Moultonborough measures a clearing job in square feet before it measures it in acres. Article 14, the town’s Steep Slopes Protection Ordinance, applies when you need a building permit and the proposed site disturbance runs over 20,000 square feet in the aggregate on ground pitched 15 percent or steeper. And the ordinance counts clearing as disturbance. Not the foundation — the clearing. Strip the trees off half an acre of Red Hill sidehill and you’ve tripped it before a single footing gets dug.
Read the definition and you see how little wiggle room there is. A steep slope is a gradient of fifteen percent or greater, taken off two-foot contours analyzed over ten-foot vertical intervals, measured perpendicular to the slope, prior to cut and fill. Those last four words are the whole thing. You cannot bench a hillside into compliance and then hand the board a set of proposed contours. The grade that counts is the grade that was there when you showed up. Twenty-five percent or steeper gets its own name in the ordinance — extremely steep slope — and its own treatment.
Site disturbance is defined just as broadly: any activity that removes the vegetative cover and/or creates erosion from the land surface, including structures, roadways, and landscaping. There’s one door out of it, and it’s narrow. Disturbance where the grade is not affected, and where the soil stabilizes again within a reasonable time, isn’t site disturbance under the article. So a selective view cut that leaves the stumps, the roots, and the duff mat alone is a genuinely different animal from a strip-to-mineral-soil clearing, and on a steep lot that difference is worth real money. We’ll tell you which one you’re asking for.
The other number people miss is in 14.3.2. If your total disturbance is over 20,000 square feet but it doesn’t put more than 20,000 square feet of that on slopes over fifteen percent, the article doesn’t reach you. That’s why two Moultonborough lots half a mile apart get completely different answers. Down on the lake plain toward the Bay you can often clear a house site, a septic area, and a drive and never come near it. Up the Ossipee side, or anywhere on the Red Hill flank, you’re on fifteen percent the moment you leave the road.
Worth knowing before you start: when the article does apply, the Planning Board can hire its own outside experts to review the plan and bill you for it. That’s written into the ordinance’s statutory authorization, not improvised. And separately, Article 9 keeps a twenty-five-foot undisturbed, naturally vegetated buffer next to any jurisdictional wetland — a rule that still applies on small pre-2008 lots of record that are otherwise exempt from the wetland article entirely. People are always surprised by that one.
Before you flag anything, find out roughly where fifteen percent starts on your lot. On the Ossipee side that line is often within a hundred feet of the road, and knowing where it runs is the difference between a building permit and a conditional use permit with an engineer attached.
First thing we do is get a rough number on the ground. Not a survey — a walk with a level, a tape, and the town’s contour mapping, working out roughly where the fifteen percent line falls across your lot and how many square feet of your intended clearing sits above it. Half the time the answer is “you’re nowhere near it, go ahead,” and that conversation costs you nothing. The other half, we start looking at what can shrink.
Usually it shrinks in three places. The house envelope gets pulled tighter. The drive gets re-routed to run across the slope instead of straight up it, which costs a little more in length and saves a lot in disturbed area. And the view cut gets done as a view cut — selective stems, stumps left in, ground cover intact — rather than a clearing. That last one is the big lever, because it may not count as site disturbance at all.
Then the work itself. Brush and small stems get mulched in place; on a steep lot those chips are doing real erosion-control duty, so we leave them where they land rather than windrowing them. Merchantable pine and hemlock go out as logs when there’s enough volume to interest a mill. Stumps that have to come out get pulled and hauled, not buried, and we get the exposed ground seeded and matted before the machines leave — not next spring. A steep Moultonborough lot that sits bare through a March thaw sends its topsoil straight toward somebody’s lake.
Full clearing in Moultonborough runs $3,000–$8,000 per acre for wooded ground. Steep Ossipee-side and Red Hill lots land toward the top, because the work is slow, the material has to be carried rather than pushed, and the erosion control is real. Flat lake-plain parcels and sapling brush sit well under it. Selective view cutting is priced per job, not per acre.
Yes. The Steep Slopes article defines site disturbance as any activity that removes the vegetative cover or creates erosion, and it names landscaping and roadways alongside structures. There is an exception where the grade is not affected and the soil re-stabilizes in reasonable time, which is why a careful selective cut is treated differently from a full strip.
The trigger is more than 20,000 square feet of disturbance in the aggregate, and more than 20,000 square feet of it has to land on slopes of fifteen percent or greater. Roughly half an acre. Under either number and the article does not reach your project, though the building permit and everything else still do.
No. The ordinance measures the gradient prior to cut and fill. Whatever the two-foot contours showed before a machine touched the ground is the number the board works from, so benching a hillside flat does not move you out of the article. It just adds disturbance to the tally.
Small pre-2008 lots of record get an exemption from most of the wetlands article, but not from the twenty-five-foot undisturbed, naturally vegetated buffer next to the wetland itself. That strip stays. It catches a lot of people who assumed an old lot meant old rules straight through.
It can. The Steep Slopes article is written on statutory authority that lets the Planning Board retain outside experts to review an application and recover the cost from the applicant. It is not a huge number on a house lot, but budget for it rather than being surprised by it.
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