Big projects, both noticed and ignored, marked Chip Chesley’s long career in Concord
Published: 06-11-2025 5:13 PM
Modified: 06-18-2025 1:07 PM |
During his 22 years leading the Department of General Services, building and operating and maintaining what might be called the underpinnings of Concord, Chip Chesley was involved with plenty of projects. Two of them, which cost millions of dollars and lasted many years, stand out.
You know all about one of them: rebuilding Main Street through downtown. You may have expressed opinions about that work, maybe more than once and maybe even loudly. “Everyone who has a drivers license is an expert for a project like Main Street,” said Chesley, 71, who retired last month.
But unless you lived in a few neighborhoods some years ago you probably know nothing about the other massive project: reshaping the city’s water and wastewater infrastructure.
“We didn’t get a lot of calls saying ‘Chip, I want to go down and tour the wastewater treatment plant!’” he said. “Just make it work, that’s what people wanted.”
Make it work they did.
“When I started here, we had a taste and odor issue,” Chesley said of city water. More than two decades later, Concord has won for the 6th time the title of best-tasting water in a competition among cities in New Hampshire.
General Services performs the tasks done by what many cities call their departments of public works: trash pickup; street maintenance, including plowing; upkeep of public properties; and operating the water plant, Concord’s two wastewater treatment plans – the big one at Hall Street and the smaller one in Penacook, originally built to handle a long-gone tannery – as well as the Everett Arena.
This grab-bag of responsibilities is vital to keep Concord running, but it is all nearly invisible to most of us. Chelsey points to TV shows of his childhood as an illustration.
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“There were police programs on television, there were fire programs on television, there was ‘Welcome Back Kotter.’ Everyone understood these elements of municipal government… Then there was ‘The Honeymooners’,” he recalled.
That classic 1950’s sitcom starred Jackie Gleason as a bus driver and rubber-limbed Art Carney as his sidekick.
“Art Carney worked in the sewers. That’s the highest level of recognition we ever got on TV,” he said.
Chesley, who says he has been called Chip as long as he can remember, has a degree in civil engineering. He was hired by Concord in 2004 after stints in Delaware and Merrimack and in private industry. At the time, Concord was in the process of upgrading all the city’s water lines, a huge undertaking, but he says his attention was drawn to the wastewater buildings.
“All of our (communities) in New Hampshire built these wastewater plants in the early 1980s. It was a big accomplishment. But they got them built and then said, ‘I’m done,’” he said. “You’d come into these plants, and they really hadn’t been touched. The staff in both instances were going 120%, working really hard to keep this puppy going… but the instrumentation was like it was when I graduated from college.”
The biggest problem were the odors from the Hall Street wastewater treatment plant, partly the result of the plant having been overbuilt. It was designed to handle 10 million gallons of sewage a day but was handling only 4 million gallons, making it difficult for waste to keep moving through the system.
There was also a two-story “biofilter” that basically sprayed partly-treated effluent over an area the size of a baseball diamond.
“It was very effective – we always met permit requirements – but we weren’t really too friendly with our neighbors,” Chesley recalled.
A variety of tweaks helped, and the city eventually built a large containment dome over the whole thing. It wasn’t elegant – it looked like something from East Germany, he joked – but it worked.
Fixing occasional taste and odor problems with city water in the summer involved a similar mix of chemistry, biology and construction, since it mostly came from issues with Contoocook River water used to supplement Penacook Lake in summer.
Planning for the Concord Main Street Project dates back the 1990s. When the project hit full steam in 2015, the big changes included much wider sidewalks and the reduction of traffic lanes from four down to two with a small lane in the middle for turning or unloading trucks.
Looking back, Chesley said the change has made the downtown livelier in some ways and quieter in others.
“It was much noisier when there were four lanes of traffic,” he said. “And pedestrian crossings were spicy.”
But he thinks the project has succeeded in its larger goal of making the city center more attractive to people. “It was a pretty sleepy downtown when we moved up here. A lot of people said Concord was a city in a coma.”
He’s also proud that the project reduced and removed many barriers for people with mobility issues, opening up businesses and the downtown to more local residents.
Chesley does have one regret, however: The Main Street project originally extended further north and south, but had to be shortened to meet the roughly $11 million budget. “It was truncated; I wish we’d had the ability to elongate it.”
Chesley and his wife, Cathy, raised two kids in Contoocook. Now that the kids are grown, they have moved to a smaller house in North Sutton. They have no plans to leave New Hampshire. “We had thought of moving someplace else, but not for long. New Hampshire is a great place.”
Looking back on big projects in his career, Chesley pointed to one big conclusion.
“This involves change, and very few people embrace change. You have to build consensus, which takes time. You have to understand that you have to go through that process to get there,” he said.
“Persistence, transparency, continued communication, empathy – those become as important as having 7-inch curbs… If you lose the confidence of your rate-payers, they may not continue to support you, and you won’t get anything done.”
David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com