Committee Hears Plans for Exit 17

For those of you waiting for a grocery store to come to the Penacook area, your wait just got a little shorter.

Laurie and David Rauseo, the owners of the Concord Crossing building off Route 4 in Concord, have obtained the rights to a 9.6-acre parcel at the intersection of Route 4 and Whitney Road. 

Currently, the couple has made plans to build a gas and diesel station and a fast food restaurant on the lot, in the first stage of a larger development plan that includes a small strip mall on the site, with an auto parts store, liquor store, and other small retail outlets, like potentially a dollar store.

“These are things that we feel are needed in the neighborhood,” she said, noting that proximity to the highway would help the gas station and fast food store.

The other uses, like a parts or liquor store, were things that Rauseo said she didn’t think residents would want in Penacook Village.

Instead of building many little stores on the site though, they would like to build a grocery store there. In order to do that, they need two covenants that were placed on the property in 2008 to be removed by the Concord City Council.

That is why the couple spoke to members of the Economic Development Advisory Council on Aug. 12, and requested that the covenants be removed to pave the way for larger scale development. The couple had met with the EDAC previously and the board suggested they come back with some schematic plans of what they would propose.

The covenants were placed on the property limit all potential commercial development to no more than 8,000 square feet in each building and collectively, no more than 50,000 square feet. This was done in order to encourage construction of a grocery store on the old tannery site in downtown Penacook, since the city had a number of developers interested in the site. However, new development opportunities, beyond a new medical office building on the site, have remained elusive.

Laurie Rauseo said that Associated Grocers were looking at the tannery site but then decided not to build on the site. Rauseo said that she struck up a conversation with AG about building a 33,000 square foot grocery store on the Exit 17 site. She said the company and potentially another one, seemed interested in being tenants on the site. The grocery store proposal would increase the footprint of the site to around 66,000 to 75,000 in size, or above the allowable use with the covenant restriction. She said enlarging the site would also make it attractive to other grocery vendors like Hannaford.

Rauseo said there are a number of covenants on the property, including limited use provisions which barred the construction of a hotel or an auto parts dealership on the site. She said she would not be looking for the removal of those covenants, just the removal of the size of the buildings and the overall size of the building.

Construction of the project would create the second most expensive non-residential property tax assessment in Penacook.

The assessed value of the entire project with the grocery store is estimated to be about $11.8 million, which would add about $300,000, to the property tax rolls, including $95,000 to city coffers and another $142,000 to the Merrimack Valley School District, using 2010 tax rates posted on the city’s website.

Rauseo noted that she had been using Facebook to reach out to residents, with nearly 600 fans on the site, discussing the project. She said demographics on the site showed the average person who hit the “like” button on the site was a woman in the 45 to 54 age bracket, not unlike herself.

“At the very least, it’s been a nice social experiment about the project,” she said.

Matt Walsh, assistant for special projects, said currently, that one developer was looking at the tannery parcel for a mixed-use building, with storefronts and office space, not a grocery store. He said Penacook Village was “obviously struggling,” with the city and federal government spending nearly $5 million cleaning up and developing the property. Whether or not the project would compete with a future tannery project or even Thirty Pines down the road, was for the policymakers to decide, Walsh said. He also suggested that the EDAC could revise the covenants. 

After some discussion about what people in Penacook thought and whether or not a grocery store would compete with other retailers in the area, the EDAC voted to recommend removing the covenants from the parcel, with two votes against the proposal. 

Editor's Note: This story has been updated, clarifying that the EDAC was voting to make a recommendation to the city council to remove the covenants, not voting to remove them, something the EDAC does not have the power to do.