When Penacook resident Brennan Bourque heard about the new, 409-space parking garage for state lawmakers to be built in downtown Concord, he wondered: In the months when the legislature isn’t in session, would members of the public be able to park there?

“How often is this parking garage going to sit completely empty?” he asked newly elected local lawmakers at a meeting of the Penacook Village Association. The answer, Bourque was told, is about half the year, primarily between July and December.

“That sounds kind of ridiculous that there’s going to be so much parking space that residents of Concord aren’t going to be able to use, and it’s just going to sit empty most of the time,” he said.

“There’s a security issue, is mostly the reasoning we’re given,” incoming state Sen. Tara Reardon told Bourque. “I agree with you.”

State and city officials are still negotiating the potential uses of the garage when the legislature is not in session. If it follows the arrangement currently in place for the state garage on Storrs Street, the public would only be allowed to park there on special occasions.

Lawmakers currently use the garage that spans over Storrs Street, built in the 1970s through an air rights lease with the city. That garage is largely set aside for lawmakers but, during significant events downtown, the state agrees to let the public use it. A similar arrangement will likely be in place for the new garage, according to the legislature’s Chief Operating Officer, Terry Pfaff.

“We’re in those talks now” with the city, Pfaff said, though “they are very preliminary discussions.”

A key difference is that the new garage will be a “secure facility” — it will have gated, key-card access and doors for foot traffic that lock, Pfaff said, so the state is still figuring out how public access at certain times could work.

Concord police potentially being able to use the garage as a space to park its vehicles is also under discussion.

“We certainly have hoped we might be able to get use of the garage for our police officers,” Concord Mayor Byron Champlin said. “But, as I understand it, the state legislature is very concerned about security.”

The negotiations go through the City Manager Tom Aspell’s office, which declined to comment.

The new garage will go behind the State House Annex — next door to the legislative office building and catty-cornered with City Hall. The lot has been empty and fenced in since what had been the Department of Justice was torn down in the spring.

Site work will restart in the coming weeks, according to Department of Administrative Services Commissioner Charlie Arlinghaus. There’s significant soil remediation to be done, he said, and construction comes after.

The property has a long history. The pink granite building that used to be there was home to several banks before it housed the Department of Justice. Before that, that city block had been home to a school and a church. That history, Arlinghaus said, means a lot of clean up.

“They just buried things, then,” he said. Remediation would start in December, and take a few months, with foundation work to follow. The goal is for a completed garage by the end of next year.

The current garage over Storrs Street has space for only about half of the General Court, and it has been plagued by structural issues — nets stretch underneath its belly to protect Storrs Street traffic from falling concrete debris. Once the new garage is complete, the state will tear the old one down, freeing up space along a parallel to Main Street that the city has in its sights for revitalization.

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com.