In a hearing at Wednesday evening’s Enfield Planning Board meeting, representatives from Dartmouth College Project Management Services will present plans for a new sailing facility on the shore of Mascoma Lake, to be used by the Big Green sailing teams in the spring and fall and by a youth sailing camp and members of the public in the summer.

“The existing boat house and boat storage have outlived their useful lives,” Lindsay Walkinshaw, a project manager at Dartmouth, wrote in a letter to the planning board obtained by the Valley News. “The replacement of these facilities will provide an improvement to Dartmouth’s athletic program as well as a desirable location from which the Dartmouth Yacht Club will continue to operate in the summer months.”

The new facilities, which will be constructed at the same site as the existing facilities at 142 Shaker Blvd., will consist of a 5,292-square-foot boathouse with separate spaces for the Dartmouth varsity teams and the summer yacht club, per the letter. A 3,514-square-foot boat barn will also be constructed for more accessible storage space for the Dartmouth program’s fleets.

Sailing has been one of the more successful Big Green athletic programs of late. Dartmouth won six events in the 2022-23 season, including the Captain Hurst Bowl on Mascoma Lake in October. It is also one of the larger teams on campus, with 22 women and 13 men on the roster last year.

“(With) the old storage system, you had to basically take apart the boat by stepping down the mast and unrigging the boat to store it,” said Rob Taylor, head of land use and economic development for the town of Enfield. “This new facility, the boats go in there completely rigged up, where the masts are still up. So the new boat storage will be tall.”

Dartmouth will pay taxes on 25% of the new property and will be exempt from the remaining 75%. Taylor said he has heard no opposition from local residents and expects the approval of the new facility to be a formality.

According to Walkinshaw’s letter, construction will begin this fall and is expected to be completed in the summer of 2024.

“This is not a controversial project. They’re not really proposing a massive expansion,” Taylor said. “The same program will be in existence once it’s complete; it will just be in a nicer facility.

“The neighborhood is not really worried about this. The architects we’ve been working with and the engineers are first-class. It’s only going to make people’s property more valuable down on Shaker Boulevard.”

Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.