By Rod Hansen
Staff Writer

Residents clashed sharply with owners of the New Boston Tavern during a recent planning board hearing over a proposal to add a 75-seat sports bar to the facility.

Concerns that the new bar would attract loud motorcycle traffic and disrupt the town’s rural character weighed heavily at the Sept. 12 hearing, at one point causing selectmen’s representative Gordon Carlstrom to urge audience members, “Let’s keep things civil.”

Fears of excessive noise prompted some of the hearing’s most heated protests.

“If you have motorcycles running through town late at night, that doesn’t fit in with the character of the town,” said Old Coach Road resident Margaret McGann.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone’s fighting for the character of the town. To hell with people making money,” McGann said.

New Boston Tavern owners James and Matt Eggers both assured the board they had taken precautions to keep the tavern in touch with local flavor. They also disputed the notion that motorcycles would act as a late-night nuisance to residents who abut the property at 35 Mont Vernon Road.

“I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a motorcycle in my parking lot after 11 o’clock,” Matt Eggers said of the restaurant he’s co-owned with his father Jim for the past year and a half.

The public hearing marked the fourth time since June the Eggerses have met with planning board members regarding their plans to expand their restaurant and lounge that currently seats 100 guests with a 22-seat bar and lounge area known as the Battery Pub.

The New Boston Tavern, formerly known as the Molly Stark Tavern, is located on 6.5 acres less than a mile from the center of town.

The new sports bar would be located in an adjacent building called Neville Mill Hall, with three televisions for sports viewing. Other amenities in the bar would include a video game machine, a pool table, juke box and potentially an area for live bands and karaoke singing, Matt Eggers said.

A recent site walk to test noise from outside the bar showed sound would not disturb the neighbors, said planning board Chairman Peter Hogan.

“We’ve done a noise sampling, and we’ve determined noise is not going to be an issue,” Hogan said.

However, the bar’s hours of operation will have drivers leaving the bar past the time of police coverage in town, Carlstrom said.

The Eggers’ proposal calls for the new sports bar to stay open until 1:30 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights and midnight Sunday through Thursday, while police coverage in town ends at 11 p.m.

“The concern selectmen have here is the lack of coverage we have from police,” Carlstrom said.

Matt Eggers addressed the issue of impaired drivers in a separate interview.

“Everybody that is a bartender (at the New Boston Tavern) is alcohol awareness-trained,” Eggers said.

“There are no impaired drivers leaving my parking lot and there never will be,” he said. Employees of the bar have undergone alcohol awareness training such as Serve Safe, a program sponsored by the National Restaurant Association.

Eggers said he has a personal concern for the safety and the character of the neighborhood, because the tavern also serves as home to himself, his parents and his pregnant wife, Fanny.

“When I’m operating the bar, my parents are sleeping in the house,” Matt Eggers said.

Matt Eggers said some of the abutters’ complaints may stem from how he chose to classify the bar.

“People seem to disagree with the idea of having a sports bar next to them,” he said. “Maybe if I had just said I was adding a new tavern, it wouldn’t have been dragged through the mud the way it has been.”

Members of the planning board accepted the Eggers’ application as complete at their Sept. 12 meeting, and will take up the issue again at their meeting of Oct. 10. Accepting an applications complete does not signal final approval, but rather gives the planning board the ability to continue with further review, Hogan said.

Eggers said some items remaining to be finalized include paperwork on the tavern’s liquor license and Department of Environmental Services’ approval of the building’s septic system.