OLD TOWN, Maine — City leaders, after hearing just one question about a proposed $3 million bond to purchase the 40-acre parcel of land and some warehouses along the Penobscot River where the Expera Old Town mill once operated, unanimously approved moving forward with the process.
The old mill property is owned by a consortium of liquidators and still home to the University of Maine’s Technology Research Center. City leaders hope the property can be redeveloped.
Town councilors on Thursday held the second public hearing on the bond for the parcel and 400,000 square feet of warehouse space. The one question was: “What happens with the rest of those buildings?”
“At this point we’re not really sure,” David Mahan, council president, responded. “We don’t have that big of a picture yet.”
The last operator of the mill, Expera Specialty Solutions of Kaukauna, Wisconsin, closed the facility at the end of 2015, displacing 195 workers.
A consortium of liquidators known as MGFR LLC, which includes the Boston-based Gordon Brothers Group, PPL Group LLC of Illinois, Rabin Worldwide of California and Capital Recovery Group LLC of Connecticut, purchased the mill’s land, buildings, property and equipment in January. The same liquidators purchased the shuttered Lincoln Pulp and Tissue mill.
Equipment and items within the two closed mills in Old Town and Lincoln were sold at auction in April.
The plan is to lease the warehouse space to pay off the bond for the land, and then sell the property down the road, Mahan said at the first public hearing.
“The money from the leases would offset the bond payment,” he said of the estimated $253,000 annual bond bill.
UMaine has agreed to pay $95,000 per year to lease the space from Old Town, if the city completes the purchase, Jake Ward, UMaine’s vice president of innovation and economic development, said last week.
UMaine currently pays nothing but utilities for the month-to-month lease for the research center, which opened five years ago and is located in the mill’s former finished product storage area on the southern portion of the site.
Researchers within UMaine’s Forest Bioproducts Research Institute are working on campus to create and commercialize new wood-based bioproducts that they test on a larger scale at the research center.
Mahan said after the meeting Thursday that the lease with UMaine has not been signed but he did not believe the amount Ward mentioned was accurate, and that he could not discuss the second warehouse lease at all.
“We voted, but we still need to sign the paperwork,” Mahan said.