Bill Young built or renovated half a dozen houses in Concord last year – including a colonial on Penacook’s Hobart Street, built atop what had been a vacant lot seized for delinquent taxes, and a white three-bedroom on Gale Street, sold last November.
“Every one had different rules,” he said.
Young said he has been working in Concord for more than 20 years, and both his real estate and paving-excavating companies do business across central New Hampshire from their base in Chichester. The city of Concord is by far the hardest to do work in, he said, and many of the contractors in his network won’t take on projects in the city.
“Nothing’s consistent,” he said. “We try to follow all the rules and guidelines, but the goal posts are always changing.”
Young’s frustration with City Hall spurred him to do something he hadn’t done often: get involved with local elections.
“We just want fairness in the process,” he said.
Young donated to candidates he felt shared his vision for Concord that would be more welcoming of growth.
The two at-large councilors up for re-election, Amanda Grady Sexton and Fred Keach, had listened in the past when he’d reached out to city leaders to try and prompt change.
“They were responsive,” he said.
Specifically, Young said, every project receives multiple visits from code inspectors during construction. At each one, he said he gets different instructions and a different checklist for what the city wants done.
The additional work drives his cost up, as do the delays. Those costs eventually get passed on in the sale price to the homeowner.
“We just want to do it the right way,” he said. “They’re constantly reaching for something to be wrong.”
The cycle has gotten worse in recent years, Young said. He added that the recent departure of city planner of Anne Marie Skinner was a disappointment, because she’d been a clear communicator. Not that she told him everything he wanted to hear, he said, but she was helpful and explicit about what the requirements were and how to meet them.
Members of the development community across the city expressed a similar sentiment about Skinner’s departure, as previously reported by the Monitor.
Keach and Grady Sexton, who both were re-elected to their seats, said they understood where Young was coming from.
“I think we need a top-to-bottom look at community development,” Keach said of the city department that includes planning, zoning, engineering and code enforcement, “to get a look at how that’s working and not working.”
In her next term, Grady Sexton said, “my number one priority is economic development…we can’t do that if we have businesses telling us we’re one of the hardest places to do business with.”
Young gave Keach’s campaign $1,700 and $2,500 to Grady Sexton.
When asked about the donations, both emphasized that, when it comes to the particular disagreements between businesses and city hall, it wasn’t their place to step in – and a campaign donation wouldn’t change that.
“My role isn’t to hold department heads accountable,” Keach said. “But I can go to the city and ask questions… the only guarantee I make is that I’ll look into it.”
Grady Sexton, too, emphasized that “no contribution is going to buy a vote.”
The city’s tax base grew less than one tenth of one percent last year, and it meant councilors had to dip into city reserves and increase the tax rate more than expected to cover expenses. In their campaigns, both citywide representatives joined other candidates in saying Concord faces an imperative to make commercial and residential development more attractive in the city.
“We’ve recently heard a real outcry from the business community for change,” Grady Sexton said. “I hear that, and I think a lot of the other councilors do, too.”
At a candidate forum in October, Keach said that Concord is “perceived as being a very cumbersome community, not particularly friendly in getting things done.”
“That’s not to say we need to relax our standards,” he continued. “But I think we need to be clear with our standards.”
