Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Clock Is Running Out on the Laconia State School Deal

The buyer told Laconia’s City Council it expected to close the state’s flagship land sale in late July. It is late July. No closing has been announced.

On January 28, 2025, the developer buying the former Laconia State School property paid the State of New Hampshire the second half of a $500,000 deposit and started a clock. Under the structure of the signed purchase agreement, that payment closed a six-month due-diligence window and opened an 18-month period to secure permits and approvals, the last stage before the $10.5 million sale can close. Eighteen months from January 28, 2025 lands on July 28, 2026. That is four days after the date on this article.

No closing has been announced. No deed transfer has been reported. No extension has been disclosed by the state or the buyer. The buyer’s last public word on timing came in March, when its project manager told Laconia’s City Council the firm anticipated closing in late July, as the Laconia Daily Sun reported. It is late July. For 217 acres that already burned the state once, on a $21.5 million deal that collapsed and ended with the first buyer in federal prison, the gap between that stated target and the public record deserves an answer on paper. The paperwork that provides one is public, and this story lists it.

The deal, on its own terms

The Executive Council approved this sale on September 25, 2024, voting 3-0 with two councilors recusing themselves, according to InDepthNH.org. The buyer is Pillsbury Realty Development LLC of Londonderry, whose principal, Michael Kettenbach, built the Woodmont Commons mixed-use project in his hometown. The broker, CBRE, collects 5 percent, about $525,000, when the deal closes; the remaining $9,975,000 goes to the state’s general fund.

Business NH Magazine, describing the agreement signed by Kettenbach and Charlie Arlinghaus, the administrative services commissioner, laid out its architecture plainly: a $500,000 earnest-money deposit, refundable through a six-month due-diligence period and non-refundable after it unless the state cancels or breaches; then 18 months for Pillsbury to seek its permits and approvals; and only after that, a closing. The City of Laconia’s own planning materials use the same frame, describing “an eighteen-month entitlement period” following the council’s approval.

The dates line up across the record. Union Leader reporting in December 2024 put the end of due diligence at January 28, 2025. By early February, Executive Councilor Joe Kenney was telling the council the deposit had reached $500,000 and the company had entered its contingency period, per InDepthNH.org. And in April 2025, Pillsbury project manager Kevin Smith told the Union Leader the firm had made its $500,000 payment on January 28 and now had 18 months to close. Do that arithmetic and the window shuts this month.

Arlinghaus framed the horizon more loosely as two years from the council’s decision, which stretches the runway to late September. He also told councilors in February 2025 that the deposit was hard money now; if the deal dies, the state keeps it. “Don’t spend it before you get it,” he said of the proceeds. Either way the clock reads the same. The period the contract set aside for permits is ending, and the outcome has not been stated in public.

Slow was the point. Silent was not.

The state chose this structure with open eyes. When the competing bids were unsealed in the fall of 2024, the Union Leader reported that a rival developer had offered $14 million in cash and a close at least a year sooner. Kenney, who sat on the committee that scored the offers, backed the winning contract without pretending it was his pick. “They were my second choice of all the offerings,” he said. Governor Chris Sununu’s stated logic was that the permit-contingent deal was the one that could pass the council. Arlinghaus’s was that a close bound to permits gives the state an assurance a fast check does not, as he told the Valley News.

And the permitting has moved. The Planning Board gave the conceptual plan a favorable reception in December 2024. The city’s Technical Review Committee worked the master plan through three rounds, finishing in June 2025. On July 1, 2025, the board approved the overall development plan and a conditional use permit for what Pillsbury calls Laconia Village: 2,050 units of housing in the Union Leader’s accounting of the plan, plus a hotel, medical and commercial space, and new streets, built in phases over years, with Pillsbury required to return to the board before each phase, as the Laconia Daily Sun reported. Kettenbach’s own proposal estimated a build-out of three and a half to ten years, per the New Hampshire Bulletin.

The conditions attached to that approval kept the file busy straight into this year: a draft traffic study in September 2025, the city’s third-party review that November, the developer’s response and a revised study in December, and the reviewer’s final comments on January 6, 2026, per the city’s project file for Laconia Village. Then, on March 9, 2026, Smith stood before the Laconia City Council and put a date in public. The firm anticipated closing in late July, he said; construction would begin no earlier than late 2027 and more likely in 2028, in five phases opening with a commercial gateway and a grocery store ahead of the bulk of the 2,000-plus homes, as the Laconia Daily Sun reported. “We still have to close on the land itself,” Smith told councilors. That was the last public word. The window he named is the one this article is published inside, and no announcement from any party has followed it.

