Millinocket to mull buying former store

MILLINOCKET – The Town Council will meet in special session at 4:30 p.m. today to discuss whether the town should bid to buy what some residents had hoped would become the Katahdin Cultural Center.

Bangor Savings Bank will be auctioning the former J.J. Newberry department store building at 11 a.m. Thursday at the store located at 225 Penobscot Ave. Councilors might be interested in buying the building and controlling its development or razing it to eliminate an eyesore on one of downtown’s main thoroughfares, Town Manager Eugene Conlogue said.

Some of the space could also be used for parking, Conlogue said.

“The council has expressed interest in this property for several years. With the property now coming up to auction, it seems an appropriate time to discuss it,” Conlogue said Monday. “It is questionable if anybody has the funds to rehabilitate it [the building] so the town is looking to bid on the property.”

Town Council Chairman Wallace Paul declined to comment in detail before the meeting.

Bangor Savings filed a foreclosure complaint against Guilds Hollowell’s limited liability company, Katahdin Community Center LLC, seeking $122,509 on March 16, 2007. Hollowell has since left Maine.

The bank formally assumed ownership of the building this fall, said Lisa Hayes, one of the organizers of the community center effort. Hayes would not say whether community center backers would be bidding on the building.

“The cultural center [initiative] is an organization, not a building,” Hayes said Monday. “We are heartbroken that we lost this building, but we are far from being dead, and that’s as far as I can take this right now.”

Hollowell announced plans in the spring of 2005 for an up to $750,000 downtown arts, culture and retail center which would be run by a nonprofit organization. Since then, the center effort had sparked controversy with several self-imposed deadlines lapsing and months of apparent inactivity that culminated with the foreclosure proceeding.

The council voted 4-3 in late March 2007 to issue a resolve supporting the center. Then-council Chairman David Nelson and Councilors Bruce McLean, Matthew Polstein and Wallace Paul supported the resolve. Councilors Jimmy Busque, David Cyr and Scott Gonya opposed it.

The majority of councilors called the center plans sound and said the center would be a welcome and necessary addition to the town’s culture and downtown business scheme. Busque, Cyr and Gonya have expressed fears that the project would become a sinkhole for taxpayer funding. At one point, they advocated razing the building and turning its property into an expansion of the small park next to it.

The building, Hayes said, is structurally sound, but needs a new roof, facade, flooring, electrical work, plumbing and interior walls before it could be usable. Local high school students put a large mural they painted over the building’s front facade, improving the building’s appearance, and cultural center workers gutted the building of its rotted walls, floors and other fixtures before the renovation effort ceased, she said.

“It would take many, many dollars to renovate that building and make it usable for somebody,” Conlogue said.

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