When it comes to roads and transportation, everybody has an opinion. How exactly to gather all those opinions isn’t always straightforward.
The state Department of Transportation is updating a document with a mouthful of a title — “Cooperative Public Process for Transportation Planning Efforts in Nonmetropolitan Areas of New Hampshire” — that tries to answer this question.
“This must be updated once every five years” to keep New Hampshire eligible for federal transportation funding, said William Watson, administrator of Planning & Community Assistance at NHDOT.
Watson said the current draft includes no major changes from past documents but makes official practices that the department has been using since COVID upended in-person meetings, such as having regular remote and hybrid public hearings.
“The idea is how to better try to engage with the public, to identify different advocacy and special interest groups and, beyond that, populations that we might not have considered … such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, working with immigrant placement services,” he said. “When there’s an opportunity for public comment, we tried to identify additional things that a community could do, or we will be doing, to reach out, to be as involved as possible with the public.”
Appropriately enough, the document itself is open for public comment. You can see it at NHDOT’s website (https://www.dot.nh.gov/public-involvement-process-procedures) or by calling Watson at 603-271-3334.
Incidentally, “nonmetropolitan” in the title refers to Census Bureau definitions. Hillsborough, Rockingham and parts of Strafford counties are considered metropolitan while the rest of the state isn’t. So Concord, like Keene, Laconia, Plymouth and other places that consider themselves pretty metropolitan, are officially non-metropolitan because they’re lumped in with less populated neighbors.
The biggest project that would be subject to these public hearings is the long-discussed expansion of I-93 through Concord and Bow. Money from the toll hike to non-state residents has been earmarked for that project but will only cover initial studies and hearings, as well as repairing or replacing red-listed bridges, which will likely begin in three or four years.
Further work on the expansion will require a lot more money, which will undoubtedly be the topic of future discussion in the State House.
