Miscommunication clears too much timber in Alton

ALTON — Before three years of operating under a default budget, town leaders were planning to construct a new public works building. While trees have already been cleared in a proposed location, Town Administrator Ryan Heath said there are no immediate plans to move forward.

Heath said in an interview, on Thursday, the town owns land on Hidden Springs Road, and there is a site plan for a 13,000-square-foot garage, and a 6,000-square-foot administration section. He said this plan was attached to an alteration of terrain permit, and was a footprint design only. The cutting and clearing were not paid directly by taxpayers, but rather funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.

The proposal dates back to Dec. 1, 2022. Since then, taxpayers have voted down the proposed budget three straight years. This year, a revised budget was sent to a Special Town Meeting last month, and passed. Heath said until the town gets its ducks in a row, budget-wise, the project is at a standstill.

“We were only fulfilling what was agreed upon in 2022, but there are no plans to move forward until the town is in a position to revisit the idea,” Heath said.

Heath said the town owns the land, and has owned it, and it was being “prepped and cleared” for a potential public works building.

“We allocated ARPA funding to set aside for that, and this is why we were doing the work,” Heath said.

The area was hard to visualize when it was wooded, he said, and town staff applied for, and received, an alteration of terrain permit from the state Department of Environmental Services.

There was a “good year-and-a-half worth” of testing, surveying, and addressing environmental concerns that go with an alteration of terrain permit. Heath said town staff needed to come up with an overall disturbance area to begin design on the site.

The town put the cutting, stumping, and grinding out to bid, and Cole Boggs of Boggs Logging, from Ossipee, took care of the work. The bid was for $5,000 per acre, totaling $142,000, paid for with funding from ARPA.

There was a communication issue, however, between town staff and Boggs.

Heath said, in December 2021, the town contracted with the engineering firm Tighe & Bond, for a future public works building and a public safety building for police and fire. In the original agreement, the plan was to look for a public safety building location, because the fire department’s central station on Route 140 needed to move out of a flood plain.

Through their work, Tighe & Bond staff helped the town determine the fire station on Route 140 was actually not in the flood plain, under new GIS elevations. Heath said this helped shift focus to public works, as it made more sense for the fire department to grow and maintain its location of Route 140.

“As [the COVID-19 pandemic] ended, and budgetary numbers were tighter, the focus shifted to the DPW building alone,” Heath said.

The clearing, he said, started in June 2025, with a request for bids for the work. The original idea was to have about half of the nearly 60-acre lot improved as recreation fields, which Heath compared to The Nick in Wolfeboro. This was an idea, and the selectboard agreed to cutting 28.5 acres. All prospective contractors bid for the 28.5 acres.

The conservation commission requested a 100-foot buffer on either side of Hurd Brook, to which the selectboard agreed, and through more conversations, the total amount to cut was decreased to 14 acres. Heath said the buffers were marked, by town staff and not a surveyor.

Heath said Boggs observed all setbacks, but the discrepancy came when the board awarded approval of the project, and verbally changed the amount to 14 acres.

“What was ultimately cut was more,” Heath said. “But, because it started back in June 2025, and there were so many changes after the original bid went out, the town is working with the contractor to try to resolve the situation.”

Boggs wrote in an email, on July 12, that he was waiting on an AOT permit to continue the project. Of the discrepancy, he wrote. “Town marked everything.”

"I just cut marks.”

The selectboard discussed the project at the April 14 meeting, where member Drew Carter was upset with the realization nine additional acres were cut.

“It appears that it is closer to about 23 acres that have been cleared at the site,” Carter said.

Carter said the cutting was done beyond the limits of what was flagged to be cut. He called it a “big mistake.”

Public Works Director Seth Garland said he walked the property himself, and came up with 22.7 acres that had been cleared.

Carter said the town needed to take a “pretty large stance” with the logger.

“He’s way overstepped his boundary on this, literally,” Carter said during the April 14 meeting. “There should be some penalty associated with this.”

Chair Paul LaRochelle said it was “quite a few extra acres.”

During the May 12 selectboard meeting, LaRochelle told the board it was prudent to seek advice from the town's counsel. Heath said information was coming back from legal counsel, but would be discussed in private. He said at that time no additional work was being done.

Heath said Monday morning nothing about any penalty has been decided, and town staff are working with Boggs to move forward.

Future of the lot

Heath said in Thursday’s interview the only thing that has happened so far is the cut, and there is still the need for stumping, grinding, and stabilizing, according to the rules and regulations for the AOT permit.

He said the town just had the AOT permit approved last week, and now Tighe & Bond’s surveyors will clearly depict the area to be disturbed, based on the application.

Heath said within the “coming weeks,” the rest of the stumping of the construction site under the permit will be completed by Boggs.

“That is the extent of the work at this point, until the town decided to move forward with an actual building,” Heath said. “We are going to complete the alteration of terrain, and stabilize the area with erosion control methods, using best management practices.”