The Effingham Zoning Board completed a long case this year in which an applicant asked for the necessary permissions to reinstate gasoline service at a convenience store that had removed its pumps and tanks six years ago, when new standards would have required them to replace their existing fuel facilities with new ones that met stricter standards for pollution control.
The mandate from the state, following on federal guidelines, skewed the requirement to favor larger corporations or wealthier store operators who could afford to front the cost to install the upgraded systems. Poorer stores could get a grant to quit the gasoline business completely and have all of the old fuel supply equipment removed at no cost to the store owners. There was no aid to upgrade the equipment. Go big on your own dime, or go away. The store here in Effingham opted to go away.
Without fuel sales, the convenience store relied on its deli and other retail offerings. The owners soon put the business up for sale.
The store is on the westbound side of Route 25. Within a quarter of a mile to the west, another, older store is located on the other side of the highway, convenient to eastbound traffic. The left turn into it from westbound Route 25 can be stressful at times when traffic is heavy. It's never as heavy here as it is in densely populated areas where truly heavy traffic is the norm, but it can get thick and fast enough to make the turn across its flow a bit tense, as one watches the rear view mirror for missiles coming up from behind as well. It was nice having an option on either side. And the older store is actually in Ossipee, so its tax revenue does nothing for Effingham.
The Ossipee valley is both blessed and cursed with the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state of New Hampshire. Stratified drift aquifers are the most productive reservoirs of ground water, but their water absorbing properties and the speed of its transmission through them make them especially vulnerable to pollution, such as the threat presented by buried tanks of the toxic chemicals on which our motor vehicles and transportation system rely.
The most vulnerable parts of the aquifer tend to be the flattest and most attractive to road construction and development. Back when people moved on foot or behind animals whose exhaust products were large and tangible but readily biodegradable, this coincidence did not present a problem. The more we came to rely on chemicals that we should really avoid drinking, and put more and more septic systems into that nice flat ground, the more bad things crept -- or poured -- into the aquifer when things went wrong.
When you know better, you do better, at least ideally. Certainly there's at least some public pressure not to poison people's wells, although concern diminishes with distance. As one native resident of the east side of Effingham remarked about a proposed race track on the west side of town back in the 1990s, "It wasn't near me, so I didn't care about it." But a little at a time we manage to increase people's awareness that problems have a way of creeping closer. You may never care about the people who live a mile away, let alone a longer distance, but maybe you'll figure out that your turn will come eventually, and you should figure out what your principles are.
Principles are not absolute. Idealists might have absolute principles, which is why they're useful as philosophers, but often disastrous in government. You have to lay the template of an ideal across the actual landscape of the place itself and the people who live there, and find a way forward that helps more than it hurts.
On the first application, for the Special Exception to have a gas station in town, the applicant appeared to have a decent case, since there had been a gas station on that site from 1997 to 2015, and it had not been discontinued due to any specific violation. It was only in site plan review at the Planning Board that someone noted that the convenience store and former gas station was located in the groundwater protection overlay district. The groundwater protection overlay district is based on the vulnerability of the aquifer presented by the particular soils mapped and defined in it. Until 2015 there were three gasoline stations on Route 25 between Route 16 and the Maine border. All of them are disastrously sited by the terms of the groundwater protection overlay district, and all of them were grandfathered, because they predated the ordinance by many years. Two of them upgraded their equipment by 2015 and continued to operate. They are also in other towns, not in Effingham. Thus they represent little value to Effingham's coffers.
The applicants had to return to the ZBA for a variance to allow them to put a prohibited use -- the gas station -- into the groundwater protection district. While the Special Exception had been pretty straightforward, the variance was not. It was gasoline versus drinking water. But it was also a functioning, tax-paying business that was reinstating a use that had already been there without incident for 18 years before it was discontinued. While there was some evidence of minor leakage in the soil samples taken when the tanks were removed, no one with a well nearby had reported pollution, and no evidence of it had appeared in surface streams that flow near the property. The new tanks would have to meet the standards that replacement tanks would have met in 2015, if the previous owners had put them in right away without delay. But gas stations are notorious sources of pollution, which was why they were prohibited in the district.
