People looking to watch their state government in action will now travel outside the heart of Concord, up a winding road tucked away off of Rumford Street.
As the downtown Legislative Office Building undergoes 18 months of renovations, the House of Representatives will shift most of its operations to the Granite Place office park until 2027.
Keeping hearings and discussions among lawmakers accessible to the public was of the utmost importance during the transition, said Terry Pfaff, the State House’s chief operating officer.
“We’ve made the goal to make it so that it would be accessible, just like normal, and pretty much succeeded, I think,” Pfaff said while leading a tour of the new site.
“We’re going to have signage so people will get used to coming here just like anything else,” he added. “We want our government — it’s their government, not ours, it’s their government — to be open to the people and we’re going to make sure that this is flawless.”
Granite Place, an office complex divided into a north and south tower, has more than 800 publicly available parking spots. The state owns the south tower, where the Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture are based. House committees will begin meeting there next week.
Entering the quiet building through a long, covered walkway, guests are greeted in a giant atrium by the same security team that watches over the State House. House of Representatives committees will convene in 10 different rooms on the first and second floors. Save for the blank, undecorated walls, these rooms aren’t much different from those in the Legislative Office Building.
The same furniture travelled 1.6 miles over to Granite Place and was set up similarly, with anywhere from 30-70 seats facing legislators and a table for public speakers and testimony. Hearings that are expected to draw a larger crowd will be held in Representatives Hall at the State House. All Senate committees will remain in the State House, too.
The office space at Granite Place was formerly filled with empty cubicles, Pfaff said, so it didn’t take much renovation to make the space suitable for the legislative process. The whole effort cost just under $1.6 million.
In the Legislative Office Building, work is underway on the $7.5 million replacement of the structure’s heating, venting and cooling system, which is more than 100 years old. The nature of the construction makes the building unworkable, displacing House of Representatives committees and some Senate offices.
All the same accessibility features, like live streaming for public meetings, will still be available at Granite Place, Pfaff said. Granite State Ambassadors — the volunteers in green polos that greet and assist visitors at the State House — will also be on site at the new location, waiting to welcome newcomers and answer questions.
The northern portion of Granite Place, and the atrium that separates the two towers, belong to Foxfire Property Management, a subsidiary of well-known Concord developer Steve Duprey.
Demonstrations and protests mostly camp out in front of the State House on voting days, but some pop up during committee hearings, too. When asked whether the line between public and privately owned property would be visibly marked — a distinction which could be legally tricky for demonstrators — Pfaff said he doesn’t anticipate any issues.
“There’s ample room here inside the foyer to do it, and that’s not a problem with the landowner,” Pfaff said. “They understand the nature of our business, so it’s not a problem. We don’t anticipate any issues with that. It’s open access, and we’ll guarantee that.”
Progress is also barreling ahead on the new legislative parking garage that has sprung up in the middle of Concord over the past few weeks, though its opening has been delayed yet again. Despite the shell looking almost complete, Pfaff said, the garage is expected to hold over 400 cars, and it will take time to build the infrastructure to support that.
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