NEWPORT — On a recent Sunday morning, a pickleball league had two games going at once in a 500-seat gymnasium, the centerpiece of the newly opened Newport Community Center on Meadow Road.

Along with the gym, the $9 million center, which officially opened on March 27, has two multipurpose rooms, a game room area, kitchen, weight room and team rooms for changing during basketball games.

“This has been a great improvement for the town’s recreation community,” pickleball regular Rick Cota said during a break in play.

The old facility on Belknap Avenue, first constructed in 1939 and opened as a recreation center in 1967, had certainly outlived its usefulness, said Tyler Patenaude, 20, and Garion Lacasse, 19. In fact, it could be a little dangerous at times.

“People were getting hurt over there,” Lacasse said while shooting hoops on a rainy Saturday. “Now, we are not slipping on dust like the old place.”

Also gone are the “dead spots” in the floor, said Lacasse, a 2023 Newport High School graduate who plays in a men’s basketball league in town.

In spite of the age and condition of the old center, for a while no one was sure a new center would come to be, Cota said.

The idea for a new center had been around at least since the town identified it as the top priority in its 1995 master plan.

Voters approved a feasibility study and several committees looked at options and even identified a few locations, but it wasn’t until 2014 that voters approved a $200,000 appropriation to hire an architect to draw up plans, said PJ Lovely, the town’s recreation director since 1993. 

A plan finally went out to vote in 2019, but voters rejected a $4 million bond proposal that would have paid for about half the cost of a new center. Three years later, a majority of voters again said no to a bond, making the prospects for replacing the deteriorating recreation center on Belknap Avenue appear as unlikely as ever.

Both proposals needed a 60% majority for approval but fewer than half the voters supported them.

“The last vote was tough to take,” Lovely said. “It is never a good time to raise taxes (as the last bond vote required), but I felt like the community wanted it, they just couldn’t afford it.”

In spite of the bond vote results, Lovely remained optimistic.

“We needed to find different avenues because we weren’t going to give up,” Lovely said. “We had to keep trying if we wanted a community center for the next generation.”

The “different avenue” came in the form of a federal grant of $4.5 million that former Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg secured through U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat.

“Hunter found the grant and that was the big thing,” Lovely said. “After that, the ball started rolling.”

The federal grant, plus a $1 million state grant and private donations from businesses, charitable organizations and citizens gave the town the $9 million it needed to build the center.

“It all came together and was not going to cost the taxpayers any money to build it,” Lovely said.

Construction began in late 2023 with the demolition of an ambulance garage on the site and later the reorientation of a Little League baseball field to provide the footprint for the 19,000-square-foot center.

Going forward, the former recreation center building will be used by the town for vehicle storage, including backup ambulances.

In the main entrance area of the new space, a section of flooring from the Belknap Avenue building is mounted on the wall with the names of roughly 130 donors on wooden cutouts of leaves affixed to the flooring in the shape of a tree.

Programming and rentals, or “drop-in fees,” not memberships, will provide the new center’s revenue, Lovely said. The center is staffed at the same level as the old one with two full-time employees and one part-time worker, as well as other part-time employees who help with summer camp and fitness programs.

Patenaude, shooting baskets with Lacasse, said stepping on the new floor versus the old one was like “stepping on gold.”

“It is a great upgrade and I am grateful for it, especially in this small town,” he said. “It is worth every penny.”

Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.