The deliberation was not an easy one. The resulting approval was not unanimous. But, as the dissenter, I fully understand the reasoning by which approval was granted. A variance has to meet five criteria to pass. It can't meet three out of five or four out of five. A majority of board members must agree that the application satisfies all five of these criteria. I felt that the application did not satisfy all criteria, but these decisions rely on interpretation. Specifically in this case, approval of the variance is not supposed to be contrary to the public interest, but the choice was between the public interest of an improved economy and tax base versus the possibility of groundwater contamination. Were we better served to expand an existing business back to its original level of services, or to insist that anyone who wanted such a business had to find a site with acceptable soils? This would require the environmental disruption of a piece of undeveloped land, and I'm not sure such soils exist along Route 25 within Effingham. As for anywhere else in town, I'm hard pressed to think of any other town road on which you could put a convenience store and have it actually be convenient.
The only other through route is Route 153, which runs down the eastern edge of town so closely that it's actually in Maine for a short stretch. In South Effingham, one side of the road is New Hampshire and the other side of the road is Maine. There used to be a store in South Effingham, with gas pumps, but it was on the Maine side of the road. Ha ha! No tax revenue for you, Effingham, even though the family that lives all over that part of town lives on both sides of the road. It's one community in two states, living in bucolic tranquility untroubled by their respective state capitals. But when the tax bills come, the money divides like a watershed, flowing each toward a different town hall, eventually sending some to Augusta and some to Concord.
The middle of Effingham is a compact mountain range about seven or eight miles west to east, and perhaps five miles south to north. Its highest peak is Green Mountain at the east end. The range tapers down over successively lower summits to Welch Top on the west end. The granite mass is separate from any other mountain system in the area, surrounded almost entirely by the glacial sediments of the Ossipee Aquifer. No roads cross it. The ones that used to cut into its flanks are not maintained all the way through.
The gas station on Route 25 represents the difficult bargains made by poor towns. If Green Mountain contained mineral resources that some corporation was willing to pay big money to extract, rest assured that it would be called Green Canyon by now. Remember also that the bigger the business, the more they will chisel for tax breaks. And the jobs they bring may be hazardous for workers who are inadequately compensated for that risk. The bulk of the profits generally go to executives and investors who don't even live in the town. Should a town do it? By some measures, absolutely not. What's lost is irreplaceable. But at some point you have to pay for basic services for the people who do live there. In the case of a state of the art gas station, the guarantee of harm is replaced by a gamble on the updated standards and on the operators' willingness, ability, and luck in maintaining a clean operation that will prosper sufficiently to make it a genuine asset.
What kind of businesses are appropriate on the aquifer that would actually be profitable and provide reliable tax revenue to the town? You could throw out a shingle for all kinds of cute and clean ideas, but will you make enough money to continue? Something grubby and mundane like a gas station serves everyone. Yes, we need to end the era of petroleum immediately, to save the environment on which all life depends, but so far we haven't, and the business model remains quite normal. If and when our species gets around to shutting down the industry, the end of the profits will be a problem for the investors who chose to hang on. This includes the gas station in question. Humans invented their way into this mess. Whoever survives will do their best to invent their way out.
Running even a small town takes more time and attention than just showing up once a week or once a month for a two-hour meeting. That's why town board positions tend to be filled by retired people or people whose work schedule allows them the flexibility to put time into training and research. You do get the self-serving scallywags who use their position for personal gain, like contractors on planning and zoning boards, and selectmen who steer contracts to their cronies. But you also get sincere individuals who are trying to do as good a job as they can for the ordinary people who trust them to find the balance.
We had a selectman for a while who was very active finding grants and other funding mechanisms to reduce the direct burden on local taxpayers, and who promoted the idea that anything we did spend money on should be built to last, so that we didn't have to spend more money on it soon afterward. But he annoyed some people who marshaled enough voters to vote him out by a slim margin, because fiscal efficiency is nice, but nobody likes a smartass. Thus do small towns shoot themselves in the foot over petty grievances. He also was pretty good at observing the conflicting effects and unintended consequences of town ordinances, and seeking a balance among competing wants and needs. He wasn't always right, but he asked good questions and facilitated discussion. He had served on a number of other town boards, including zoning, and returned to the ZBA as an alternate after he was no longer on the select board.
The approval of the gas station is probably going to be challenged in court. The denial would have been challenged by the opposite party. The conflicts are clear cut to their partisans. It will be interesting to see how the next level deals with it.
