Loring eyed for drug treatment site

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BAR HARBOR – The nonprofit group that hopes to establish the state’s first long-term residential drug treatment center will develop a proposal to use part of the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, group officials said Wednesday.

The idea is preliminary, and the Maine Lighthouse Corp. has a lot of work ahead in order to craft a new proposal, according to Douglas Chapman, a Bar Harbor attorney who recruited some of Maine’s top community leaders to join his effort.

The group encountered intense community opposition when it tried to secure the former Navy base in Cutler earlier this year. Chapman said Wednesday that Maine Lighthouse expects opposition no matter where it tries to locate, but that “half-truths and fear” would not deter the group from trying again.

“We will proceed as we have from the beginning – on the high road,” Chapman said. “This project is too important to die.

“A fact that a lot of people miss,” Chapman added, “is that the [treatment center clients] will be professionals – doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers and priests, police officers. So this is not the black hole people think” when they imagine a long-term drug rehabilitation center.

A group of Maine Lighthouse board members met last Saturday with Brian Hamel, president and chief executive officer of the Loring Development Authority, and left enthusiastic about the possibility of using part of the former base, now the Loring Commerce Centre, for a treatment center.

“I think it’s a doable thing, and I think it’s worthwhile looking at [Loring],” Daniel Wathen, former Maine chief justice and Maine Lighthouse Corp. president, said Wednesday. “I think Loring is a very good site” to explore.

Wathen, a native of Aroostook County, was not among the board members to meet with Hamel, but he has become a visible and articulate spokesman for the group, in addition to serving as president.

“Certainly [Aroostook] is a place where employment would be appreciated and respected,” Wathen said of the health care industry jobs that the residential treatment center would create. “So at this stage we’re interested, and we’re looking into it, and we’ll pull everything together in the next couple of months,” and put together a proposal for Hamel and the Authority’s board of trustees to consider.

Hamel confirmed Wednesday he met for about four hours with Maine Lighthouse directors and took them on a tour of the former base. Hamel said he has a lot of studying to do about Maine Lighthouse’s residential treatment center before deciding whether to send it on to trustees for action.

“We never close the door on any project until we determine it is not a viable project, and at this point, I don’t have enough information to determine that,” he said.

Projects must be compatible with the LDA’s strategy for redeveloping Loring, Hamel said, adding that the Maine Lighthouse plan could fit either into a commercial or educational zone at the base.

He said there is room for such a facility.

“There is still much for me to learn before I can make a recommendation,” he said.

Loring Commerce Centre already is the site of numerous businesses and organizations, including the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Center, Loring Job Corps Center, Maine Winter Sports Center, Maine Readiness Sustainment Maintenance Center, The Telford Group Inc. and SITEL Corp.

Both Chapman and Wathen emphasized that Maine Lighthouse plans to look at other possible sites in Maine.

Wathen said at least one and perhaps two regional intake and assessment facilities would be needed. He identified Ellsworth as a possible site, given the pronounced drug problem in Washington and Hancock counties.

The Cutler residential treatment proposal would have created nearly 140 jobs and served up to 300 alcohol and drug addicts.

Maine Lighthouse plans to use the international Daytop Inc. model for long-term residential care, created in 1962 in New York City by a Catholic parish priest.

Daytop’s “therapeutic community” simulates a family atmosphere, where residents are responsible not only for themselves and their individual space, but also for the entire facility.

Hamel said he will likely take a trip to New York to tour Daytop facilities before making a decision.

Maine hospitals and other addiction programs offer short-term treatment, typically 30 days, but many addicts return to their addictions because they return to the environment that helped create the problems, officials said.

Anyone who needs long-term residential care must go out of state. The Daytop concept keeps clients at the facility for up to a year.

Chapman is optimistic the LDA trustees can withstand political pressure in a way that the Cutler Development Corp. apparently could not. The Loring group is experienced in decommissioning a military facility and finding new uses for the sprawling campus located near the Canadian border in Limestone, Chapman and Hamel both noted.The Cutler board, meanwhile, was a small group of community members with no experience in the field. They gave the former Navy base to a housing developer.

“These bases represent a resource for the entire state, and they should not be treated provincially,” Chapman said. “When they are, we lose a statewide resource to politics.

“I was surprised, having grown up in Washington County, and with the [public] knowledge of the addiction problem down there, be it alcohol or whatever it is, that a few individuals could poison the minds of that good community and cause the whole community to turn out in an angry fashion based on half-truths and fear,” he said.

Chapman described Maine Lighthouse’s experience in Cutler as a “blood bath” and hoped for better results in other communities.

Cutler residents, who had a say in approving whatever project went into the naval base, were unified and vocal in their opposition to the drug treatment program, responding with silence during a public presentation of the proposal during a February meeting. Many thought the presence of a drug treatment center would lower property values and endanger the community.

“We’ve got some wounds,” Chapman said, “but every time you come through a blood bath, you come out the other end better for it – a little wiser and more mature.”

Reporter Liz Chapman is not related to attorney Douglas Chapman.