Special panel studying feasibility of plan to centralize state offices

AUGUSTA — The creation of more “campuses” to centralize state offices, which now are sprawled throughout the capital area in more than 50 locations, is being studied by a special committee.

The offices are in Augusta, Hallowell, Gardiner and Winthrop, and they are housed in state-owned buildings, suites and leased cubbyholes. Some are large, some small, some are easily accessible and some are tucked away.

Not only is it inconvenient for the public to find government services, but scattered offices create administrative problems for managers of large bureaucracies. There is some concern that the state may be wasting money by renting dozens of offices — entire buildings, in some cases — instead of building its own facilities.

Even veteran state employees are sometimes at a loss to get from point A to point B, so the Legislature created a committee to draft a new Capitol Area Master Plan.

State Rep. James R. Handy of Lewiston drove around Augusta during his first term in the Legislature, searching in vain for a branch of the Department of Human Services. “It was stuck behind a shopping center on Western Avenue,” he recalled.

Caribou City Manager Terry St. Peter was once late for a meeting at a Department of Environmental Protection office in Gardiner because he went to state offices in Hallowell by mistake and nobody could point him in the right direction.

“The more people we asked,” he remembered, “the fewer answers we got.”

Even Kathy Tatarcyk, a clerk-typist in the State Office Building who routinely gives directions to lost office seekers, has her share of problems with the confusion of state buildings in the Augusta area.

“I still have to look up some divisions” after seven years on the job, Tatarcyk said. “Every once in a while, I still get a curve thrown at me.”

The study committee’s final report, which may be two years away, will have to be approved by the Legislature.

Should the committee embrace a large-scale construction program, it may run afoul of political leaders who fear public opposition to what one observer dubbed “a monument to bureaucracy.”

Such a plan also would disturb the city of Augusta, which collects property taxes on privately owned buildings leased to the state but not on state-owned buildings.

Any time state offices are moved into state-owned buildings “you obviously have a drain on the (local) tax base,” said State Planning Director Richard H. Silkman, a member of the master-plan committee.

The attorney general once occupied two adjoining offices around the corner from a suite of offices housing the Department of Education.

Now the Attorney General’s Office fills the entire sixth floor and part of the seventh at the State Office Building behind the State House. And the Department of Education has a 45,000-square-foot building of its own southwest of the State House.

With planned consolidations, the Department of Human Services still will have eight offices in Augusta and Hallowell, and the Department of Labor has at least five offices in those two cities.

Even state brochures are incomplete. The Capitol Visitors’ Guide, which is posted prominently at various points in the capitol, does not list the names and addresses of all state agencies. And the map on the brochure does not even show Gardiner, where several state offices are located.

Compounding the problem, the need for additional space for the Bureau of Public Improvements has worsened in the past two years, according to Cheryl Kelley of the state BPI.

“If we’re going to lease, and we’re going to lease wherever buildings become available, we’re just going to scatter” even more, said David S. Silsby Jr., a member of the study committee.