After more than a year of controversy, the Hanover Planning Board unanimously approved the Occom Ridge Road site for the College's Center for Jewish Life in a meeting last week.
College Rabbi Daniel Siegel said the groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for the spring of 1996. "It isn't a plan," he said. "It's a hope."
The new building, which will be more than 11,000 square feet and will be built in an empty lot near Delta Delta Delta sorority, will replace Hillel's current home on Summer Street near Hanover High School.
The proposed Center has been at the center of a controversy since November 1993 when residents of Occom Ridge submitted a petition to College President James Freedman and the College's Board of Trustees expressing concern about "parking size and placement, traffic access and safety, scope of services and size-design of building."
The College's Office of Facilities Planning tried to address the residents' complaints by modifying and reducing the plans for the Center while expanding the adjacent parking lot.
Despite showing strong opposition to the proposed location at previous meetings of Hanover's Zoning and Planning Boards, no members of the Occom Pond Neighborhood Preservation Association were present at the final meeting, association member Len Morrissey said.
"We thought it was a fait accompli. A done deal," Morrissey said. "We had evidence the meeting would be perfunctory."
The association will not pursue the issue in court, Morrissey said. "It is behind us now. We will welcome them and make the best of it."
But Morrissey said the Planning Board did agree to reconsider building an exit road to Webster Road "if there are problems with some combination of parking or traffic flow."
The board also dictated that the College return to the Zoning Board to seek a special exception to a municipal statute dictating that circular driveways be narrower than nine feet. The Center's driveway would be slightly wider.
Siegel said at a preliminary meeting of the Zoning Board Monday night, "a lot of the discussion was about whether a special exception was even necessary."
"The statute has been applied only to residential driveways in the past," he said.
Siegel said he is optimistic that the Zoning Board will reach a decision favorable to the College at its meeting next week.
The College's Director of Facilities Planning Gordon DeWitt said the compromise reached by the Planning Board is acceptable to the
College.
"These are conditions we are prepared to live with," he said. "The Planning Board reviewed the project thoroughly. They took notice of some of the concerns these folks had."
"It wasn't easy but it was certainly helpful," he said.
Siegel said he is optimistic about the project's future. "The fundraising has been going very very well even before this process resolved itself," he said.
Associate Director of Major Gifts Karen Blum said the College has been given or pledged more than $1.7 million of the $2.2 million needed for the project.
"And there is some money the Upper Valley Jewish community is raising. We don't have their numbers," Blum said.
