When addressing the lack of housing in Concord, city officials often cite 3,000 units in the construction pipeline. Yet nearly a third of those come from a single project that the city manager and mayor now say they have no interest in seeing move forward.

“One of the key elements to business growth and also to addressing homelessness in the city is definitely creation of more housing,” Mayor Byron Champlin said in his State of the City remarks in April. “If all 3,000 plus units that I talked about are completed, the city’s total housing supply will be expanded by nearly 16%.”

Fast forward five months, and Champlin had a different attitude after the developer asked the city to rezone a tract of land along the Merrimack River, which currently only allows industrial uses.

“The way his project is right now,” Champlin said last month, “it’s just not that attractive to us.”

Plans for the Monitor Way project, a mixed-use development that got its name because it would be built on land owned by the Concord Monitor’s parent company, include more than 900 housing units, most of them apartments.

This summer, two years after the project was announced, City Manager Tom Aspell’s office told the developer that any attempt to rezone the land to allow housing was off the table for the next several years. City officials, and residents, have expressed concern about traffic and infrastructure related to the project, but the city has given no previous public indication of being against rezoning the land, or conversely, limiting it to industrial uses.

“We understand that the property is zoned industrial. That has been known since the beginning of the project,” Kevin Lacasse, CEO of New England Family Housing and a lead developer on the project, wrote in a letter to the city last week. “As stated previously, re-zoning the property didn’t appear to be a concern as our concept was said to be ‘generally consistent with the community’s goals and aspirations for the site.’ Only now has zoning been cited as a concern.”

Based on what city staff and elected officials have said about this project publicly, Concord’s administration has only recently raised concerns about a rezone of the property. City staff even previously noted that the city was planning for a non-industrial development at that site.

The developers, in a letter to the city, said city staff is not dealing with their project openly and is “grossly” overestimating its costs.

“We have requested an audience with Mayor and Council to discuss our proposal only to be told that it is not allowed and that our proposal can only be presented by staff in non-public session,” Kevin Lacasse, Deane Navaroli and Mike Dion, the Monitor Way development team, wrote in a letter to city administration last month. “In light of your most recent letter, we believe some aspects of our proposal may not have been accurately conveyed to Mayor and Council in our absence.”

The cost of the road and other off-site improvements would cost about $6.67 million, not $38 million, as city officials have claimed.

“While we recognize this amount is not inconsequential, it would be offset by the projected tax revenue generated by the full buildout, which is anticipated to be more than $6 million to $8 million annually,” the developers wrote.

In an interview recently, Champlin said the Monitor Way site is broadly not supported by the city because the current Master Plan favors the redevelopment of land over new construction on undeveloped land and visions the land as remaining industrially zoned. He also argued that a potential future industrial use of the property was key to expanding the city’s tax base.

Monitor Way developers declined to comment for this story. The city manager’s office has not responded to multiple interview requests, and a related request for public records has not yet been fulfilled.

Lacasse and his development team have an agreement to buy the land from the parent company that owns the Concord Monitor and five other newspapers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The agreement does not include the Monitor’s building and the newspaper has no role in the sale.

‘I think it’s fantastic’

The project’s design team gave a presentation to Concord’s Planning Board last year and at a neighborhood meeting in Penacook in May.

City officials and residents have voiced various concerns about the project mainly centered around traffic and infrastructure but changing the zoning was not one of them.

“As we advance, we understand that we would need a zoning change here to make this work. And we wanted to visit the planning board to see: Is this a project that you would embrace? Is this the type of development that you’re looking for in moving forward?” Ed Roberge, an engineer for the project, said when Monitor Way was first pitched to the Concord Planning Board last fall. “We’re just trying to get some better input.”

Along with concerns about a traffic burden, board members shared thoughts on where self-storage units should go and accommodations for environmentally friendly transportation like bikes, buses and electric cars. Those comments echoed public feedback relayed to the developer at earlier meetings with the Penacook Village Association.

Board members also spoke favorably about the project putting housing on the land along the river, complimenting the development for what it could mean for addressing the region’s housing crisis. They didn’t raise concerns over the project’s conflict with the Master Plan, and then-City Planner Heather Shank noted that the city had planned for a non-industrial build-out on the property.

“I’m not saying Not In My Backyard,” said Matthew Hicks, a planning board member who lives on Mountain Road. “I’m saying, build it, I think it’s fantastic. But I’m saying that the people on Mountain Road that I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to many of them, don’t know what their neighborhood is going to become. … This is a great spot for this development, it’s just what it’s attached to that presents a problem.”

In a recent interview, Planning Board Chair Richard Woodfin said that preliminary review of a new project is to give non-binding feedback and impressions of plans, not to answer questions about a development concept.

“When the plans first came out, the board looks at it and goes ‘this looks nice — let’s dig into the details,’” Woodfin said. “Does it work for the future of the city? We didn’t render opinions on that.”

Shank, responding to traffic questions at the meeting, noted that the city planned for dense, non-industrial development on the proposed site when it did traffic studies for the Market Basket project off Exit 17.

“This corridor was assumed to be built out. It wasn’t assumed to be simply industrial use with minimal traffic,” she told the planning board. “There’s already a base of data that was assumed to be this type of density when that construction happened.”

Flash forward to the State of the City event, put on by the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in April, where Aspell outlined the infrastructure needs of Monitor Way, from culvert replacements to the expense of extending Whitney Road, which, together, he said could carry a more than $20 million price tag. There was no discussion of wanting to preserve industrial land or opposition to rezoning at the project site then, or when the road came up again during spring budget talks.

‘More interestthan dissent’

From the planning board hearing to meetings between the developer and the Penacook Village Association, city residents have given the project a mixed response: Many vocally objected to any large development happening on undeveloped land along the river, and rejected the idea that taxpayer dollars should be used to support it. Others have applauded the project, saying that working to increasing housing of all types in the area makes the costs of the project — of infrastructure work and losing the undeveloped land — worth taking on.

There has been no vocal public advocacy for industrial use of the land: Those who most strongly opposed the project want the land to remain largely undeveloped, either because of environmental reasons or because they don’t want any additional traffic.

“To see that part of Concord destroyed, it just breaks my heart,” Elizabeth Szelo, a Sewalls Falls Road resident, said to the planning board. “I just can’t support the project, and I feel awful saying that because I know that we need housing.”

Those who support Monitor Way founded their support on the volume of housing it would bring.

“Even if you might miss a few stars, does it help have other people have somewhere to live, somewhere to work,” Ahni Malachi, a Penacook resident, said in planning board testimony. Adding housing, she continued, is a big part of making the city more welcoming. “For the last decade, everyone has been saying ‘diversity, inclusion, diversity, inclusion’ — but if it’s not in your backyard, how are you diverse? Who are you including?”

Malachi has since been named by Champlin to lead the city’s new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice and Belonging committee.

City Councilor Brent Todd, whose ward includes the proposed site, recently summed up how he thinks residents see the project.

“That concern would exist regardless of the type of development that occurred,” he said in reference to Mountain Road traffic backups. “What I didn’t really hear was a majority of residents overwhelmingly rejecting the project. It seems to me that there has been overall more interest than dissent about it.”

Lacasse’s team, in response to city pushback on road infrastructure, have proposed a drastically scaled back version of their project. But Aspell’s office has rejected a request to rezone that as well. Whether councilors are as staunchly opposed to a rezoning request will be explored in future coverage.