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The Henniker planning board Wednesday night heard a presentation pitching the idea of a shopping plaza on Old Concord Road, complete with a gas station and convenience store, a grocery store, café and bank, and received the brainstorm rather warmly.

Dennis Sturms, owner of Back Bay Stone on Old Concord Road, proposed a project on roughly seven acres near the intersection of Old Concord Road and Route 202/9. Though no official plan has been filed with the town, Sturms and engineer Karl Dubay of The Dubay Group, Inc approached the board Wednesday to unveil the plan and absorb some early feedback.

“I grew up here,” Sturms, who was raised in Contoocook said. “I want to do a project I am proud of and that people are proud of. I’m not trying to save money or cut corners, and I think this aesthetically reflects what [I’m] about. I want to work with my neighbors and with the community and get feedback and incorporate it, to have this be good for everybody.”

With Unity, a town abutting Newport, forced by the State Department of Education to close its school last week, the Newport School Board has offered to assimilate the ousted students into the Newport system. The addition of students would put a strain on the Newport system in several ways, but the Board felt the difficulties were a better option than the students not having an education venue available at the start of the school year.

According to SAU 43 Director of Education, Virginia O’Brien Irwin, the Unity board contacted Newport for a proposal to take their 117 students into the halls of Richards Elementary and Towle School.

The Newport board has offered to take the students into the system at their full tuition rate. Annually it would cost Unity $11,289 per elementary student and $11,838 per middle school student. With 117 students to pay for, the bill would exceed $1.2 million.

Deering selectmen and residents are looking at the possibility of taking over the lease to Camp Tuckernuck to use as a recreation facility. The Camp was being leased from the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests by the Hopkinton Independent School until the school recently went into bankruptcy.

The Camp also has a beach front that may be used for swimming.

Deering selectman J.P. Marzullo wrote about the possibilities
and the complications in his column, The Deering Hot Line, last week. He pointed out the lease is currently in the hands of the Bankruptcy Court, which will ultimately decide its fate. The Forestry Society may be able to purchase the lease back and then resell it, or the Court may auction it off. Either way, the Court’s aim is to raise money to help pay off the school’s debt.

Peterborough Recreation’s area soccer program may be out of action next year, as a closer look at the controversy that arose between Antrim and Peterborough over the cost of paint for soccer field lines revealed a deeper problem.

“I think it is a symptom of what we’re facing at this point,” said Peterborough town administrator Pam Brenner. “I don’t know about Antrim but Peterborough has had a flat budget for four years, and cut positions through attrition, and we’ve absorbed a $300,000 shortfall of revenue from the state last year. We’re all strapped at this point.”

Antrim has also faced a shortfall in revenue, as every town has because of state cuts in revenues to towns, and Antrim is also working through paying off a deficit.

“Yes, certainly in Antrim we’ve seen tightening budgets,” said Antrim Recreation Director Celeste Lunetta. “Peterborough has asked us to donate the paint to them. We did not budget for the paint for the Peterborough Soccer League, and have had an 18 percent reduction in our budget over the past two years.”

The flame first flickered for Rebecca Lavoie in the break room at work. It was there, the day after Hopkinton resident Eric Windhurst’s 2005 arrest for the 20-year old murder of Danny Paquette, that a co-worker made it clear what everyone thought was a shocking revelation wasn’t – at least to a certain faction of people – a revelation at all.

“The key moment for me was in the break room, there was a paper laying out that said he’d been arrested, and someone I worked with said, ‘Oh, they finally got Eric for that,’” Lavoie said. “I asked what she meant and she said she was from Hopkinton, she knew him, and [a lot of people] who knew him knew what he had done. It was a secret everyone was keeping.”

But it wasn’t until Lavoie answered a casual question during a conversation with a magazine editor that the flame turned into an all-out blaze. The editor asked if Lavoie, a Hopkinton resident herself, had any stories she was interested in developing, and she recalled the Windhurst case.

Forty cats and one dog were rescued from a Deering residence within the last three weeks, and three residents were arrested as a result.

Three cats had to be euthanized because they were infected with what Maureen Prendergast, Animal Cruelty Investigator for the Animal Rescue League of NH, called “feline AIDs.” The remaining 37 cats will have to be quarantined for two months until it is determined whether they are also infected with the feline AIDS virus before they can receive intensive care and needed surgeries.

Randy Emery Sr., 58, Phyllis Emery, 56, and Randy Emery, 36, of 2352 2nd NH Turnpike in Deering were arrested at on June 28 and charged with one count of Cruelty to Animals each. The three were released on Personal Recognizance Bail and ordered to appear for arraignment in the Henniker District Court on Sept. 16 at 8:15 a.m.

“The specifics of the elements are more towards negligence in failing to provide a safe, healthy and humane environment for the animals to live in,” said Police Chief James Pushee of the charges.

All of the cats had Upper Respiratory Infections (URIs), which have also infected many of the cats eyes.

The Patenaude family, owners of Henniker Crushed Stone, confronted the Henniker selectmen on Tuesday about the price quote for lot 98 they received from the town through their lawyer for $300,000. They argued the language of the article on the town warrant at town meeting, which passed with 71 percent of the vote, made it clear they would only pay $200,000 or the current assessed value.

The current assessed value, which was calculated five years ago, is about $250,000. The current reevaluation of the town will not be completed until September. Lot 98 is a commercial piece of property with road frontage on Rt. 114, however it drops off steeply from the road, leaving only one part of it accessible to the road. Wayne Patenaude believes the current value of the land would be no more than $100,000.

Residents aired a mix of approval, doubt, and constructive criticism regarding the plan to implement a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) waste disposal system in Hopkinton at a public hearing on the issue, held during Monday’s selectman meeting. About 40 people filled the town hall to hear an implementation proposal.

Some points of contention the audience brought up with the plan included calculation of the price per bag, practicality of sharing the transfer station with non-PAYT town Webster, and whether the plan should go forward at all. One concern echoed by several residents was the town’s currently narrow range of recyclables.

Tom Herbert said there “are too many things not on the list as recyclable,” and other residents agreed that increasing the capacity would do a lot to encourage recycling.

Selectman Tom Congoran, a member of the implementation committee, said the issue of adding more recyclables is “under discussion.”

An anchor store and several retail outlets make up the plan a developer has for a 17-acre lot on the east end of Hillsborough, the same site Wal-Mart nearly built on several years ago. But realtor Rex Gray of Hometown Realty says of the new plan, “It’s not Wal-Mart.”

And that is about all Gray can say at the moment, due to confidentiality between the agency and the developer, except that he is fairly close to having the contract signed and negotiations, which have been ongoing for about a month, completed.

“I’d say it’s 90 percent,” said Gray of how sure the deal is. “We’re very close to signing the contract on the old Wal-Mart site with a national retail developer. Their intent is to build a shopping plaza with an anchor store and several retail outlets.”

Carnivals and Candy Land weaved a colorful backdrop to a decidedly festive Hillsboro-Deering High School graduation ceremony Friday evening, as the largest class in the school’s history was persuaded to continue blending a passionate drive with playful enthusiasm.

That the graduates were the victors during a trio of separate Winter Carnivals was mentioned no fewer than three times, and keynote speaker and retiring school nurse Candice Garvin made note of the ongoing game of Candy Land the graduates continue to play in their lives, with a nod toward embracing their H-D colors and pedigree.

“We’ve taken our turns and used the slides up and used the slides down. We’ve gotten stuck and now we’re unstuck,” Garvin said. “It’s not a simple game, but it’s on to the next version of Candy Land for us all. We’ve landed on that last space, and it’s red, white and gray in our version.”