Grantham's Master Plan Has A Math Problem

Steve Schneider, Eastman Community Association's CEO and general manager, put a number to something Grantham has been living with for years. Asked how the private community's population had shifted since its last five-year member survey, he said the share of full-time residents had climbed from about 60 percent in 2021 to something closer to 65 percent now. "It's a marginal move, but it's definitely a move," he said.

That single-digit shift is the quiet engine behind a meeting most people outside Eastman never think to attend. On a Monday evening this April, Grantham residents gathered at the Grantham Village School to talk through the next ten years of the town's Master Plan, a document last updated in 2017. The stated agenda covered business development and road conditions. The real subject, once you sit with the numbers, was something closer to arithmetic: what does a town do when two out of every three residents already live inside a private community that runs its own roads, its own recreation budget, and increasingly, its own definition of home?

The Meeting Nobody Outside Eastman Usually Attends

Grantham's Master Plan Committee has spent the better part of two years assembling a document meant to guide the town's growth through the mid-2030s. This spring's workshop, the second of its kind, was billed as a conversation about business development and the relationship between the town and the Eastman community, where roughly two-thirds of Grantham's 3,400 residents live. Representatives from Northwind Security, the town's largest commercial landowner, and Jake's Market & Deli sat alongside Eastman Community Association staff to talk through what the next decade should look like.

Selectboard and Master Plan Committee member Jeremy Walla framed the gathering as a chance to hear directly from the people and businesses who make up the town, rather than react to a draft plan after the fact. The setup matters because Grantham isn't really one town having one conversation about its future. It's two overlapping populations, a municipal one and a private one, trying to write a single planning document that has to work for both.

The Number That Explains Everything Else

Eastman spans roughly 3,600 acres across Grantham, Enfield, and Springfield, with 1,440 occupied properties inside its boundaries. Residents there pay Eastman's own fees for road maintenance, capital projects, utilities, and staff salaries, on top of the municipal property taxes they already owe the towns their land sits in. For the fiscal year running from April 2025 through March 2026, that meant an annual assessment near $4,364 for developed homes and condominiums, plus a one-time membership fee closer to $7,000 due at closing for new owners of homes and condos.

That's not pocket change layered on top of a normal tax bill. It's closer to a second municipal budget, one that funds a fitness center, an indoor lap pool, eight Har-Tru tennis courts, four newly renovated pickleball courts, a golf course, groomed cross-country trails, and a restaurant at The Center at Eastman. When Schneider says the community's full-time share has edged from 60 to 65 percent, he's describing a private system quietly becoming the town's default residential experience rather than an exception to it.

A Grocery Store In A Town That Already Has A Dining Room

Ask Grantham residents what they want most, and the answers sound like any small New Hampshire town's wish list: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a coffee shop, all while keeping the town's rural character intact. It's a reasonable ask. It's also one that runs into a structural problem the survey data doesn't spell out directly but the numbers make plain.

A grocery store or a pharmacy needs rooftops and repeat traffic to survive. Grantham has both, in theory, with 3,400 residents. But a majority of that population already directs a meaningful share of its household spending toward Eastman's internal budget instead of toward the kind of commercial density that would normally support a pharmacy counter or a grocery aisle in the town center. The town isn't short on people. It's short on the kind of spending that shows up outside a gate.

That's not a criticism of Eastman residents, who are simply funding the amenities they use. It's a description of why Grantham's commercial wish list keeps showing up in survey after survey without much changing on the ground. The town's population and its consumer base aren't quite the same thing anymore, and the Master Plan process is, in part, an attempt to reconcile that.

The Ask On The Table: Not A Handout, A Door

Walla's comments after the workshop suggested the Selectboard isn't proposing to build a parallel recreation system from scratch. Instead, the conversation has turned toward whether residents who live outside Eastman's boundary could get some access to the pool, the fitness center, or the courts that already exist inside it. Walla was careful to note the town has no interest in pressuring a self-governed community into opening its gates. The idea on the table is closer to a negotiated door than a demand.

That distinction matters for how the next decade of planning documents will read. A town asking a private neighbor to build new public infrastructure is a very different conversation than a town asking whether existing infrastructure might flex to include a few more neighbors. The second version costs Eastman nothing in new construction and could cost Grantham very little in new tax revenue, which is likely why it's the version getting airtime.

The Road Everyone Actually Agrees On

If there's one item in Grantham's survey results that cuts across both populations without argument, it's Route 10. The state-maintained road running through town was built on concrete slabs decades ago, which makes it unusually difficult and expensive to repair. Residents describe frost heaves deep enough to damage vehicles, and the state's own transportation department has acknowledged there's no formal statewide program to address roads built this way. Sections get resurfaced as funding allows, which in practice means slowly and unevenly.

Route 10 doesn't care whether the person driving it lives behind Eastman's gate or in one of Grantham's older neighborhoods. It's the one shared piece of infrastructure that makes the town's split identity irrelevant, at least for the length of a bad commute. That may be why it shows up as a point of near-universal agreement in a planning process otherwise defined by two populations negotiating around each other.

What Ten Years Actually Buys

The last Master Plan carried Grantham from 2017 to now, a stretch that included Eastman's full-time population creeping upward and the town's commercial base staying largely the same. The document being drafted this year will carry the town through the mid-2030s, and it's being built by a Selectboard that seems to understand something the survey responses don't say outright: this isn't a town trying to attract its first grocery store the way a growing suburb might. It's a town trying to figure out how to serve a population that already built most of its own civic infrastructure privately, and asking, gently, whether some of it might be shared.

For anyone who already calls Grantham or Eastman home, that's worth watching over the next few Selectboard meetings, not because it will change property values overnight, but because it's the rare planning process that's honest about what the town actually is rather than what a standard template assumes it should be.

If you're weighing a move to the Lake Sunapee region or thinking through what a property here means for the next chapter of your family's story, Pamela Perkins has spent a career learning these towns lake by lake, board meeting by board meeting. Get in touch when you're ready to talk through what a specific address here actually means, on paper and in practice.