To the editor:

If you’ve driven by the old Anne Hutchinson school on Bristol Ferry Road recently, you may have noticed all the construction activity. It’s been several years in the making, but Portsmouth’s seniors will soon have a brand-new senior center. 

Since 2019 when the Rhode Island state fire marshal ordered the 95-year-old school building to be vacated for multiple safety code violations, there has been much work (and anxiety) over the ultimate fate of our senior center. It’s been a five-year process to find and implement a viable solution for our seniors. Our Town Council and administration leadership have conducted exhaustive due diligence, including detailed analysis of alternatives, a special referendum (2021), and continuing public outreach under sometimes harsh public criticism, to get to this point. The groundbreaking happened last week, and construction has begun.

This effort to save the senior center evolved from initial desires to retrofit current fire code requirements into a failing building, well beyond its useful life. Once the costs ($5+ million) and economic realities (taxpayers foot this bill) of that approach became clear, our town leaders worked closely with the public and the contracting community to develop an innovative and cost-effective alternative to replace an obsolete building with a new state-of-the-art facility. This plan serves two critical functions: provide our seniors a new center and also create more than 50 units of desperately needed senior housing. If you’ve ever looked at the waiting lists to get into Quaker Manor or Anthony House, you’ll appreciate how important this dimension of the project really is.

The economic advantages of this approach are even more compelling. The town provides the site (hence the need for a referendum), the contractor (Church Community Housing) funds and builds the facility at no cost to the town, and the taxpayers get a new multimillion-dollar property put back on the tax rolls.

It’s taken a while to put this innovative solution together, but what a great deal — win-win for everyone, especially our seniors. Next time you run into one of our councilors, or the town administrator, give them a pat on the back for a nice job. And as a town, we all owe Church Community Housing a heartfelt thank-you for their expertise and persistence in finding a way to get this important project designed, funded, and built. This is what success looks like in the Town of Portsmouth.

Jim Seveney

72 Macomber Lane

Portsmouth