PORTSMOUTH– The Portsmouth City Council triumphantly declared the Portsmouth housing crisis to finally be over thanks to their new plan to annex neighboring cities of Newington, Dover, and Somersworth.
“The issue we’ve been struggling with for decades is where to put all the people who want to move to Portsmouth, and then it finally hit me ‘what if Portsmouth was way bigger?’”, Mayor Deglan McEachern said outside a non-public City Council meeting late Friday.
Assistant Mayor Joanna Kelley noted that the Portsmouth Housing Authority keeps asking the Council if they can take over old schools and radio stations and that gave us the idea to think even bigger. Instead of just taking a school, what if we took whole cities?
Kelley noted several times that it was really her idea, not McEachern’s.
Councilman Vince Lombardi woke up just long enough to express support for the idea. “We understand that everyone who lives in Somersworth would rather live in Portsmouth and under our plan we can make all their dreams come true.”
At publishing time, it was not yet clear whether Newington, Dover, and Somersworth would go along with the plan, but our underpaid reporters did confirm that spontaneous protests had broken out in Rochester, where angry homeowners were apparently feeling snubbed.
