It is a time of decision for Berlin, N.H., a piece of New England that prosperity forgot.

About Berlin: It was not named for the big city in Germany but after Berlin, Mass., which was named after the German metropolis. During World War I, hostility toward things German prompted the New Hampshire Berliners to change the pronunciation of their city’s name to “BURR-lun.” (The same happened in Berlin, Mass.) People still say “Burr-lun.”

In the state’s northern reaches, about 180 miles from Boston, Berlin was long a gritty paper-mill town of 10,000 souls. It enjoyed little of the white-steeple-and-village-green prettiness of many other New England towns. When the mills shut down, thousands of jobs vanished, and there was no other industry to take up the economic slack. Today Berlin suffers from abandoned buildings, arson and an influx of people too poor to afford any other place — many dependent on government programs.

But the city does have the Androscoggin River and mountain scenery. It’s the city’s hope to capitalize on its setting and become a magnet for fans of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). To that end, it hopes to become the lodging and restaurant center for a new ATV park, featuring 136 miles of trails and numerous campgrounds. The state bought the land, 7,500 acres, from a logging company. New Hampshire estimates that the park will bring Berlin revenues of $694,000 a year.

The other development on the horizon is a new 1,280-bed federal prison. The prison would employ up to 400 people during the construction phase and about 300 permanently. Berlin already has a state prison, and some residents worry about the impact another incarceration facility would have on the town’s image.

A far more controversial proposal is for a 50-megawatt power plant to be run on wood chips. A private project, the mill would employ only 40 people but pollute the downtown air. One upside of losing the mills was the improvement in air quality. Richard Poulin, a gift-shop owner and former state representative, says that the interest in the plant reflects Berlin’s “inferiority complex.”

The city’s director of economic development, Norman Charest, agrees that downtown Berlin is a bad place for a wood-chip-fired plant. He also wants Berlin to lose the mill-city mentality “because it stifled entrepreneurship and we developed a culture around a mill that now bites us in the backside.”

When you have lemons, make lemonade. Berlin’s loss of the paper industry has given it a cleaner river and air, and lots of inexpensive housing. We congratulate the city for the new recreational park and possibly the federal prison but urge it to bypass the burning plant. While they might irritate a few people, windmills on local ridges would make more sense for local energy production.

There’s potentially a great future for any New England city that has mountains and beautiful river — and a civic culture that values its environment.