PROVIDENCE — Months after tearing down the Welcome Arnold shelter to make way for a new state police headquarters along Pontiac Avenue in Cranston, the Carcieri administration has abandoned plans to build on that site and has come up with a new plan for a smaller, cheaper version behind the current headquarters in Scituate.

The state has already spent $3.8 million on the relocation plan, including the demolition of the homeless shelter amid angry protests last March by advocates for low-income residents.

The new superintendent of state police, Col. Brendan Doherty, is now proposing alternatives and cost-saving measures that include: the construction of a building to house both the state police and E-911 on the Scituate site, the closing of the Chepachet barracks to “allow the state to sell a prime piece of real estate in the town of Glocester,” and $3.4 million of renovations to the remaining 1930s-era barracks in Lincoln, Hope Valley, Wickford and Portsmouth.

In his 2008-09 budget proposal, Doherty said there would be “no decrease in law enforcement services” to the towns currently patrolled by the Chepachet barracks. “Troopers assigned to this barracks will be relocated to the headquarters complex in North Scituate and the Lincoln Barracks,” Doherty wrote.

The change in plans for the new headquarters came to light in the spending request the state police recently submitted to the state Budget Office.

Shortly after The Journal questioned the Carcieri administration yesterday about the then-unannounced plan, the governor’s press office issued a news release headlined: “Carcieri Announces Plans To Save $36 Million By Building Smaller State Police HQ in Scituate.”

In it, Carcieri said: “Although we had been planning to build the new headquarters at the Pastore Complex in Cranston, we believed it was important to change those plans in the face of the state’s mounting budget problems… This new plan will give the State Police the modern headquarters they need to fulfill their public safety mission, while cutting the cost in half for taxpayers.”

The proposed site of the new headquarters had moved at least three times as its price rose in the five years since voters first approved spending $48 million.

Under the new plan, the size has shrunk from 144,000 square feet to 54,000 square feet, and the projected cost has dropped from $63 million to $27 million for a smaller version of the three-story red brick building the architectural firm Robinson Green Beretta designed.

“Under the original plan for the Cranston location, the Wickford and Chepachet barracks would have been closed, and all dispatching operations from all barracks would have been centralized in the new headquarters. Under the new plan, only the Chepachet barracks will be closed, and dispatching will be retained at the individual barracks,” Carcieri said.

Yesterday, the governor’s office cited downsides to the rejected Cranston site, including up to $6 million in cleanup costs for a site “contaminated with the debris of at least 12 buried buildings and foundations,” “serious security concerns that resulted in higher building cost[s] for items like re-enforced, blast-proof walls and bullet proof glass” and a location, in the flight path of the airport, that led the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to impose height restrictions on the communications tower.” Of the decision to tear down the homeless shelter nonetheless, Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal yesterday acknowledged the state will now have to pay about $200,000 to “restore the site to pre-construction status” on top of the $252,475 spent to demolish the building. That does not include the lost value of the demolished building. But he said the state could no longer justify spending the extra $36 million “when we know that there is another plan that will meet the needs of the state police.”

As for the homeless, he said, “The state took the advice of the homeless advocates … The state replaced every single bed that was available at the Welcome Arnold shelter with new beds in other, smaller facilities. In fact, we even added some beds.”

With a $150-million budget hole this year — and a potential deficit three times that size next year — each state agency was originally asked to shave 10 percent or more off their projected spending for the fiscal year that begins July 1. All were required by law to submit their spending and cost-cutting plans to the state Budget Office by Oct. 1, but few did.

As of yesterday none of the large state agencies — including the Department of Human Services, the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, and the Department of Children, Youth and Families — had submitted a plan. And the budget requests from the courts and a handful of smaller state agencies come at the projected multimillion deficit from 180-degree angles.

From the judiciary, for example, came a proposal to spend $1.5 million this year and next replacing ceiling tiles and light fixtures in the Garrahy Judicial Complex. The explanation: “The distraction of discolored ceiling tiles and inefficient lighting diminish the public trust and confidence in the judicial building in [that] its current physical state is less than reverent.” The judiciary is also pursuing plans to build a new Blackstone Valley courthouse.

Other agencies are looking at fee hikes and retrenchment.

The Department of Elderly Affairs is proposing, for example, to impose a $2.50 trip-fee on the 127,000 or so free rides to doctors’ offices and medical treatments the agency has paid RIPTA to provide to income-eligible elderly people in specially outfitted vans.

While this new fee would only be charged to an estimated 400 people with incomes above Medicaid-eligibility levels, the agency is proposing to raise current fees for everyone qualifying for aid who attends “adult day-care centers,” which DEA Director Corinne Russo said have sprung up as a means to provide “a respite to a caregiver who chooses to keep a loved one at home but needs to work.”

To help reduce her agency’s spending, she is proposing to raise the current $5.50-a-day fee to $7 for those at lower income levels (below $10,210 for an individual, $13,690 for a couple), and from $9 to $11.50 a day for those at the upper end of the eligibility scale, which tops off at $19,341 for an individual, and $24,179 for a couple. What “we are really trying to avoid is a waiting list,” she said.

Others warned of serious consequences.

Public Defender John J. Hardiman, for example, said the restraints placed on his agency would necessitate a 20-percent cut in staff, which, in turn, would render his agency “unavailable for legal representation in any parental-rights cases statewide, or any juvenile case statewide or any proceeding alleging a violation of felony probation in any Superior Court.”

State police spending is not dropping. In fact, the budget Doherty proposed for next year would grow from $61.6 million to $78.4 million to cover, among other expenses, the purchase of 18 replacement vehicles. But along with the sale of the prime 6.75 acres in Glocester, the agency also proposes charging Exeter 75 percent of the $434,783 cost to station four troopers there full-time, and Block Island a similar percentage of the $63,298 cost to post two troopers there through the summer.

kgregg@projo.com