Housing Appeals Board Oversteps in Reversing Town’s Subdivision Denial
A recent New Hampshire Supreme Court decision illustrates what can happen when an administrative appeals board goes too far in substituting its evaluation for reasonable judgments made by local planning officials. In overturning the Town of Roxbury’s denial of a subdivision proposal to add new lots along a treacherous rural road, the Housing Appeals Board (“HAB”) flouted key legal principles limiting the scope of its review. Appeal of Town of Roxbury, No. 2022-0238, (N.H. Nov. 14, 2023). This problematic overstep ended up being overturned, but exemplifies how appellate bodies can inappropriately insert their own opinions instead of showing deference when evidence supports local decisions to limit further development.
The Background
When developer Greatwoods Unity Forests applied to carve out two 5-acre lots along the partially unpaved Middletown Road to likely build residential homes, the town planning board said, “No.” Its reasons? Middletown Road was a narrow, primitive road with steep slopes and impassible conditions during mud season that also lacked fire hydrants or water access to fight fires. The town’s board reasonably ruled that adding a few homes would exacerbate safety hazards on an infrastructure-deficient road already taxed by serving its existing residents.
Yet after doing a site visit and hearing arguments upon Greatwoods’s appeal, the state’s HAB reversed. HAB board members felt qualified to decree, contrary to the local planners familiar with the road’s conditions, that Middletown Road was adequate for subdivision, downplaying legitimate fire protection deficiencies.
The Core Issue: Substituting Judgment
In overturning HAB’s ruling, the state supreme court zeroed in on the crux transgression—inappropriately replacing local determinations with its own judgments when the law required proper deference. The court stressed the following point: municipal planning boards’ reasonable findings must be deemed “prima facie lawful and reasonable” absent concrete grounds to disturb them. RSA 677:6; see RSA 679:9, I. But HAB ignored a fair amount of evidence about the road’s perils from residents and planning board members personally living there.
Instead, HAB devised its own evaluations about road width, drainage, and navigability based on its members’ limited observations. Local familiarity carried little weight compared to HAB’s snapshot impressions. This substitution of judgment flew in the face of standards requiring appellate bodies to defer to plausibly grounded evidentiary conclusions of frontline, local decision-makers.
Ramifications
This case spotlights the pitfalls of appellate review boards feeling free to ignore deferential standards and trespass into reasonable local judgments, especially about hyperlocal road conditions. That is precisely what permitting processes and procedures seek to leverage - intimate knowledge of a particular local area. While opposing views of a road’s condition can and do happen, the reasoned evidentiary findings of a town’s planning board should not be displaced without grounds by an appellate board’s own assessment.
By exhibiting overconfidence in casual “drive-by” assessments of road adequacy, HAB did exactly what oversight bodies should seek to avoid: dismissing local determinations absent concrete evidence necessitating intervention. Indeed, pushing aside testimony from officials directly accountable to affected residents based on cursory opposing impressions undermines responsible oversight. Even if honestly held, contravening views of the facts do not instantly prove local judgments unreasonable or necessitate substitution. Largely on the above grounds, the arguments defending HAB’s overreach were properly rejected by the Court.
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