CALAIS, Maine — A “perfect storm” has hit this Down East border town: the nation’s slumped economy, a month of horrible weather, the weak Canadian dollar and new border identification requirements.
These four factors, combined with fears that the area’s largest employer, Domtar in Baileyville, is on shaky ground and could close again, are putting unprecedented pressure on Calais businesses.
Empty storefronts line Main Street — every other shop is vacant — and “going out of business” signs are common. Downtown, which is the first thing Canadian tourists see when they cross into the U.S., has an abandoned feel and there is no competition for parking spaces.
Melissa Royer, owner of My Favorite Things gift and clothing shop, woke up at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday and began to cry. “This is the day,” she thought, “that we may close for good.”
Royer was a Calais success story. She began her business 10 years ago selling handmade goods from a card table in the parking lot of the local Ames store.
She now has a large, popular gift shop on Main Street and employs five workers.
“We’re trying to hang on,” she said Tuesday. “But I need to raise cash immediately.” She marked everything in her store down 25 percent and began calling customers, begging them to come down and buy.
“My sales this summer are down 60 percent,” she said. “People are just not traveling. Normally, in the summer, traffic is backed up across the street [at the border crossing] for three hours. I’ve not seen that all summer.”
Compounding the problem is the weak Canadian dollar. On Tuesday, one Canadian dollar was worth 85 U.S. cents.
Add in a month of rain, and a shaky local economy begins to topple.
Billie Parks at the welcome center in Calais, operated by the Maine Tourism Association, keeps track of visitors. The high count in July 2008 was 118 on July 9. On that same day this year, 69 people came through the center.
“A lot of people said they were trying to wait for better weather and a lot of people are still waiting for their final paperwork for passports,” she said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been phasing in border identification requirements since January 2008, when oral identification was halted. Since June 1, only a passport, passport card or enhanced driver’s license will be accepted at any U.S. border crossing.
“There was a backlog initially,” Ted Woo of the department said Tuesday. “But it is not true now. Once someone applies, they only wait a couple of weeks.”
Woo said truck traffic at the Calais crossing has decreased by about 6 percent, a change he attributes to trucking efficiencies, but personal vehicle traffic has dropped by a whopping 16.96 percent.
Woo does not blame the new border identification requirements, however, and said the drop is due to the loss of value of the Canadian dollar and the poor national economy.
“The U.S. is in the worst recession in decades,” he said. “Not just in Calais, but all over the place.”
Meanwhile, Domtar, a Baileyville papermaker, shut down operations on May 5, putting more than 300 people out of work. Even though it reopened in mid-June, local people are not confident it will remain open.
“The people are in a saving mode,” Royer said. “They are back to work but scared it won’t last.
“The hospital just cut all its full-timers to 37½ hours,” Royer said. “I looked online today and Filene’s, Eddie Bauer, Six Flags — they are all in trouble. If the big guys can’t make it, you know the little guys have no reserves.”
At the Urban Moose, another gift shop on Main Street, owner Britani Holloway-Pascarella admitted, “It’s been a tough season.”
When asked the percentage of loss she has experienced, Holloway-Pascarella said, “I don’t even want to look.”
A group of tourists in the Urban Moose said the economy had also affected them. The shoppers were members of three families from California, Virginia and New York who gather each summer on Pleasant Lake.
Emily Wheat said her husband stayed home this year in Virginia because he is a builder. “He needs to work,” she said.
Next door to the Urban Moose, Holloway-Pascarella rents space to her mother, Estelle Holloway, who operates an antiques shop. “Going Out of Business” signs were in her windows Tuesday.
“She’s 72,” Holloway-Pascarella said, “so her closing is not economy-related. But I own that building and I have not had one single person inquire about renting it. It will be another empty storefront. At what point do we lose critical mass on Main Street? I’m scared.”
City Manager Diane Barnes said, “We’re experiencing what everyone else in the state is experiencing.”
She said the City Council has been doing everything possible to build a viable downtown. The city has obtained more than $4 million in grants since 2004, many of which helped revitalize the downtown area and the waterfront. Evidence of stimulus money projects are everywhere — paving, sewer installations, water projects.
But even if the economy turns around, Barnes said, there is great fear that the new border crossing, north of the city’s business center, will funnel all traffic away from the heart of Calais.
The City Council has been working with Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge to locate a visitor information center on Route 9, near the soon-to-be-opened border crossing. “We want to partner with Moosehorn to enhance this area,” Barnes said. The new crossing “is a bypass, no matter how you look at it. All of Calais business is [located] this way.”
Meanwhile, Royer continued to call customers Tuesday morning. “Please come down and buy something,” she said. “Everything is 25 percent off.”
Hanging up the phone, Royer said the only comfort she has is that she is not alone. “We — all of us in Maine, particularly those that rely on tourism — we are all in the same situation. It is a crisis.”