LYME — A single mother and her two youngest children are in the process of moving out of town after the Selectboard decided not to renew the lease for the town-owned house where the family has lived for nearly a decade.

Board Chairwoman Judith Brotman and Vice Chairman Ben Kilham voted during a Tuesday morning meeting to give the tenants until Dec. 31 to vacate the Pike House, a town-owned building on the same parcel as the town offices and police station.

The third board member, David Kahn, was absent Tuesday. But, in past meetings, he has been outspoken about his belief that the town should not be in the residential rental business.

“At this point, we believe that Pike House should be available for town use not as a rental,” Brotman said during the meeting.

The decision ends the role the town has played as the house’s landlord for nearly 20 years. The town first began renting it out in 2008 after a Town Meeting vote to buy Pike House along with a garage, wood shop and since demolished barn for $599,000 from longtime Lyme resident Ray Clark in order to expand office space for town officials.

The current tenant, Jackie Carter, 42, and her two youngest children, Andrew Ladd, 18, and Isabella Ladd, 13, have lived in the home for nine years. Carter’s sister, Jenn, 52, had rented the house for the previous nine years, residing there when the town bought it.

Although Carter and her children have until the end of the year to move, she wants to be out by early August.

“I’m to the point where I want to have nothing to do with the town of Lyme,” Carter said in a phone afternoon after the meeting. “I don’t want to live anywhere attached to people who think this is a kind or reasonable way to behave.”

Carter pays $1,458 a month in rent, plus utilities, for the three-bedroom, 1½-story house.

The cost is well below median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Grafton County of about $2,000, according to New Hampshire Housing’s 2024 Residential Rental Cost survey.

Apartments are few and far between in Lyme. The one listing on the Dartmouth Real Estate Office’s website is a one-bedroom for $1,400 a month, including utilities.

The family has felt uneasy about the stability of their living situation since January, when Carter reached out to Town Administrator Dina Cutting asking to renew her lease, which ends the last day of June. Cutting said the board could not “make any long-range commitments” for the building.

After that, Carter, the office manager for Dartmouth College’s safety and security department, searched for a suitable home but could not find anything she could afford in the Upper Valley, she said.

Now, Carter and Isabella plan to move in with Jenn Carter in West Lebanon and Andrew is set to move in with his grandmother, Jackie and Jenn’s mother, in Hartford.

“I feel lucky enough we have a place to go with people we know,” Carter said.

The departure of Carter’s family is expected to clear the way for the Selectboard to use Pike House for storage and town offices, Kilham said in a phone interview after the meeting.

“It belongs to the town and the town has needs it has to address,” he said.

The town’s overseer of public welfare and recreation director do not have designated spaces in the town offices and could move in to the Pike House, Kilham noted.

Additionally, the Police Department would like to use the house as a more secure and climate-controlled place to store files and evidence that are currently in an unheated garage next to the police station and the old town jail, Shaun O’Keefe, the police chief, said.

But getting the building up to standard will take time and money. “We don’t know the state of the building,” Kilham said. “It won’t be overnight that we can convert it to town uses.”

For Carter, the board’s decision just doesn’t make sense. “Why are they taking a perfectly good house that generates income and using it as storage?” she said.

At a public meeting last month, many residents voiced support for Carter’s plea to stay in the house until Isabella graduates from Hanover High School in 2029.

Family members have since agreed to pay the $24,000 a year in tuition so Isabella, who just graduated from Lyme School, can go to Hanover High School, Jackie Carter said.

In spite of the public support for renewing the lease, resident Simon Carr is not surprised the board acted the way they did. “I frankly think they made the decision before the meeting,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Carr, who was on the Selectboard when the town purchased the Pike House, called the current Selectboard’s decision to stop renting to Carter and her family “problematic.”

“It’s very sad that we would take any housing stock out of housing use in Lyme,” he said. “That’s critical because we don’t have a fantastic area to build new houses here.”

Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.