July. He never followed up.
Last month, after she announced her plans to leave, she met with him again and sent him an email outlining how much she enjoyed working in Concord and the conditions under which she would continue.
“I would love to stay, but with a different boss,” she wrote on Sept. 19. “Exciting things are just around the corner for Concord and that is the fun part of planning.”
She would remain in her role, she said, if the planning department were separated from the leadership of Walsh, a 24-year city employee who was Skinner’s direct supervisor. Doing so would mean a fundamental reorganization of City Hall. Walsh is one of two deputy city managers and oversees not just planning and zoning but engineering, community development, code enforcement and special projects. In Concord, many department heads report to a deputy city manager, not Aspell directly.
Some city councilors were frustrated or concerned by Skinner’s departure. They also stressed that they only directly oversee the city manager.
The vacancy, said City Councilor Michele Horne, is “very, very unfortunate when us as a council are trying to move past these issues around housing.”
“Having a master plan process coming up, this is a major concern,” she added. “It’s concerning to see people leaving major city roles voluntarily.”
At-Large Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton agreed.
“I’m confident the city manager will take time to assess how to ensure stability moving forward, including a need for any possible restructuring,” she said. “If we want to expand our tax base through economic development in order to reduce the tax burden on our homeowners and renters, we need to make sure that this next hire is positioned for success.”
Judith Kurtz, an at-large councilor who ran on zoning reform, said in an interview that she did not think the council’s goal for housing and zoning reform had been moving at a sufficient pace.
“It’s been slower than I would have hoped,” she said. “I’ve been told that it is a work in progress.”
To Lacasse, easing some of Concord’s friction with development starts with one thing: “Take a close, close look at staff that they have.”
