Concord Monitor – April 2, 2025
By DAVID BROOKS
Work is continuing on the new forensic psychiatric hospital on Clinton Street in Concord, although you’d be hard-pressed to recognize it when driving by. “In any construction, you have visible things happening, not-veryvisible things happening, and then engineering and planning. You don’t see them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening,” said Charlie Arlinghaus, commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services, which manages many state government construction projects. He said most soil work has been done without finding any unpleasant surprises.
“The thing that’s happening most right now is … a lot of concrete work, testing of the concrete, analysis of the concrete, and the foundations. That’s the most important part of any building,” he said. “It’s like when building a basement and foundation of your house.”
The lack of conspicuous activity at the much-publicized project has led a number of readers to tell the Monitor that it had reached an impasse of some sort, which resulted in a halt of work. Arlinghaus said there’s no impasse and the work is on schedule. “We expect to finish the project at the end of 2026, early ‘27,” he said.
The 24-bed facility will be the state’s first forensic psychiatric hospital. It is being built adjacent to the existing New Hampshire Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility on Clinton Street in south Concord. It will cater to defendants in the criminal justice system who suffer from severe mental illness, those who are deemed unfit to stand trial due to mental health challenges, and people who are civilly committed to treatment. All of those require stricter safety protocols than are the norm at the psychiatric hospital. “Essentially, we’re building a new building that will be attached to the old building. It’s not an addition,” Arlinghaus said.
Concern about security at New Hampshire Hospital following a fatal shooting in November 2023 led the Executive Council to approve a $3 million contract to place armed guards in the building. The site of the new facility was formerly the visitor parking lot for the New Hampshire Hospital. A second state project in Concord – the new legislative parking garage next to the State House – encountered some hangups when asbestos needed to be cleaned from the ground prior to construction.