Council delays casino zoning decision to spring

LACONIA — City councilors tabled an agenda item which could have paved the way for the development of casinos during their regular meeting Monday night.

Planning board members at their meeting on Jan. 7 took the first steps toward ultimately revising the city’s zoning ordinance to include provisions for the development of casinos when they sent language for an amendment to the council.

As written, casinos would only be allowed in certain areas of the Weirs.

The zoning ordinance amendment before city councilors on Monday night included definitions, performance standards and the addition of such a use to the table of permitted uses.

Such performance standards include the prevention of casinos being located next to religious facilities, schools, day care facilities and health care facilities and enumerates the ratio of parking to be required by a casino development. It would also have restricted the use to major tourism corridors of the city by requiring them only to be built within the commercial resort zoning district.

Following the unanimous approval by planning board members earlier in January, councilors were set to discuss the potential amendment, but elected to table the matter, potentially until May, as suggested by Ward 1 Councilor Bruce Cheney.

Shawn Flanagan of Allen Avenue told councilors he did not support the amendment being taken up by the council in the winter, when many of the residents of the Weirs are staying elsewhere and therefore could not express their positions in the public forum.

“People that are on Weirs Boulevard, Endicott, Lakeside Ave. — not a lot of people around in the winter time, pros and cons,” Flanagan said. “I don’t know how much input you’re going to get having it in the middle of the winter when there’s not a lot of people around. That’s my biggest concern with the zoning changes that are being made to Lakeside Ave., Weirs Boulevard and Endicott. Particularly Lakeside Ave., because I don’t think it’s the correct spot to have any type of casino in that beautiful tourist area. As I said before, you guys can either make Lakeside Ave. look like Atlantic City or maybe more like Wolfeboro and Meredith, where it’s much more inviting for tourists.”

City Planning Director Robert Mora said when he was first hired by the city he was asked to look into casinos and learned there weren’t provisions for the same within the zoning ordinance.

“We looked at, I think, Hampton and then a few well-known cities out in Nevada about how they were regulating them and why they were doing such things,” he said. “We looked at the state and the lottery commission and what our definitions should be for ‘games of chance’ and then ‘casino’.”

According to the language of the amendment, casinos must ingress and egress from Endicott Street East or North, or Weirs Boulevard. 

“We thought that traffic might be a potential issue with casinos so we wanted to limit it to the main arteries within the commercial resort district,” Mora said.

Cheney requested the item be tabled until spring to allow for more time to consider it. 

“This council needs to look at a lot more than what we’ve been able to look at at this point, so I move to table this until May,” Cheney said.