The last calendar died quietly

New Hampshire has been here before on this exact land. In 2022 the state accepted a $21.5 million offer from Robynne Alexander’s Legacy at Laconia. She missed her closing, received three extensions, and missed the final deadline in April 2024, at which point the state relisted the property, as InDepthNH.org reported at the time. What followed was worse than a failed sale. Alexander pleaded guilty in July 2025 to one count of federal wire fraud; prosecutors said she defrauded roughly two dozen investors of more than $3 million across projects that included Legacy at Laconia. In October 2025 a federal judge sentenced her to 30 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and $2.873 million in restitution, according to the U.S. Attorney’s announcement reported by the Laconia Daily Sun and NHPR.

Nothing in this story suggests the current deal resembles that one. Kettenbach’s Woodmont Commons exists in concrete and occupied storefronts. His deposit went hard 18 months ago. No allegation of any kind attaches to him or his firm. The comparison that matters is institutional, and it lands on Concord: twice now, the state has set its own calendar on this land, and the first calendar died through three extensions before anyone said out loud that the deal was dead. The public learned the truth at the end, in a press release announcing a relisting. A state that lived through that owes the public the status of calendar number two before it lapses, and certainly after.

The governor is selling the model this deal has to prove

The stakes run past one parcel because the parcel is the pilot. In March, at New Hampshire Housing’s annual conference, Governor Kelly Ayotte pitched leasing surplus state land for residential development, per NH Business Review. She campaigned on the idea, the Keene Sentinel has noted, and her Commission on Government Efficiency flagged it as a way to put idle state assets to work, per the Concord Monitor.

The Legislature answered with House Bill 1726, Rep. Chris Muns’ measure to inventory surplus state property and shape a process for selling it, reworked along the way to add a study commission. It reached the governor’s desk. On June 19, she vetoed it, agreeing with the goal while rejecting the mechanics: “we need to improve the management of state-owned assets such as surplus land,” her veto message says, before objecting that the bill routes sale proceeds back to the fund that originally bought each property, per the governor’s office release and InDepthNH.org. Whatever the merits of that fiscal argument, the score after the veto reads simply. New Hampshire’s surplus-land housing agenda still has exactly one flagship, and it sits unsold beside Lake Winnisquam, in a state where the median home sold for $535,000 last year, per the Keene Sentinel, and where Laconia’s mayor has called housing the city’s most urgent need, as NHPR has reported.

What the paperwork will say

The documents that answer the question are short, specific, and public. The executed purchase and sale agreement and every amendment to it sit at the Department of Administrative Services, along with the escrow ledger and any closing correspondence with Pillsbury and CBRE. The Department of Safety holds the relocation plan and timeline for the state’s 911 and regional dispatch operations, which keep a lease-back on the property until a new facility exists, per InDepthNH.org; if that building is behind schedule, the state may be a holdup in its own sale. Every one of those records is a governmental record under RSA 91-A, and any person can demand them; the law knows no press credential and needs none. The Belknap County Registry of Deeds, meanwhile, will tell anyone with five minutes whether a deed has recorded. If the state or the developer announces an outcome, this story will be updated.

One more piece of context belongs on the page. The state office built to referee records disputes, the Right-to-Know Ombudsman, has been vacant since July 1, 2025, and the state’s posted notice says filings there get no action until a new ombudsman exists, per the Secretary of State’s office and the New Hampshire Bulletin. If an agency stalls, the recourse is a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7. That is the transparency environment this question lives in: ask, wait five business days, and be ready to go to court.

Read the calendar back to us

There are good endings available here. Maybe the deed records next week and $9,975,000 lands in the general fund, in which case the state should say so loudly; it would be the best news this property has produced in decades. Maybe the parties signed a sensible extension tied to the traffic and stormwater conditions, in which case the state should publish the new date and the reason for it. What Concord does not get to do is let a second deadline on this land dissolve unremarked. The state wrote the calendar. The state can read it back to us.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This analysis rests entirely on the published public record; each claim traces to the fact-check table, and where a status reads ATTRIBUTED, the named outlet is the source of record. No party was interviewed for this piece. Three government websites cited here (the General Court, the governor’s office, and the City of Laconia’s document portal) block automated retrieval; material from them was confirmed through search-indexed copies and cross-checked against independent reporting. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.