Dover 2023 City Council candidate Dennis Shanahan
Name: Dennis Shanahan
Education: Bachelor of science, physics - UNH
Occupation: Retired, after 34 years at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as a radiation and occupational safety manager.
Political or civic experience highlights: Four terms on the Dover City Council, the last term as deputy mayor. Currently the chair of the COAST Board of Directors, member of the New Hampshire Municipal Association Board of Directors, numerous other city boards and commissions, past president of Dover Baseball.
What would be your top three priorities if you are elected?: Attainable housing - the wave of gentrification from the south has reached Dover, and the inflation surge of the last few years has virtually eliminated the construction of affordable single-family residences. This has, in part, led to expansion of the housing insecure population in the county. I look forward to supporting the work of our new housing champion and the recently appointed Housing Committee as they develop the next steps to re-open Dover to workforce and attainable housing.
Insufficient services for those who need help with mental health and substance abuse issues - Our nonprofits do extraordinary work to address these needs as well as they can, but are underfunded by the federal and state governments. We need to continue to find ways to fill the void left by the federal and state governments. The Strafford County commissioners' plan to rebuild the county elderly care facility and create housing must be supported.
The continued degradation of our rivers, stream, ponds, and the Great Bay. Past development with insufficient stormwater management infrastructure and many current practices allow nutrients and contaminants to flow through the watershed and into the Great Bay. We need to continue to improve the management of stormwater, and we need to change our practices that add soluble nutrients that have a direct path to the Great Bay.
What is the biggest problem Dover is facing and how you would solve it?: The increase in the population of our residents that are housing insecure needs to be addressed. The solution brings in all stakeholders, at the city, county, state and federal level. The Strafford County facility plan must go forward. If we address housing first, then this streamlines the next step which is providing the services that affect the cause of housing insecurity for each individual. Greater networking between all of the parties working on this must be achieved to direct the resources effectively.
Should the city work to create below market rate housing, and where is the best site?: The city needs to work to create below market rate housing. We have many examples of projects that are planned and/or currently permitted, that will increase the inventory of below market rate housing stock in the city. Some examples include the old courthouse (under construction), the Macintosh Apartments (in planning with InvestNH funding support), the Station Apartments (in early stages of construction), a development off Littleworth Avenue (in very early stages of planning), and the small houses off Back River Road (well into construction). In each of these developments, city planners have used a variety of tools to include attainable housing in these projects. As evidenced by the variety of locations for these projects, the development of affordable housing should be distributed throughout the city, not concentrated in one area.
Should the council address the pace and type of development in the city? If yes, how?: New Hampshire is the "Live Free or Die" state. Underlying this motto are state statutes that control what influence a municipality can have on the pace and type of development. For example, if a city were to impose a moratorium on new construction due to, for example, wastewater treatment capacity, State statute requires that the city address the capacity issue very quickly, and likely at great cost. The City Council has frequently been provided updates on the pace of development in comparison to past decades. Our current pace is less than that of the 1980s, for example. The city does not currently have any capacity issues with infrastructure related to sewage treatment or provision of drinking water. Our recent water restrictions are directly attributable to the loss of our most productive aquifer. This situation is being resolved (at no cost to the city's property taxpayers) by the construction of a drinking water treatment plant off Mast Road. The city has grown at a rate of less than 1% per year since the end of the Great Recession, prior to that growth rates were near zero for the prior decade. One other measure of expansion of the city is our school population. Over the last several years, the total school population has been stagnant, allowing school construction projects to focus on improving education quality, without needing to address population increases. Growth occurs in cycles, often driven by national and world economic concerns.
Does the city need to make changes to its approach to parking as development increases?: There have been recent changes to parking as the downtown infill development projects have been planned. As we know, we eliminated a number of surface parking areas to allow for development in the downtown area. Obviously one of those lots was converted to a parking garage. Some of the downtown infill developments were provided with the ability for residents to lease spaces in the parking garage and other locations. At this time, we have essentially reached capacity for any further leases on city-managed parking areas, so recent and future projects will need to fully include their own parking. The Capital Improvement Plan currently lists a second parking structure as a future project. City planners have been in active discussions with developers to make this a public-private effort. There is planning for a vehicular and pedestrian accessibility project that will address the configuration of some of the downtown parking areas. Bottom line, we currently have sufficient parking in the downtown and robust planning tools in place to maintain this condition.
What is the city doing well and where is there room for improvement?: The city has been a leader in introducing controls on stormwater management that have allowed development to continue with practices in place that improve the quality of stormwater runoff, to the point that the quality of the runoff water is significantly improved over the pre-development conditions. These efforts have also been instrumental in positioning the city receive federal and state environmental permits that do not require hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades.
We need improvement in the public-facing aspects of city government. Our website is long overdue for a transition to one that is easy to navigate. There is a wealth of information that is publicly available, but can be onerous to hunt down in the file systems. While our community engagement is overall successful, we need continued attention to changes in how people choose to communicate. An ad hoc committee on public communication may be in order.
What is the city’s responsibility to its homeless population, both this winter and long term?: The city has a legal obligation to provide services to all who ask for them. Dover has a Welfare Office that is funded to provide emergency support, we have established social workers in the Police Department to provide outreach to those in need. These are short term solutions, as is the Willand Warming facility. The city will continue to support the facility, as we did with our recent vote to increase our financial support by 40%. The county emergency services provide overall support of the warming center, with a contractor to perform day-to-day service yet to be determined.
I have mentioned the long-term solution above, that is moving forward with the Strafford County commissioners' plan to build a new elderly care facility and convert the existing Riverside home into transitional housing.
This article originally appeared on Fosters Daily Democrat: Dover 2023 City Council candidate Dennis Shanahan
