Hanover
Members of the board voted, 4-1, to reject Dartmouth’s proposal for a $17.5 million, 70,000-square-foot indoor practice facility off South Park Street, following months of debate between school officials and prospective abutters over the structure’s potential effect on the nearby residential neighborhood.
The defeat for the college came during an infrastructural push: among other large efforts, Dartmouth is renovating the Hood Museum of Art on East Wheelock Street, building homes for professors in its new residential “house” system, and gearing up for an expansion to the professional schools on its west campus.
Seasoned town officials and longtime community members this week said residents regularly opposed proposals that border on their neighborhoods, but that Dartmouth’s inability to secure a permit was unusual.
“What’s occurred with the (indoor practice facility) in terms of neighborhood involvement and concern is absolutely typical of what we see when the college contemplates a project butting up against a neighborhood,” Town Manager Julia Griffin said.
Griffin, who has run the town administration for about two decades, noted that neighbors had fought expansions of the Chase Field complex, on which this facility would have stood, for many years. Projects internal to campus, she said, rarely spark much controversy.
The town manager said residential-adjacent buildings from Dartmouth usually shook out in a few different ways when neighbors objected: the college made heavy modifications to appease residents, relocated the project or withdrew it altogether.
But as for a situation where the college does its best to obtain approval and fails, Griffin said, “that’s less typical.”
“In my 20 years here, which is only a very small time period … I can’t think of another,” she said.
Marilyn “Willy” Black, a seven-term former member of the Hanover Selectboard who has lived here for 49 years, couldn’t think of an example, either.
“It’s been pretty harmonious all the years I’ve lived here,” she said. “I don’t think anything by Dartmouth hasn’t been approved. I think this is the first big wall up against them.”
Black said she couldn’t speak to the general climate of residents’ relations with the college, but noted that Hanover has seen significant demographic change since she first arrived.
Hanover, she said, has changed from a “company town” to a “very diverse town” — a healthy development, she said. Black recalled that when she was first shopping for a house in the area, a local real estate agent told her he wouldn’t show her homes in Hanover because her husband didn’t work for Dartmouth.
Now, she said, although Dartmouth and its affiliate hospital still are the largest employers, many residents don’t have the same close ties to the college. She also said that fewer Dartmouth administrators are residents.
“Many of the people making the decisions for Dartmouth are not Hanover residents, and that makes a difference,” she said. “They don’t have a feel for the town because they don’t live here.”
Planning Board Vice Chairwoman Kelly Dent, perhaps the most prominent opponent of the practice facility, said she had seen some strain between residents and the college.
“My sense from all my dealings with Hanover residents is people are kind of tired of Dartmouth always getting their way,” she said.
She cited resident dissatisfaction over Dartmouth-supported zoning changes around West Wheelock Street, including a zoning amendment passed this spring that eases building restrictions on the west side of campus, plus an earlier, larger-scale amendment that would have created a “gateway district” allowing high-density housing. That second proposal had support from town planners, area landlords and developers as well as the college, but it failed at the 2015 Town Meeting.
Moving forward, Dent said, she and others are working to create proposed zoning amendments that would strengthen the buffer zone between institutional and residential districts “so that this doesn’t happen again.”
The Planning Board is scheduled to meet next month to discuss potential amendments to put forward at Town Meeting, and Dent might propose her amendment then, she said.
Dent, who recused herself throughout the review process, did not participate in Tuesday’s vote.
During the Planning Board’s many hearings in its site plan review, Dartmouth officials said they needed the athletic building so that its athletes could practice regardless of weather. They were unable to relocate the facility, they said, in part because athletes had to be able to walk to practice.
Dartmouth has about a month to appeal Tuesday’s ruling to superior court, town and college officials said this week. The college has not yet decided whether to do so.
“We continue to review and are waiting for the board’s written decision to inform our decisions,” Ellen Arnold, the college’s associate general counsel for campus services, said in an email.
College officials didn’t immediately address a question about relations with residents.
The Planning Board’s decision also was a departure from the norm in terms of its enforcement of town regulations, officials said.
“This is going to be an interesting case,” Griffin said, “because some would argue that there weren’t grounds to deny the project by the Planning Board.”
In casting her vote against the project Tuesday night, Nancy Carter, a Selectboard representative to the Planning Board, said Dartmouth’s proposal conformed to “the letter of the law.”
Nevertheless, she cited sections of the town’s site plan review regulations that say the Planning Board may consider “conformance with the Hanover Master Plan and local ordinances”; “the likely impact upon the abutters, neighborhood and others”; and “the relationship of the project to the harmonious and aesthetically pleasing development of the town and its environs.”
The master plan, for reference, says that “the character of the residential neighborhood adjacent to business areas and the Dartmouth College campus should be protected.”
Carter’s reasoning regarding the master plan helped form a split within the board, with some members siding with Dartmouth in saying the town’s guiding document for development was not meant to be treated as a regulation.
Planning Board Chairwoman Judith Esmay, the sole member to vote in favor of the facility, declined to comment on the case afterward, other than to reiterate her explanation of her decision: the master plan is “not enforceable” in site plan review, she said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.