For Alex Streeter, a $10 million price tag for a new golf course clubhouse loomed as an enormous expense presented with little context.

In front of Concord City Council Monday night, Steerer crunched a few numbers of his own.

With a proposal in front of the council for a $10.3 million build a brand new structure at the Beaver Meadow Golf Course – a one-story, 15,000-square-foot building – the total price for construction would be $680 per square foot, he said. That’s nearly double the cost of residential construction and supersedes commercial buildings.

At this price, it was more in line with the cost of a five-star hotel, he said.

“That’s insane,” said Streeter, an engineer. “If you want to build a community center. Build a community center. It doesn’t require a pro shop. It doesn’t require a publicly-owned but privately-operated restaurant.”

His points will now become part of a larger conversation as the city goes back to the drawing board with plans for a clubhouse space.

In front of an overflowed council chambers, with residents lining the walls and sitting criss-crossed on the floor in front of rows of chairs, Mayor Jim Bouley made an announcement before the public hearing began: City councilors would listen to residents’ comments, but then recess the matter and send it back to the design committee.

The move meant the clubhouse at the city-owned course would be decided by the next set of councilors, who will take their seats in January with Mayor-Elect Byron Champlin at the helm and six new faces around the table.

“I would ask that the committee take the proposal back to the committee, listen to what the community has said, what they like and what they don’t like, etcetera,” said Bouley. “Do you change the proposal, do you stay with what you have, do you just decide to let the building fall in on itself and decay?”

The committee will then bring forth a proposal to the next council.

In a two-hour marathon hearing, many criticized the current proposal for its cost and said the city should have been more transparent with the public about the growing price tag.

Some supported the new clubhouse as an investment that was long overdue to improve a historic community asset.

When the new skate house at White Park opened in 2019, a neighborhood committee helped foot the bill for the project. Supporters of Beaver Meadow should be asked to do the same, said residents like Steerer.

These partnerships will help alleviate pressure on taxpayers, who spoke about rising costs in the city.

“Even a modest increase in property taxes does become significant,” said Jessica Wheeler Russell, a Ward 2 resident and at-large member of the Merrimack Valley School District.

Lindsay Hagberg knows the pressure of property tax increase all too well. When she and her husband bought a house in Concord prior to the pandemic, they put 20 percent down on a $265,000 home. It was within their budget and they started a family.

Now, Hagberg is pregnant with her second child and watching her family become priced out of their home due to rising property taxes. Her $6,000 tax bill is now closer to $8,000. Her starter home is now assessed at nearly half a million dollars. And that’s before the tax impact of a new middle school.

“When you’re slated financially and you do everything right and you’re just getting beaten down by the truth, the crazy costs of everything else ... we don’t know what to do anymore,” she said.

The cost burden of the golf course project on young families like Hagberg’s is what makes funding a clubhouse renovation inequitable, said Lisa Beaudoin, a Ward 4 resident.

Beaudoin came with statistics to prove her point. The median age of a golfer is 54 years old and 77 percent of these players are male, she said.

“That’s an obvious small proportion of the population in terms of looking at equity,” she said.

She suggested the $10 million could go toward renovations of the athletic facilities at Memorial Field, which would serve as a more equitable choice benefiting the majority of students in the area.

“This is a wildly inequitable allocation of scant taxpayer dollars, which benefits largely, honestly, privileged white people, at the expense of failing to meet the needs and wants for the greater public good,” Beaudoin said.

Defining the needs of this greater good with the future of the clubhouse has been left in the hands of an ad-hoc committee.

Tom Croteau knows he has a unique position in this group: he’s not a golfer.

Instead, he brought a view to the table to envision the space for people like himself, who aren’t heading to Beaver Meadow for a tee time.

When asked to think about future plans for the space, he started big – a pool, walking trails, pickleball courts.

It was part of a brainstorm within the committee as they defined goals for the space.

