Bangor Hydro-Electric Co. has announced the sale of three downtown properties that house the utility’s corporate offices and customer service center.

The spaces at 33 State St., 205 Exchange St. and 213 Exchange St. will be occupied by rapidly growing PROTEA Behavioral Health Services, a privately owned, state-licensed agency that provides mental health and substance abuse services throughout Maine.

“They were right next door,” LuAnn Williams, corporate communications officer for Bangor Hydro, said of PROTEA. “The thing that is so great about this [transaction] is that, for a long time, [Bangor Hydro] has been a big part of downtown Bangor. We didn’t want to leave this void for the businesses there.”

Bangor Hydro will relocate its corporate offices and customer service center to a building that is being developed by Stillwater Telcom. It will be off Union Street between Unicel and Town and Country Realtors. Bangor Hydro had been located in the historic State Street building since 1928.

“We loved our downtown location, but it wasn’t financially efficient,” Williams said. “It really wasn’t conducive to the kind of work space we need.”

The sale and subsequent move of Bangor Hydro is part of a facilities optimization project initiated in June 2003, Williams said. Bangor Hydro is wholly owned by Emera Inc. and serves 192,000 customers in eastern and coastal Maine. Williams said the company plans to move into the new facility by the first quarter of 2005.

“It will be good to have everyone under the same roof,” she said.

Alex Tessmann, chief executive officer of PROTEA, said his company became interested in the downtown locations more than a year and a half ago, but negotiations with Bangor Hydro began only about three months ago.

“This transaction really took its course and flowed as it should,” Tessmann said. “It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.”

Bangor Hydro sold the space to Paradigm Developments LLC, a company that Tessmann owns for the purpose of leasing all its property to PROTEA.

“It’s just a most cost-efficient way of doing business,” Tessmann said. “I’m not in the realty business.”

With the purchase, PROTEA adds about 34,000 square feet, Tessmann said, more than doubling its existing space. In addition to existing locations on Exchange Street, the company had been renting space on Broadway to house some of its administration. Now all of PROTEA’s Bangor employees will be in the same development.

“Any time you have to fragment business, it’s going to cost you money,” Tessmann said. “Bangor Hydro has bent over backwards to make sure this transaction was successful.”

Tessmann and his wife, Rowena, founded PROTEA Behavioral Health Services in January 2001 with seven employees. Since then, the company has expanded to a staff of 110 in its Bangor office and five other satellite offices around the state.

“We just ran out of space on Exchange Street,” Tessmann said. “We’ve been renovating these buildings for the past couple of years, even the renovations weren’t enough.”

“We let Bangor Hydro know that if they ever wanted to leave those premises, we wanted first crack at that property.”