LINCOLN, Maine — Completion of Lincoln’s newest and largest hardware store and an upcoming referendum on widening the town’s major business corridor are among the keys to boosting the local economy, officials said this week.
Construction of the SW Collins store at West Broadway and Penobscot Valley Avenue is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks with a grand opening likely on Jan. 1, 2015, its owner said Wednesday.
“Construction is going very well. We have some great partners on the job,” said Sam Collins, president of SW Collins Co. “The siding is up on the majority of the two buildings. It is insulated, and we will be hanging drywall within the next week.
“We expect to be in the building and setting it up in the month of November,” added Collins, who is the brother of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.
The largest single development on West Broadway in the last 10 years, town officials have said that the SW Collins store is one of the cornerstones of Lincoln’s development, along with the widening of the road and the attraction of new retail and industrial business to West Broadway and the River Road corridor to Interstate 95.
Voters will decide on Nov. 4 whether to approve the widening of West Broadway with a turning lane that would run from River Road to the KeyBank branch office. The total project would cost $1.8 million, but a combination of TIF money and Maine Department of Transportation funding would leave the project directly costing nothing to town taxpayers or town government, officials said.
Maine Department of Transportation would give $600,000 to the project, and a portion of tax-increment finance money set aside since Lincoln Paper and Tissue LLC opened in 2004 would cover the rest.
Voter approval of the road widening is an essential component of plans to apply for grants for the second phase of improvements to the West Broadway area — the installation of water and sewer mains on River Road from West Broadway to the Chester town line, according to Ruth Birtz, the town’s economic development coordinator.
“If this referendum does not pass, we won’t be applying for the grant,” Birtz said Thursday. “We have to have [the road-widening project] in order to qualify for the second phase of the project.”
With its connection to I-95’s exit 227, the River Road area is among Lincoln’s prime pieces of real estate, but its development has been hampered for years by the high cost of installing water and sewer mains there, Birtz said.
“It is our only area in town zoned for industrial development. If we want good, light manufacturing jobs, that is where they have to go, and its access to the interstate is very complementary to that,” Birtz said.
The widening also would effectively free nearly 254 acres for business development along West Broadway and near River Road and Penobscot Valley Avenue while making the road safer, according to David Cole, a former Maine Department of Transportation commissioner who is helping Lincoln officials with the project as a private consultant with David Cole Consulting of Brewer.
Developers could pay the road-widening costs themselves but have balked because state transportation department traffic impact fees would range as high as $250,000 — too much for them to pay individually, Birtz and Cole have said.
“We want to be in a position where we provide economic development incentives for businesses to move to Lincoln. We have a mill, but it is not just a mill town,” Birtz said.
The Lincoln Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce will host an informational meeting on the road-widening project at 6-8 p.m. Oct. 28 at Mattanawcook Academy. Residents are invited. Chamber and town officials plan to outline their reasons for supporting the road-widening project with maps of the town’s TIF districts, explanations of the TIF program and Cole’s presentation on the road-widening project, said Will Labrie, the chamber’s executive director.
“With everybody that I have talked to, there is a tremendous amount of support for it. They see it as a giant step forward for Lincoln,” Labrie said Thursday of the road-widening. “The [Department of Transportation] impact fees are just too huge. With the referendum passing, we can talk to those businesses or others about coming in even before the third lane is built. We don’t have to wait.”
If voters approve of widening the road, road engineering would occur in 2015, and construction would finish in 2016, Labrie said. By then, SW Collins plans to have gone to full staffing, about 20 part- and full-time workers, Collins said.
SW Collins’ main retail area, the building closest to West Broadway, is 18,000 square feet, according to Glen Rowe, supervisor of Buildings Etcetera of Houlton, one of the construction companies building the new facility. Another storage building, about 25,000 square feet of covered storage area closer to Penobscot Valley Avenue, sits behind the main building.
The facility is smaller than most big-box stores such as Lowe’s and Home Depot, Collins said, but larger than other Collins stores in Caribou, Houlton and Presque Isle. Collins wouldn’t rule out expanding in Lincoln or elsewhere.
“We don’t have anything on the horizon, but we are always looking at opportunities,” he said.