By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

As local planning experts predicted more than a year ago, Hooksett’s growth management ordinance has been ruled unconstitutional.

The superior court ruling comes as a number of largescale residential and commercial development plans are looming, and as planners draft new residential growth limits for voters to consider.

By nearly a 2-1 margin, voters approved a growth cap, submitted by petition at last year’s election. According to Hooksett’s Master Plan, the number of housing units in town has increased by 72.8 percent in the last 20 years, compared to just 34.8 percent in adjacent communities.

The ordinance limited the number of building permits issued annually to any one developer to five, and limited the total number of building permits issued per year to 2 percent of the current year’s total number of housing units.

The new regulation was soon challenged in court by the Controlled Asset Investment Group, which was denied a waiver from the growth rule by the town’s zoning board of adjustment. The group hoped to subdivide a 28-acre tract of land to create a 20-lot subdivision off Mammoth Road.

Controlled Asset argued that the petitioned ordinance was “discriminatory and based on unsupported facts,” according to court records.

Citing the will of last year’s electorate, the town council moved to fight the suit, despite opinions from planning board members and counsel that the ordinance was flawed.

Merrimack Superior Court Justice Kathleen McGuire, in a ruling issued April 27, sided with the developer, and wrote that the ordinance “does not rest on scientific and statistical evidence.”

Michael Sorel, who created last year’s petition, and collected 233 signatures, derived the 2 percent limitation by reviewing the growth management ordinances in the nearby communities of Bow, Pembroke, Auburn and Chichester.

“Maybe there should be a different percentage,” Sorel told the planning board in February 2005. “I would hope that the planning board would improve on it, but it has to start somewhere.”

Voters then overwhelmingly signaled their desire for a residential growth limit, and planning officials have lately been drafting an ordinance that may better withstand the scrutiny of the courts.