OLD TOWN, Maine — When Charlie Heinonen became Old Town’s code enforcement officer, his oldest daughter was 5 and his youngest daughter was a newborn.
That was two dozen years ago, and over that time Heinonen has watched his daughters grow into women and the riverfront community that became his home change from a mill town to one that is positioning itself for the future.
“You don’t have to be in Boston or New York to do business anymore,” he said Wednesday, sitting in the conference room at Old Town City Hall. “I think Maine is just starting to get that.”
Heinonen, who is retiring next week, sat down with the Bangor Daily News to reflect on how Old Town has changed during his many years there, and what steps city officials are taking to ensure a promising future.
The best decision the city made during his tenure, he said, was to remove the old Lily-Tulip factory, known locally as the “pie plate factory,” which operated along the Penobscot River until 1983.
“Just before I came they had a fire in there and a couple of kids kept getting in there and running around,” Heinonen said. “It was becoming a public safety issue.
“I got up on the roof one time and said, ‘Look at that river,’” he recalled. “‘Look how pretty it is.’”
As soon as he saw the view, Heinonen knew that the massive, run-down, blue factory had to go. The city went back and forth about what to do with the contaminated site, located on 3 acres in the heart of the city, and finally in the mid-1990s decided to take ownership. The city partnered with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields Program to change the area into a waterfront park and commercial property.
“Once the building came down, the people really realized what a beautiful river we have,” Heinonen said.
Old Town now has a gathering point that attracts people from all over the region and is used for several community gatherings.
Heinonen, who grew up in Minnesota, came to Vacationland in 1971 as a graduate student studying geology at the University of Maine. He earned his degree and worked at Sewall Co. between 1975 and 1977, then for the next seven or so years was a subcontractor for a Canadian mining company.
He met his wife, Kathryn, who is from Milford, on a blind date and married her while working for the mining company. Heinonen was gone for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and one day his wife handed him an advertisement for the Old Town code enforcement job.
“I said, ‘I’ll stay a few years,’” he said.
He was hired in August 1987 and will retire on Friday, April 8.
When Heinonen was hired, the paper mill that has been a part of the region’s economic mix since opening in 1860 was operated by James River Corp.
The city has been through a roller-coaster ride with the mill site over the last two decades as it watched the facility, which once employed more than 540, change hands several times, close and reopen, Heinonen said.
“Yes, we were kind of a mill town,” he said. “They were 40 percent of our tax base.”
A decade after Heinonen was hired, James River merged with Fort Howard, creating Fort James Corp., and in 2000 the mill was purchased by Georgia-Pacific Corp.
G-P closed its doors in 2003, and soon after the state purchased the site and its landfill for $1 and then sold the mill to Red Shield Environmental, which declared bankruptcy in 2008.
The shuttered facility then was purchased at auction for nearly $19 million by New York venture capitalist Lynn Tilton, who reopened it as Old Town Fuel & Fiber. Nowadays, it contributes around 15 percent of the city’s tax base.
What has helped the mill town survive is its business diversity, with Old Town Canoe, Sewall Co., Sargent Corp., Cyr Bus Lines, LaBree’s Bakery as strong building blocks, Heinonen said.
“We have the industry,” he said.
The city also makes revenue from the state-owned Juniper Ridge Landfill in west Old Town — the former G-P landfill — that is run by Casella Waste Management Systems.
The city of 8,500 also has a number of amenities, such as its airport, quick access to Interstate 95, excellent public safety departments, available land, and proximity to UMaine, which the retiring code enforcement officer says should attract research and development opportunities.
UMaine “kids who are on the cutting edge of technology” often leave the state looking for good-paying jobs, but there is no reason those jobs cannot be done in town, Heinonen said.
City officials are working on developing the Energy and Enterprise park on Penny Lane, located next to the university, to attract innovative technologies, he said.
City councilors will host a retirement reception for Heinonen from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, at City Hall and are inviting staff and community members to attend.
Since no one has been hired to fill Heinonen’s shoes yet, he said that he’ll be on hand to help until someone is hired. Those interested in the job have until Friday, April 8, to apply.