The Portsmouth City Council held a combined work session and regular meeting on May 26, 2026. The work session focused on downtown parking policy and the Link District streetscape project, while the regular meeting included a public hearing, consent agenda approval, and public comments. Key decisions included direction to proceed with two-hour free parking on High Street with escalating charges, adoption of a preferred streetscape option with further study of mini-roundabouts, and approval of multiple grant and settlement ordinances.
Manager in place. Let's get it going. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Citizens of Portsmouth are called order at a meeting of a public work session for today. I want to take a moment to uh acknowledge everyone that's here and attunance our city staff that's here and also our visitors in the room who are here to listen to the work session. Our city attorney, Mr. Derek Challenger. Also want to acknowledge our city assessor, Mr. Stephen Edwards, and our city clerk, Miss Deborah White. Swite, would you please call the role? Yes, sir, Miss Bryant. Present, Dr. Dotson. Here. Mr. Moody. Here. I just saw Mayor Clever. Here is in the building. Yeah. Thank you, Madam Clerk. And Mr. Carter, sure, you have the floor. Thank you, Mayor. Good evening, everyone. Hope everybody had a pleasant uh Memorial Day weekend. There was a lot of things happening right now, City. Hope you had an opportunity to participate in all of them. But they had some scheduling conflicts and had to back out, so we have to reschedule that presentation, but we will get that before you. This is County Street lot. It used to be a garage. Then the red shows some other surface lots. You have the old town south uh parking district to the uh the south here of County Street, and then you have some time restricted parking areas and areas of parking meters shown in that map as well. So this map sort of breaks everything up. The two residential parking districts on either side of high street, the uh city-owned lots, parking authority owned lots, and parking garages. Time restricted parking. This is specifically for the two-hour time restricted parking. So downtown visitor parking availability. Um Middle Street and Ward Street garages, you have 279 spaces, uh, 120 uh spaces in Water Street, um, the other are in Middle Street, middle asterisk area because middle streets parked by float, surface lots, 234 spaces, then high street, um includes handicap uh parking and 30-minute parking zones, 165 spaces, 678 spaces, just NDs looking at these specific areas here. Does not include the lots from Queen Street or any other available uh on-street parking. So parking on Washington Street, parking on court, any of those other streets where there's on-street parking, not included in this number. So your May 12th budget budget ordinance two things right now uh parking ordinance reference meter meter parking, so it removes that reference to meter meter parking. So any reference to the to the form of payment for parking is removed from the ordinance. Um it also increased the on-street parking fees from 125 to $2 per hour. So in your parking ordinance, um, it specifies where the city imposes parking, pay for parking, um, and the applicable rates. Those rates are in appendix A. Um, the time frames and any operational details are set by the city manager. So future parking ordinance, uh modifications are needed to the May 12th ordinance. Um at the uh PPA meeting. Um certain parts of the ordinance still weren't clear, so some clarifications that's needed in the existing ordinance as it relates to residential parking districts, and then there's discussion that we're gonna come back to council for for um whether you're gonna change high street parking from time restricted to paid visitor parking.