At a Hanover Planning Board meeting last week, angry residents of Occom Ridge Road again presented their case against the proposed location of the Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth.
Members of the Occom Pond Neighborhood Preservation Association, a group of about 70 citizens, told the Hanover Planning Board that the proposed Center has too broad a usage to be located on a primarily residential street.
Charles Officer, who opposes the Occom Ridge location, said if the building was completely full it would need 74 parking spaces -- 32 more than are planned. He said he based his results on attendance projections.
Officer is the husband of Trix Officer, who is the head of the Occom Ridge association.
Len Morrissey, who has been outspoken in his resistance to the Occom Ridge location, said "there are a number of sites on the former hospital that would be more suitable for the Center and for the neighborhood."
The Occom residents have hired a lawyer, Barry Schuster of Lebanon, to counsel them.
Schuster suggested the College "has been unwilling to discuss alternate sites. There have been no direct concessions that I am aware of. The College is being very short-sighted."
Director of Facilities Planning Gordie DeWitt said the Mary Hitchcock hospital site is "earmarked for long-term academic expansion."
"They would like to get us talking about 'Why don't we put it somewhere else?' You could go on forever like that," he said.
Both the College and the citizen's group will present more information at the Jan. 31 Planning Board Meeting.
Hanover Planning Board Chairman Charles Faulkner said, "the board is now in the position of approving, or not [approving], the application for the site plan."
Faulkner said "I think it is hard to say at this point how the board will vote."
The association has protested the Center's site since Nov. 1993, complaining about parking size and placement, traffic access and safety, scope of services and size-design of building.
In response to residents' concerns, the Foundation for Jewish Life has downsized the Center by 1,400 feet, reduced its height to one story, increased the number of parking spaces, moved parking to the Delta Delta Delta sorority parcel and changed the building materials to brick, white paint and lead-coated copper roofing.
DeWitt called the residents's most-recent argument "curious" because "it didn't really comment on the site plan but commented over and over that it was too big. They made an impassioned presentation."
The citizen's group estimates a 200 percent increase in Jewish worship attendance in the first decade after the Center's completion. Officer said those figures are based on changes in church attendance in the Upper Valley.
College Rabbi Daniel Siegel said the attendance estimates are not accurate because "a Jewish community functions in a very different way [than a church congregation] because we don't have an agreement that your religiousness is tied to your attendance."
Opponents of the Center have cited the 220-seat auditorium in the building's blueprint as evidence it will attract too many people from beyond the Dartmouth community to be appropriate for the Occom Ridge location.
The auditorium will be divided by a removable partition, Siegel said.
"We want to have our religious service in one room and then go to another room to eat," he said. "But instead of building two rooms with a fixed wall, why not build one room with an attractive moveable wall?"
Siegel also disagreed with the group's study on the number of parking spaces needed.
"I would not dignify that by calling it a traffic study," he said
Officer's findings about traffic and parking disagree with a formal study by Resource Systems Group last year that recommended only 20 spaces.
Karen Knetter, a senior associate at Resource Systems Group, said the citizen's research is flawed.
Economics Professor William Fischel said the Resource Systems Group's findings are more credible because it is a neutral group.
Fischel is the Hanover Zoning Board chairman. He is an adamant supporter of the Center, and stepped down from the zoning process because of the conflict of interest.
The proposed Center passed a major hurdle this fall when the Hanover Zoning Board approved it with the condition that the planners expand parking.
The current site is a plot of land between Occom Ridge Road and Choate Road.
If the Center is approved construction will begin in spring of 1996.
