City council declines to support application for planning grant

LACONIA — City councilors declined an agenda item on Monday which would have permitted the city’s planning department to apply for grant funding up to $100,000.

The decision came during a tumultuous regular meeting which attracted a large crowd of residents who expressed their disapproval of a number of items on the agenda relating to housing and zoning issues.

“We were a finalist, we thought we had a grant through the congressionally directed spending to do the Master Plan update, something we’ve been talking about for a long time,” City Manager Kirk Beattie told councilors during the meeting.

“We would still be back in front of you for a public hearing and an approval if we were to be accepted for the grant, this just gives them — when they turn in the grant application — that it has some early support from you to at least move forward with a grant like this, especially when it’s such a big dollar figure.”

The Housing Opportunity Grant, worth up to $100,000, would come as part of the state InvestNH initiative. The program has $5 million allocated to provide grants to municipalities to analyze and update their land use regulations to increase opportunities for housing development. The New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs had contracted with New Hampshire Housing to administer the program.

The initial $5 million was exhausted within its first year and a second $2.9 million was allocated to the program. The deadline to apply for the second wave of funding is Monday, Sept. 30.

In a city staff report prepared with the council’s agenda, Assistant Planner Tyler Carmichael explained that the city’s planning department would use the grant monies to rewrite the land use and vision sections of its Master Plan and to add chapters on housing and implementation. Funding would also be used to audit the city’s zoning ordinance, subdivision regulations and site plan review regulations for the causes of a lack of affordable housing in Laconia and to identify potential changes to those regulations.

“Because it is a housing opportunity grant, we want to look at a housing chapter, which is something we were discussing with the last funding as well,” Carmichael said Monday night. “That’s not workforce housing, it’s housing as a whole for the city.”

“So as part of the Master Planning process, we’re going to study what kind of housing we need and maybe where in the community it is best fit?” Ward 3 Councilor Eric Hoffman asked.

“Correct, we already have a study that was done by the Lakes Region Planning Commission in 2023, of the amount of housing that we’re going to need by 2040,” Carmichael said. “At the end of the day, we want to make it more specific to Laconia because we agree that we don’t have enough data, as a city, to understand what our true needs are.” 

The motion which would have formally declared council support for the city to pursue the grant opportunity died on the table after councilors tied 3-3 and, Mayor Andrew Hosmer was absent, so there was no tie-breaking vote.

Councilors expressed concern regarding the grant, wondering if it was related to another agenda item to apply for a special designation related to housing which would have made the city eligible for preferential access to state funding, and concern regarding any potential zoning ordinance changes that may come as a result.

“This grant money is just mostly for the Master Plan that we’ve been trying to update for a long time,” City Planner Robert Mora said.

Councilors Tony Felch (Ward 6), Mark Haynes (Ward 4) and Eric Hoffman (Ward 3) supported the item and councilors Bruce Cheney (Ward 1), Robert Soucy (Ward 2) and Steven Bogert (Ward 5) did not support the item.