Freedom—June 5, 2025—Wabanaki Campground has withdrawn its Site Plan Application to expand five cabin-like structures called “hutnicks” that are among 77 property “units” it hopes to sell if the state approves a plan to convert the 11-acre Ossipee Lake property to a cooperative.
The withdrawal by campground owner Mark Salvati comes after Freedom’s Planning Board last month voted 6-0 to deny a continuance of the proceedings to June, which would have been the seventh such delay since the application was submitted more than a year ago.
The vote to deny a continuance was made “without prejudice,” meaning the same application could have been resubmitted, a possibility now removed by the withdrawal.
Salvati scheduled an April 17 meeting with the Planning Board to discuss a potential subdivision plan. The board canceled at the last minute due to confusion over what materials could be presented without notifying abutters and the public. The campground owner has declined to comment on whether he plans to reschedule.
In January, the Planning Board told Salvati he needed to produce a new site plan plat after the board concluded that design changes unrelated to the “hutnicks” were making it impossible to understand what the board was being asked to approve.
“We should have stopped from the first time we saw this and said, well, your application’s only for hutniks,” said Les Babb, the Select Board’s representative to the Planning Board.
In February an independent professional evaluation of the plan by TND Engineering of Portsmouth concluded it should be denied or withdrawn because of “inconsistencies and regulatory problems.”
TND took particular aim at Wabanaki agent Horizons Engineering for asking Planning Board members to ignore the plan’s repeated changes to blocks of extraneous information, including the number and location of RVs and attached structures, such as decks.
“The submitted plans depict fundamental noncompliance with town and State regulations that the applicant seeks to remove from the Board’s attention, namely the zoning ordinance, the site plan review regulations and State statutes,” the TND report stated.
Wabanaki’s Site Plan Application has courted controversy since it was filed in February, 2024, and was taken up by the board the next month. A Planning Board site visit that April resulted in calls to require a stormwater management plan for the whole property to address shoreline erosion and debris flowing into the lake.
After Board Chair Linda Mailhot determined the board did not have the authority to require such a plan, Freedom’s Conservation Commission took the issue to the Select Board. The Selectmen said it was a Planning Board issue, and the impasse continued for months until N.H. DES stepped in this April.
In December, Mr. Salvati conceded that he had refurbished and expanded one of the “hutnicks” while approval for the work was pending as part of the Site Plan Application. He said he misspoke when he told the board that no construction was taking place.
The Planning Board’s decision to not approve another continuance came on the same night it was learned that Board Chair Mailhot granted two “extensions” in the proceedings without the board’s knowledge.
An “extension,” per RSA 676:4(f), is a board’s request to an applicant to grant the board more than 65 days to review and rule on an application after it has been accepted as “complete.” The board, however, had not accepted the application as complete.
In January the board ruled the application was “conditionally complete,” with one of the conditions being to submit for the board’s review a revised application with a plat that did not contain extraneous material. The applicant had not fully complied by the May 15 meeting.