At the end of Mechanic Street, Portsmouth New Hampshire becomes almost too beautiful for arithmetic.
The road runs out near Prescott Park and Point of Graves, where slate headstones lean toward the harbor and old houses hold their place against the water. Then everybody flushes.
Beneath that view sits the largest wastewater pumping station in the city. It dates to 1963, has suffered recent pump failures and sends Portsmouth’s sewage toward the Peirce Island treatment plant. The city now expects to spend about $25 million designing and building its replacement.¹ [Appendix A]
Once, $25 million would have been enough for a full civic argument. Now it takes a number and waits its turn.
Across town, the Municipal Building Blue Ribbon Committee has put a rough estimate of $58.6 million on a nine-phase renovation and expansion of the police station and City Hall. The work would stretch from 2028 through 2032. Councilors greeted the estimate with relief because earlier stand-alone police concepts reached as high as $72.6 million.² [Appendix A]
That is the strange emotional life of a public estimate. Fifty-eight million dollars can sound reassuring when seventy-two million spoke first.
The police building has earned its place in the queue. In 2018, then-Police Commissioner Rev. Arthur Hilson described rodents, black mold and dust inside the department and called it “certainly not a good place to be, health-wise.”³ The city later undertook remediation, but years of improvised fixes do not turn an inadequate building into a good one.
Chief Mark Newport has also described a problem no architect can solve. Last December, with 63 officers filling an authorized 70 positions, he said Portsmouth’s wages were “way below market value” and the department was “not competitive with other police departments.”⁴