Brewer’s Leach Home dedicates new wing

BREWER – Thursday afternoon found Marie Cameron of Brewer eagerly anticipating her first peek at the apartment she will move into later this month.

“I’m just waiting to move in,” Cameron said. “I can hardly wait.”

Cameron, her son, Robert Cameron, and his fiancee, Jodie Herron, were among the more than 200 future residents, local officials and other guests who packed into the lobby of the Ellen M. Leach Memorial Home to witness the dedication of the latest development there, a new wing.

The expansion, consisting of 30 new one-bedroom apartments as well as a solarium, brick patio, community room, computer room and game room, represents the third phase of development at the facility on Taylor Drive. A dining room, lounge-library, arts and crafts studio, exercise room, beauty shop and nurse’s office were provided in earlier phases of construction.

A retired medical secretary who now volunteers at the front desk at St. Joseph Hospital, Cameron said this week that she’d been on a waiting list for an apartment for 21/2 years when one finally became available as a result of the expansion.

Robert Foster, also from Brewer, also visited to check out his apartment. The nameplate next to his door already has his name engraved on it.

“It’s beautiful,” Foster said as he looked over his living room, bedroom, bathroom, storage room and kitchenette done in neutral shades of off-white and beige. “I’m very happy with it.”

The Leach Home, which opened in 1995, was built with the proceeds of a Massachusetts charitable trust established in 1926 by Mabel Tyrell of Wakefield, Mass., in partnership with the Brewer Housing Authority. Partners in the latest phase of development were Key Bank’s community development program and the Maine State Housing Authority, which provided a $1.1 million low-interest loan, federal tax credits worth $2 million and a $360,000 subsidy.

The expansion brings the number of units at the Leach Home to 90, 80 percent of which are subsidized and 20 percent of which are rented at market value, which currently is $1,555 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Rent includes two meals a day, utilities except telephone and cable, weekly housekeeping assistance and the services of a nurse.

During Thursday’s dedication, local elected officials and candidates, and other dignitaries reflected on what the project meant to area senior citizens and the community.

For City Councilor Gail Kelly, the event was bittersweet. Thursday marked her first visit to the facility since the death of her mother, Dorothy Cameron, a former resident of the Leach Home. It was good, she said, to renew acquaintances with old friends and to revisit some of the places her mother enjoyed, in particular the greenhouse.

“She would have been so proud,” Kelly said of the Leach Home’s continuing development.

City Manager Stephen Bost said that when the Leach Home was established seven years ago, it set a new standard for senior housing in the area. “This represents the state of the art of continuum of care,” he said.

Frank McGuire, president of the Leach Home’s board of directors, observed that a campus is emerging on Taylor Drive that ultimately will provide living accommodations for a senior population ranging from those needing very little assistance to those requiring around-the-clock care.

The Leach Home serves a relatively independent elderly population. The Woodlands, located just yards away, provides a higher level of care, including case management, the administration of needed medicines, nursing care and three meals a day. An Alzheimer’s unit, to be named Evergreen, is proposed by developer Lon Walters, president of the Woodlands Inc.