Common Sense For New Hampshire

But Do We Want Them To Come?

And if we really don’t want them to come, why build it?

I sat in on the meeting and presentation published below and I strongly recommend watching it.  It’s pretty interesting to see what the new buildings will look like, although one resident, retired designer and graphic artist Ted Ehman didn’t think they were quite interesting enough, comparing the style of the new Taylor Pavilion to a Days Inn he once stayed at in Ohio.

The planned 8th Ave Pavilion produced the most dissent.

It would consist of two buildings connected by a common roof.  The south building would house four small restaurants.  The north building would house public restrooms and, to the audience’s surprise, public showers.  On top of everything (literally) would be miniature golf on the common roof.  (Someone in this town, Matt I presume, seems to have some sort of unhealthy obsession with miniature golf.)

Both ideas, public baths and miniature golf, sort of went over like a lead balloon.  Many in the audience were skeptical that visitors, if they could clean themselves up and change clothes in a public bath house, would be more likely to then drop a c-note at one of our fancy restaurants.  I have to say that when I was younger, and still lived up north, I used to visit Seaside.  (Sorry, Belmar.)  I always used the public shower and changing room and would then get in my car and drive home.  I wanted to be clean to get in the car.  I wasn’t inclined to go spend money just because I was clean.  The miniature golf proposal was similarly unwelcome, particularly by resident and well-known local photographer Bill McKim.  He lives directly across Ocean Ave from the proposed development.

I really think there’s a basic disconnect between our mayor’s vision of Belmar and what the people who actually live here want.  I for one, and many of my neighbors I’m sure, could live perfectly nicely without a public bath house and more miniature golf.  We just want a nice town to live in, not a Seaside Heights of the north.

After the bath house idea was sort of shot down, some folks started speculating what we might put there in it’s stead.  I proposed that we simply build the restaurants and restrooms and not build that second building at this time.  Why build a building that you don’t even have a use for?  Right?

Well that idea was even a bigger lead balloon than the bath house or the miniature golf.  It was pointed out to me that FEMA will be paying the greater part of the construction costs so why not build it.  To that I say: because we don’t need it.

Am I the only person in town that thinks we don’t need to squeeze every last cent from FEMA that we can somehow justify?  First of all, we’ve already been promised tens of millions from FEMA but as of this writing we have only seen two million of it.  But secondly, FEMA is funded by our fellow Americans, and I’m against overtaxing anyone, not just Belmar residents.