The following article is courtesy of the Granite State News and Carroll County Independent.
Freedom—May 28, 2025—Five days after Freedom’s Planning Board voted to deny a request to continue a Site Plan Application for Wabanaki Campground, Board Chair Linda Mailhot emailed the applicant to say the board “may have improperly dismissed” his application, according to campground owner Mark Salvati.
Salvati submitted the Site Plan Application more than a year ago, asking for approval to expand and refurbish five structures called “hutnicks” so he can to sell them as co-op “units” if the state approves converting the property to a cooperative campground owned by 77 shareholders.
Freedom Select Board Chair Les Babb made the motion to deny the continuance request “without prejudice.” Denying the continuance means Salvati must notice all parties if he wants to appear before the board again. It does not change the status of the application.
The term “without prejudice” typically applies to an application a board has denied. Its use in a denial of a continuance is unclear. Board Chair Mailhot’s use of the word “dismissed” is also unclear, as the board did not vote to “dismiss” the application.
Mailhot voted with the majority to not continue the application to June, which would have been the seventh continuance in the case.
The Board also learned at the May 15 meeting that the Chair twice sought and received “extension” agreements from the applicant without the board’s knowledge.
As opposed to a “continuance,” which is an applicant’s request that a board delay a scheduled hearing to a future date, an “extension” is a board’s request to an applicant to grant the board more than 65 days to review and rule on an application once it has been accepted as “complete.”
In January the board voted that the Site Plan Application was “conditionally complete,” with one of the conditions being the submission of a new, “stripped down” site plan. The applicant has not fully complied with the condition, leaving the application “conditionally complete.”
A new plan was mandated in January after the board said it was no longer sure what it was being asked to approve because the applicant was changing elements of the campground that were unrelated to the “hutnicks,” including adjusting the number and placement of RVs and decks, and moving campsite lot lines.
Asked by a board member to explain why she sought “extensions” from Salvati given that his application was not accepted as “complete,” Mailhot said she was “erring on the side of caution.”
“I did not get a legal ruling from our Town Counsel to do that. I just went ahead and did that, so if we don’t need it, then we have it for nothing.”
Salvati declined to comment further on the email he received from Mailhot. Mailhot did not respond to several emailed requests to comment for this story.
Wabanaki’s Site Plan Application for the “hutnick” expansions has garnered interest beyond the novelty of the word “hutnick” to describe the cabin-like structures.
Concerns that an approved Site Plan for the “hutnicks” could be used as a de facto subdivision plan to meet the N.H. Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau’s co-op conversion requirements surfaced last year after a town-approved subdivision plan for the property could not be found.
Concerns escalated after a document in Wabanaki’s co-op application that was represented to be an approved, “platted of record” subdivision plan from 2000, to which an “amendment” was “pending” in Freedom, was found to be an unapproved draft condominium conversion plan created in 2022 and is not under Freedom’s review.
Salvati said his subdivision plan reference in the state application should have been to a 2001 DES-approved septic/subdivision plan, although that plan is also not under review by Freedom.