Earl Sweeney: Will State School development cause prosperity or drive out businesses?

To The Daily Sun,

I'm not much for writing letters to the editor, but the Oct. 21 edition and its front-page article about the development plan for the State School property gave me, as a lifetime resident of the area and frequent visitor to Laconia to shop, obtain medical care or celebrate with a meal or a movie, a warning shudder that has led me to express my concern to residents and businesses of your city.

The article says the proposed development plan calls for a "self-sustaining village" with 200,000 square feet of commercial, office and retail space, which will go before the Executive Council in the coming weeks. The vision includes a 250-room hotel and a conference center, an urgent care clinic, a child care center, a pharmacy, other stores and a memory facility.

It's wonderful to take a once-scenic area now a virtual wasteland and convert it to a residential area with maybe a few small stores for supplies like bread, milk and The Daily Sun. However, if you encourage the developer to go overboard and include a plethora of retail establishments, where will the revenue to support them come from? What will happen to the existing restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacies and the hotel in the downtown area, and those recently refurbished and made more attractive in Lakeport and along Union Avenue, to to mention those at McIntyre Circle and Weirs Beach?

We are headed into a recession and these existing businesses have helped develop and support Laconia and pull it out of hard times in the past. I am simply raising a cautionary note that the process of approving such a subdivision should include reasonable controls over retail development so as not to steal business from the current retail community and result in a dying business community.

Earl Sweeney

Belmont