Portsmouth new police station sites down to 5: Here are next steps

PORTSMOUTH — The City Council is slated to hold a work session meeting on Nov. 13 to discuss a potential new police station site.

The council voted this week to hold the workshop meeting with the Police Commission and members of the city’s working group aimed at creating a new Community Policing Facility.

The working group has reduced the number of potential city-owned sites for the new facility to five, City Councilor John Tabor said this week.

“The design team would really like some feedback on the sites,” Tabor said during this week’s City Council meeting.

The five sites include a possible renovation of the existing police station site at the City Hall complex on Junkins Avenue.

The other four potential sites include the lower parking lot at the City Hall campus, the Granite Street ballfield, which is located near the end of the Market Street Extension by Rite Aid, the former Sherburne School where the Robert J. Lister Academy is now located, and the field in front of Little Harbour School on South Street, according to Tabor and comments made by other officials at a recent input session on the facility.

“Each of those sites have their pros and cons,” Tabor said. “I think what the team would really like is some feedback from the council. Obviously it gets expensive to do further engineering and research on five sites.”

“If the council could give feedback, we might be able to winnow down that list,” Tabor added.

Police station part of a puzzle of projects in Portsmouth

Tabor, who made the motion to hold the work session, pointed out “we’ve got competing uses like ballfields, where do we relocate ballfields, we’ve talked about housing as an option for Sherburne, that’s a competing use,” he said.

Mayor Deaglan McEachern credited Tabor with scheduling the meeting after the upcoming municipal elections.

“Regardless of who wins, this is going to be one of the bigger issues that faces Portsmouth in the next two years,” he said.

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Deputy Police Chief Mike Maloney said “part of the goal of this all along is to keep the public and the community informed about this entire process from step one.”

He acknowledged building a new station is “a big project” and a “big undertaking.”

“There are big dollars associated with it, and we understand the gravity of that,” he said during a recent public meeting on the project. “We want to make sure the public is brought along with us, every step of the way.”

Department of Public Works Director Peter Rice stressed it’s “really important that we do this right.”

“This is a 50-year investment, we don’t want to jump into something and then have to back it up or find that we misstepped,” Rice said during the recent meeting, while stating that the final site decision would be made by the City Council.

Station to cost tens of millions of dollars

Rice previously reported that the City Council has identified a $42 million price tag for a new station, an estimated $38 million of which would go to construction costs.

He explained at the recent meeting that two sites that had been considered previously, were dropped off the list.

That’s because, he said, “of the difficulty either in terms of the development, or in terms of the location.”

He explained Hislop Park, which is located at 134 Preble Way, is “relatively remote” and was dropped off the list of potential sites for a new station.

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“It’s isolated in terms of access, if there was an accident on the railroad, it could isolate the police department and make it very challenging to access their facility,” Rice said.

The working group also eliminated the Parrott Avenue parking lot, Rice said.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure underneath Parrott Avenue that would really not be easily relcoated, so that dropped off as well,” Rice said.

The current station is located in a former hospital building.

Police say it’s too small, the space they have is cramped and congested, the air quality is often poor, and they have had to remediate mold for years.

The layout of the station is also poor. For example, when a suspect is bailed out, police have to walk that person unhandcuffed from a holding cell, through the station, to the lobby.

City project page: cityofportsmouth.com/publicworks/portsmouth-community-policing-facility

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Portsmouth NH new police station sites down to 5