Portsmouth police station meeting set for May 20, council will get new cost estimates

PORTSMOUTH — The City Council has scheduled a workshop session May 20 to talk about how plans are progressing to renovate and expand the city’s police station.

City Manager Karen Conard said the city’s working group on the project “has made significant progress and is ready to advance a conversation and a conceptual design, following along with the hybrid model.”

That model calls for putting an addition in front of the existing station “at the upper campus of the municipal complex,” Conard said during this week’s City Council meeting.

The workshop session is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. and will be held in City Council chambers in City Hall.

“You all can review the plans and progress updates to date,” Conard added.

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Department of Public Works Director Peter Rice said the council will hear “refined, updated cost” estimates for the project.

“I don’t have those at the moment,” Rice said.

Police and city officials have been working on the hybrid model — which combines a renovated existing station with an addition. The shift in the plans came after initial cost estimates for a new station came in $20 million to $30 million higher than expected, depending on its proposed location on city-owned land.

The City Council had included a new police station project in the city's capital improvement plan, which came in at $42.2 million, and included all costs.

The lowest estimate for a new station from the working group in November 2023 came in at $61.9 million at the lower City Hall parking lot site.

Rice told the council this week that “we look forward to having an opportunity to talk to you about where we are at in the process.”

The work session will allow the working group and other officials “to be able to talk about how we got to the point where we’re at,” Rice said.

“It will be a great opportunity to get some direction from you all in terms of what you would like to see moving forward,” Rice stated.

Rice said the presentation to the council will include “some block diagrams, and some three dimensional diagrams” of the project.

“They won’t be formal renderings, because until we have really settled on the sizing and the mass of the building, and the layout, we won’t be able to put a pretty picture together so you can see what it will look like on site,” Rice said. “But what we’re looking to do is take some photographs and superimpose a block in there so you can get from different perspectives a vison in terms of what it would be from a massing standpoint.”

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Portsmouth NH update on new police station plan, cost estimates