These priorities included being creative and innovative with the space by utilizing Beaver Meadow as a year-round facility in the community. They wanted to think long-term for the next 50 to 70 years, be environmentally friendly with the space and pursue a partnership with New Hampshire Golf Association, said Brian LeBrun, the deputy city manager for finance.

Absent from that list was cost.

In a presentation to the council ahead of the hearing, LeBrun walked through the total cost of construction and renderings for the one-story building.

The total cost of construction for the 15,000-square-foot structure came out to $10.8 million, which included a new parking lot and solar panels on the roof. With nearly $500,000 in last year’s budget already allocated for clubhouse design, the final number for the taxpayer-funded bond was $10.3 million.

Previously, an estimate of $914,000 was presented as the cost to renovate the facility instead of a complete demolition and reconstruction. However, this figure was outdated, according to LeBrun, as it was from 2021.

A new renovation cost was not presented, although LeBrun speculated that with an addition of electrical improvements alone, it would be higher.

“I would be comfortable saying that it would be much more than that,” he said.

Multiple residents asked council members for a concrete number on renovation costs.

Ahead of the public hearing Charlie Russell, an attorney and long-time Concord resident, filed a set of right-to-know requests to get more information on communication between the city and H.L Turner, the architecture firm hired for the site project.

Through his request, Russell found that initial estimates for a three-story building – which the committee considered in partnership with the New Hampshire Golf Association, before they backed out – totaled $14 million.

This figure was never presented publicly, said Russell.

“Transparency has been a word thrown around,” he said. “I’m trying to pull teeth writing right-to-know requests.”

But conversations about the clubhouse have come in front of the council over the last two years, councilors said. In December 2021, the council voted to accept a report and recommendation for the ad-hoc committee to build a new facility, said Ward 9 Councilor Candace Bouchard, an outgoing member.

This report was the culmination of four meetings from the committee, which was appointed by Bouley. At one, the group visited different courses in New Hampshire that had built a new facility in the last 10 years, including Pease Golf Course in Newington and The Oaks in Somersworth, said LeBrun.

Yet the community input garnered from these conversations was limited, said Allan Hershlag, a former city council member. What the community has been asked to comment on, is quite different than what these committee proposals have entailed.

“The community has barely had time to see a project and until this evening they have not had the opportunity to comment on project funding,” he said.

With more time now for funding conversations, Sam Evans-Brown, the founder of SkiTheBeav, a nonprofit that fundraises for skiing on the course, reiterated that the group would raise money to offset costs. The group has already raised for city projects – roughly $60,000 for a groomer and a trailer for skis to offer as free rentals, he said.

There are other untapped resources, like NHTI’s architectural department, where students could be involved in drawing plans, said Doug Magee. His son currently studies architecture at Norwich University and grew up playing golf on the course. He would draw the plans for free, he said.

“There is no need to spend 10 million. We can spend that 10 million elsewhere in the community, he said.

It’s this community input and ideas that Robert Maccini asked for in a petition to the council ahead of the public hearing. With over 500 signatures, the petition forced the council to hit the brakes on the current proposal and facilitate more public conversation.

Last week, Maccini watched the Concord School Board vote to approve a new middle school at a site in East Concord, despite a vocal outcry to rebuild at the current location. Those in favor of rebuilding at Rundlett were painted as a vocal minority, he said.

He felt those asking for the council to slow the clubhouse vote down were being met with the same response.

“I’m hoping that tonight you will take a different path than the one taken by the school board, a path that leads to goodwill, renewed faith in representative government and confidence that our marvelous little city is aptly named not discord, but Concord,” he said.

Now, with the matter in front of the newly elected body, it will also bring a chance to hold city councilors accountable. For voters, like Streeter, Beaver Meadow was one issue top of mind when he went to the polls last month.

“Whether the members of this council would like to admit it or not, this particular time, this particular issue did play into my thinking for who I was voting for this most recent election,” he said.