City planners moving housing projects forward, working to build Master Plan

LACONIA — A newly revitalized city planning department is working at full staff for the first time in years to further the development of more than 100 new housing units and a new Master Plan.

Planning and Community Development Director Rob Mora — who started working in the position in January after serving as the master planner for the state Department of Military Affairs and Veteran Services — understands the city intimately, having previously worked as a municipal zoning technician and assistant city planner. Mora is a native of Laconia and served 12 years in the U.S. Air Force. 

And he’s got a big vision for the future development of Laconia, councilors learned Tuesday evening when Mora presented the planning department's portion of the proposed municipal budget, which will be the subject of a public hearing at the city council meeting June 10.

“Our planning department has had a massive turnover in the last year,” Mora said. “We then got our Assistant Planner Tyler [Carmichael], who’s here with me, in February. We then hired an administrative assistant in March, and we have a conservation person starting [Wednesday], hopefully. For a staff of five full-time people, we had quite a few new faces come in. It will be just about two years that we have not been fully manned and we will finally be at 100% staffing.”

The department being fully staffed is vitally important to the planning and operations of the city. Most everything done by council or delegated to other city departments must, at one point or another, go through the planning department.

City planners are responsible for a lot: preparing, revising and implementing new zoning ordinances, tables and regulations; investigating, studying and reporting on all matters regarding land use within the city; the preparation and oversight updates of long-range planning documents such as the city’s Master Plan; enforcing zoning ordinances; and reviewing all building permit applications among other duties. 

“We’re working on really getting our foothold in community development,” Mora said. “That’s working to improve, foster and maintain the housing, economic and physical development of the city. Enhance the quality of life for low and moderate-income residents and for all citizens and administer the Weirs, Downtown and Lakeport [tax increment financing districts].”

Mora said a current priority of his department is examining existing impact fees, which are a share of public facility improvement costs related to capital needs created by a new development, to the benefits accrued to a development from capital improvements financed by the fee.

“We have reviewed our impact fees, we’ve reached out to a few firms to give us some quotes of what it would cost to update that,” he said. 

The department is also working on the housing and redevelopment overlay district, special events and outdoor assembly ordinances and plans for a future historical overlay district downtown. They’re also updating department rules and procedures in order to adopt a Master Plan steering committee, needed to move that important chess piece forward on the planner’s board. 

“Which will then allow us to actually move something forward with our Master Plan,” he said. “We’re striving for that one, that’s a big push right there.”

The department may also receive a windfall of $100,000 to put toward developing the city’s Master Plan. Proposed budget resolutions at the federal level from the offices of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rep. Chris Pappas (NH-01) would fund the city’s planning department to that end.

“Hopefully, when the federal government adopts their budget this year, they’ll adopt a portion that will allow us to have $100,000 to put towards the development of our Master Plan,” Mora said. “With that we want to update our land use chapter and our vision statement, which should be updated every five years according to the state RSA.”

In a future Master Plan, Mora hopes to add chapters on housing and economic development, energy, transportation and natural hazards. It would include an implementation plan, which would provide the city a roadmap on how to carry out the individual items in the plan.

In the immediate term, city planners are facilitating the development of numerous housing projects throughout the city. To date in 2024, there have already been 85 individual units of housing approved, with many more in the works. Over the last three fiscal years, the city has averaged over 100 new units of housing approved by the planning board.

Major developments in the works include a 291-unit project at Langley Cove and a 92-unit project at Governor’s Crossing, along with other projects in the application phase which could contribute more than 100 additional units of housing to the city.

“I thought that was a really good indicator of how strong we are as a community in getting developers in here,” Mora said.

“We still have several projects in the pipeline, so that could be an additional 129 — that’s just what we’re aware of currently. I think that’s looking great for us.”