In October of 2011, Lynne Placey of Stewartstown, New Hampshire, then 65, got a visit from her nephew and neighbor, Landon Placey, who stopped by to say he had agreed to sell his 115 acres of North Country land to Northern Pass for $500,000. He urged her to do the same with an abutting parcel of the same size.
She refused.
“Contemplating getting half a million dollars was quite a carrot to drop in front of me,” she told the Concord Monitor at the time. “But I couldn’t compromise my ethics. I don’t believe in what Northern Pass is doing.”
Landon Placey’s 115 acres are now part of the 5,000 acres that Eversource-NH plans to open up for public access and mixed-use activity, as part of the new Northern Pass plan announced earlier in the month.
The fate of those 5,000 acres has been in question since 2013, when Eversource-NH, then PSNH, announced its first route change. While stating the land and easements acquired in a three-year buying spree were no longer needed for the hydroelectric project, the company was silent on what would be done with “the road not taken.”
As part of the full-court press for the latest iteration of its route, Eversource announced it would “allocate 5,000 acres of land in the North Country for mixed use activities, including recreation, economic development and natural resource preservation.”
But what exactly does that mean? How will those allocations be made, and toward what end? The answers to those questions could have as much impact on the North Country as the Northern Pass itself.
A defining moment
The acquisition process from 2011 to 2013 was itself a defining moment for a part of the state that had been relatively calm and cohesive, fighting off any possibility of eminent domain in the Northern Pass process through successful legislative initiatives.
“Instead, PSNH turned to what I call eminent dollar-main,” said Jack Savage, spokesman for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which over the same three-year period engaged PSNH in a chess match, buying properties or obtaining easements to block the route being set up by Northern Pass purchases.
“It wasn’t the power of the government coming in and tearing apart a community and tearing apart families,” he said. “It was a large corporation operating on behalf of a foreign entity coming in and spending more than $40 million to create something that really fragmented the community in some ways, and now we’re told they have no use for it.”
The purchase process was undeniably divisive, going well beyond one or two families. A selectman from Clarksville, who had been an active Northern Pass opponent, resigned his selectmen’s position when his sons sold their land, saying they would have been fools not to. When the Weir family of Colebrook sold the 20-acre Weir Tree Farm for $4 million, it triggered an editorial in the local newspaper that railed against “our new overnight millionaires.”
Eversource’s chief executive for New Hampshire, Bill Quinlan, says it’s time to move on.
“My focus is on moving forward, and listening to New Hampshire. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last year or so,” he said. “We hosted a North Country event last week to share our announcement, and I was impressed by the number of attendees and the positive feedback that we’ve gotten. I’m hoping some of the tensions are beginning to dissipate.”
Divisions remain
That may be wishful thinking on his part, as evidenced by the outcome of negotiations that could have led to a windfall for off-road recreation in a region that is staking its economic future on programs like Ride the Wilds.
According to off-road enthusiast Harry Brown, the disposition of the “road not taken” could prove as controversial as the acquisition of the land in the first place. Brown is a resident of Stewartstown and former president of the North Country Off-Highway Recreational Vehicle Coalition, which runs the enormously successful Ride the Wilds program. He resigned earlier in the month when a furor erupted in Coos County after Northern Pass opponents discovered that a deal with Eversource was in the works.
“I had negotiated with Eversource, and we were very close to cementing a proposal that would have offered a fairly substantial amount of cash; 1,100 of those 5,000 acres; and a right of way for OHRVs and snowmobiling through the remaining 4,000 acres from Pittsburg to Dixville,” he said.
“Prior to even getting a formal offer from Eversource, one of our board members leaked to the press that we were negotiating with Northern Pass, and as a result, several current landowners said that if we were to deal with the devil, they would shut down their access for both OHRVs and snowmobiling.”
Brown estimates the deal would have had a market value of $8 million to $10 million, but the stakeholders in the organization were divided 50-50 on the issue, he said, “and the end result of this whole thing is, we shot ourselves in the foot.”
Brown now fears that too much of the land at issue will be locked up for conservation, closing off much-needed recreational and economic development opportunities in the depressed area.
Process planned
Quinlan said the process that Eversource plans to set up for allocating the land will aim for diversity in how it’s used.
“What I am getting consistently from folks in the North is an interest in opportunities to do multiple things with these parcels, whether it’s expanded recreational opportunities, a tourism benefit, or a commercial use that can co-exist,” he said.
“Some are 300 to 400 acres, so you can support multiple uses on a single property, and we’re hearing people say, ‘Don’t just lock up the land and bar access to the public. Make it available for hiking, fishing, hunting, snowmobiling and ATVs.’”
He would not rule out logging operations on some of the land. “There’s a lot of interest in that,” he said, “and obviously, there’s the natural preservation piece, which is also important. We’re open to a range of options. It’s an exciting opportunity that folks up there will get a chance to be creative about and work with us to do some good things.”
Options on the table
The company can’t grant rights to land on which it has only purchased easements, which constitutes a relatively small portion of the real estate. Most of it is owned outright, and is up for grabs. In some cases, the company will donate parcels, or it may only grant easements or rights of way.
“At this point, we’re leaving both options on the table,” Quinlan said.
The company is setting up an advisory board that will also make decisions about the use of the $200 million Forward NH Fund announced as part of the new route rollout.
“We are contemplating multiple ways for ideas to come forward,” he said, “including a grant application process. You could envision scenarios where an initiative would utilize both land and funds, and that would be processed through a grant request.”
Savage said the forest society has not taken any position on what should happen with the land, except “We never thought an overhead power line was an appropriate use for any of this, including the areas where they are still proposing putting an overhead power line.”
Meanwhile, he’s reserving judgment on the promise of a mixed-use windfall for the North Country.
“If they [Eversource] retain rights of way, they really aren’t giving up anything,” Savage said. “So far, they have only offered a very vague description of what they intend to do.”
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