On a typical weekday afternoon, cars zip by on Route 3 in Boscawen and often don’t stop.
Known as North Main Street at its southern end and King Street along the northern portion, the road has gas stations and a few small businesses like a nursery, antiques store and gun shop. A few homes are sprinkled in, too, and though it’s a small town, Boscawen’s main thoroughfare is not exactly a village downtown.
With a grant for a zoning update and an eagerness to hear from community members, though, Town Co-administrator Alan Hardy thinks that could change for the Route 3 corridor.
Presently, the area is mostly zoned as commercial or light residential with adjacent but separate blocks for different uses.
“The net goal is a multi-use district,” Hardy said. “(To) help multiple uses live together well.”
Last spring, Boscawen applied to a new Plan NH Municipal Technical Assistance Grant program. It was one of four communities to receive a grant supported through New Hampshire Housing. The program aims to help municipalities update zoning in order to support housing.
Plan NH Executive Director Robin LeBlanc said Boscawen applied for funds with a bigger vision than just housing.
“It was looking more broadly at a revitalization of its main street,” she said.
Boscawen won the $10,000, 25 percent matching grant in May. The Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission is providing assistance, and at this point, Hardy said Boscawen is in the outreach stage.
“Typically, we would be having public hearings here,” Hardy said. As part of the Plan NH program, though, communities are required to engage with residents and actively reach out.
This is because in the past, when zoning updates were put on the town meeting warrant, Hardy said most people didn’t know about it until they were asked to say “no” or “yes” to it.
“Invariably I would have somebody walk up to me after voting on a proposal for a year and say, ‘I wish I had known about this before I voted,’ ” Hardy said. “Trying to get that information out was what drew me to the project.”
Several weeks ago, Boscawen planning board members, Hardy, and the Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission went out in pairs to interview more than two dozen residents and businesses about their vision for the community.
This was organized in part by University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension specialist Molly Donovan, who is working with Boscawen and other grant recipients through the outreach process.
“It’s interesting what we heard,” Hardy said. While traffic is the most common complaint in Boscawen – the regional planning commission and the state Department of Transportation are doing a study for this grant program – Hardy said people want better access to the rail trail by connecting it to the town’s sidewalk system.
“The recreational aspects, other than traffic, are the ones that are being talked about the most,” he said.
Hardy said more people asked that American flags be posted year-round along the utility poles in town. “We’re the host to the New Hampshire veterans cemetery,” he said.
Visitors, he added, go through town to get there. “The image of having those American flags lining the street. . .that was one of the things that came back resoundingly.”
Hardy said the town is now looking to host input sessions for the main corridor zoning update at non-municipal locations.
“I hope what we’re doing is what we – what the town – want it to be,” Hardy said. “At the end of the day, it all comes down to quality of life.”
How exactly this will play into the zoning update isn’t clear. That will have to be determined later this fall, when the zoning update is prepared as a warrant article for March 2017. A public hearing will be held before the article is finalized.
At this point, Hardy has a rough idea – he invoked the image of a small Vermont village, where businesses are stacked below residences in the same building, and where everything is within walking distance: home, work, shopping and recreation.
The Route 3 corridor in Boscawen, in other words, would be less of a throughway and more of a place to stop and stay.
LeBlanc of Plan NH said this is an increasingly common trend across the country and the state, which is why her non-profit began the new technical assistance grant program.
“I think we’re seeing more and more of that with keeping things local,” LeBlanc said. “There’s a real yearning to return to community.”
Hardy added, “Humans tend to evolve in cycles and I think we’re going back to that.”
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)