In what ended up being a relatively brief discussion, the planning board and a lawyer speaking for his client all danced around two words: Langley Parkway.
“While I won’t be saying those words in public,” said lawyer Ari Pollack. “I think the public can be satisfied to know that that content was removed by agreement.”
The project on the table was a pitch from national hospital giant HCA Healthcare, which wants to build an emergency room facility at the corner of North State Street and Penacook Street, near Concord’s central fire station. It would add another for-profit healthcare facility in the city and means construction on land that has been shuttered for years.
In September, Concord administration strongly encouraged the Planning Board to require a sixteen-foot easement, giving the city rights over a stretch of property along the road for the construction of the Langley Parkway, which was thought to be off the table.
“Significant future improvements have been planned for Penacook and North State Street, as well as this intersection, as part of the Langley Parkway Project,” a report from Deputy City Manager Matt Walsh stated.
City Hall, after a negotiation, agreed to drop the easement language. But not before it had raised eyebrows and had residents hitting the phone lines of planning board members.
Why would Concord need land to build the Langley Parkway when the city council had, as a result of vocal public outcry, canceled its plans for the project years ago, they wondered.
The parkway was planned as a bypass of downtown toward Concord Hospital and would open up tracks of undeveloped land for potential housing.
The stated benefits of the roadway included improving ambulance response times and relieving downtown residential areas from cut-through traffic. It would have stretched from Concord Hospital through forestland, crossing Auburn Street and Rumford Street before outflowing onto Penacook Street and ending at North State Street.
The city’s master plan, which remains in effect, calls it “the most important and needed upgrade of the city’s roadway system.”
The project faced significant opposition from residents in the neighborhoods that would have been bisected by the roadway and by conservationists worried about the forest and trails it would disturb.
The City Council pulled it from Concord’s capital project plans in 2022, yet the project has remained controversial. When the Monitor asked a question about the project at a candidate forum in 2023, now-Mayor Byron Champlin said the paper had “resurrected the bogeyman of Langley Parkway.”
Opponents of the project have worried that the project might come back to life.
In an interview before the planning board meeting, Champlin was firm.
“From my perspective,” he said, “The Langley Parkway is a dead deal.”
Even if the parkway didn’t happen, the initial report to the planning board stated, the city would need to reconfigure the intersection by the former bank at some point in the future anyway.
“I’m not pleased that this discussion about Langley Parkway was included in the staff report,” Champlin said. “But I also understand that staff has a responsibility to take the long view and to try to make sure that they put the city in the best position possible for future contingencies.”
He continued: “It is possible at some future date, we may have to do something with Penacook Street, depending on future growth and things of that nature.”
Concord leaders have long hoped that land near the former Lincoln Financial complex just off Penacook Street would be developed – its owner, Steve Duprey, is in the process of donating a parcel to the city. According to Champlin, no imminent proposals to develop it are before the city.
The agreement between HCA Healthcare and the city includes no easement. However, the company agreed that it won’t put any buildings on that portion of the property “in anticipation of potential future improvements to the… intersection.”
In effect, the property owner and the city will cross that bridge when they come to it.
That agreement, Pollack concluded at the meeting, “is a warning to those who come in the future that that intersection simply may need future improvements, and everyone is having their eyes open about what could be proposed some future date.”
He thanked the city hall staff for revising the report.
The parkway, including the two sections of it already built, has been part of city master plans since the 1960s. The city council is expected to update the current master plan sometime in the next few years.
HCA Healthcare, which will open the urgent care, owns 190 hospitals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, including Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, in addition to more than 2,400 “ambulatory sites of care” like urgent-care facilities.
