Water Street boat launch

The process of preparing the site plan and seeking the required permits for the public boat launch on the Winnipesaukee River, near the foot of Water Street, is about a month behind schedule, but City Manager Eileen Cabanel said yesterday that the project was "on track to be completed in a year's time."

The working group of state and local officials met this week to review the status of the project. Lee Perry, executive director of the N.H. Fish & Game Department, lead agency for the project, said that the plan of the facility would be complete by the end of September, when the process of obtaining the wetlands permit from the state and site specific permit from the city could begin. With the permits in hand, the project would be put out to bid in October or November and a contract awarded in December or January with the aim of beginning construction in the spring.

The preliminary conceptual plan provided 31 parking spaces for vehicles and trailers, including two accessible for handicapped vans, and five spaces for "cartop" boat carriers, one of which would be handicapped accessible. The launch itself, 30 feet wide, would be cut into the bank of the river at an angle aimed at Lake Winnisquam and flanked on either side by a bulkhead to which boats could be moored.

The city swapped 1.4 acres of land, where the Department of Public Works stored materials, in return for a new storage building adjacent to the old public works garage on Messer Street with the state, supplemented by 0.56 acres of adjacent state-owned land, to provide the site for the launch.

The issue of public access to Lake Winnisquam came to a head in 2004 with the closure of one of the two remaining boat ramps open to the public. Ralph Langevin, then owner of Martel's Sport Shop on Winnisquam Avenue, closed the other ramp, vowing that it stay shut until Governor Craig Benson visited Laconia and promised to provide public access to the lake within a year. Less than a week later Benson and Langevin shook hands in the middle of Winnisquam Avenue and the process of designing and building the public boat launch began.

The late City Councilor Fred Toll, who represented Ward 4, suggested the site on Water Street, where the completed launch will honor his memory.