Hollis Dunkin Donuts is unlike other locations in many ways. It’s in a repurposed building multiple times its age, it doesn’t have the usual bright orange and pink signs and it doesn’t have a drive-thru despite it being a former site of a bank with one.
While I can’t speak intelligently to the finer details of its original battle to exist, I can give some local lore as I am a regional native. Rep Moffett might be quick to criticize me for tasking readers with their own fact checking, but not so fast! Hollis has an extremely bad reputation for their spitefully sloppy and sporadic recording and retention of meeting minutes and other important public records. Just ask some of the most respectable locals if you don’t believe me, but let’s get to that history.
Souhegan National Bank (SNB) was the only place in town where a teenie bopper like me could cash a Brookdale Fruit Farm payroll check without having an account, or a license for that matter. Sometime after the mid 80s, SNB was gone. At an unknown time after SNB’s relocation or closure, Dunkin Donuts wanted to move in and they were very unwelcome. My uncle, a regular town meeting attendee, would come to family dinners and cookouts with reports of what the most recent planning board discussions and actions were. In short, Dunkin Donuts was unwelcome mostly because they clashed with the quaint rural character that Hollis locals sought to preserve.
Permits were denied for various reasons (shuffle deck), mostly being infrastructural matters, like water, sewer, and traffic impact. With each rejection, they would come back, to the chagrin of the locals, just like Jason Voorhees. They edited their plans each time to address the reason for the rejection, which I surmise included the abandonment of a drive-thru. Keep in mind that the place was once a bank, and its drive-thru part of the infrastructure is still there, as one can see in a Google Earth image of 2 Main St.
These Dunkin Donuts developers wanted what they wanted, and they were bent on not taking NO for an answer. They eventually got their way, and my uncle later reported that the place was always busy, as I’m sure anyone stuck at the only red light in town would regularly observe. With today’s Nashua metropolitan area being saturated with Dunkin Donuts and plenty of competition being available, this location is seemingly no busier than others at the same time of day/week.
Why am I sharing this story? There are a few answers, in no particular order. One of them concerns the current acrimonious (to use Ray Guarino’s favorite word again) controversy involving zoning, planning, property rights, and local control. Another reason is to prepare Hollis GOP members who haven’t been in town as long as Dunkin Donuts has for their meeting next Thursday, 5/22, at Lawrence Barn. Nurse Terese is one of the featured guest speakers, and she’s presumably invited to discuss her recent accomplishment in saving her hometown of Loudon over $2M from bloated school budget pork. However, she’s been taking a lot of heat lately for her activism against all this housing bill madness, which, if certain combinations of bills cross the finish line, could destroy local control by way of neutering the institution of zoning.
“I am the most hated person at the state house,” said Terese, to which I respectfully replied, “Do you have more haters than Jesus did?” I would regularly quote Rep Kelley Potenza with “that means you’re right over the target,” when she complained that zoning abolitionists would “heap abuse” (1 Peter 4:4) on her. The loudest argument against zoning that I am hearing has to do with property rights though the Uniparty establishment is pushing all this crap in the sacred name of housing. While Dunkin Donuts is not a dwelling, their story illustrates that a process does exist, though each individual outcome won’t necessarily please everyone. As far as I know, Dunkin Donuts didn’t have to use litigation to get (enough of) what they wanted, evidence of hope that peaceful discourse can resolve disagreements and solutions can be found that all of us are willing to accept.
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