Two Schoodic-area businessmen with a background in the building trades were the winning bidders Thursday morning in an auction of a defunct seafood processing plant in Gouldsboro.
Tim Ring, founder of Ring Paving, and Kevin Barbee of Barbee Construction won the auction for the sprawling former sardine cannery with a bid of $975,000.
Ring, a current partner in K&T Rentals, said after the auction that he and Barbee did not have specific plans for the building. They view it as an investment property and don’t yet know how it will be used, he said.
“I really have no idea,” Ring said with a chuckle. “Hopefully something will open up.”
The winning bid is $75,000 more than what Maine Fair Trade Lobster paid for the property when that company bought it at an auction 11 years ago.
Gouldsboro resident Becky O’Keefe said after Thursday’s auction that she was very excited that local businessmen bought the property and are open to maintaining it as working waterfront.
“This is the best outcome I could ever hope for,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe is part of a local community nonprofit group called Schoodic Rising that was founded in 2021 in part to try to preserve the 100,000 square-foot building’s historic use in supporting local fisheries.
She said that the group believes the best use for the building is not by a single owner who would try to use as much of it as possible for seafood processing, but by several tenants who each have a connection to fisheries or other marine trades.
The past history of the building — which was the last sardine cannery in the United States when Bumblebee shut it down 13 years ago — shows that pinning the property’s hopes all on one owner, which likely would not be an existing local company, is unrealistic, she said.
O’Keefe said the group has been trying to promote the idea of dividing the building up among several tenants who could be lobster wholesalers, seaweed processors, boat builders, or even a takeout seafood stand. Ring and Barbee, she said, are receptive to this idea.
“There’s a vision of this not being a single entity anymore,” said O’Keefe, whose husband is a local lobsterman. “Not one industry can use this whole space. These [new owners] are guys who are going to work with us. Anyone who wants to be a tenant here, we are looking to help the buyers fill it out.”
Eve Wilkinson, Gouldsboro’s town manager, said the town is quite happy that the property has a new owner who wants to breathe life back into the building. The site has been a major part of the Schoodic Peninsula’s economy since it began use as a sardine processor and cannery in the early 1900s.
“I’m so excited I can’t stand it,” Wilkinson said. “We’ve all been hoping someone will get it going again.”
The 100,000-square-foot facility, which originally was more than 100 years ago as a sardine cannery, has been expanded and modified over the years, each time with a single owner who used it to process seafood. After Bumble Bee Foods closed the sardine operation down in 2010, it was revived as a lobster processing plant, first by Live Lobster and then by Maine Fair Trade Lobster.
The latest owner, before Thursday’s auction, was American Aquafarms, which said it wanted to use the plant to process salmon that it planned to farm in Frenchman Bay. That proposal met stiff opposition from residents on both sides of the bay, however. The company’s application to Maine Department of Marine Resources ultimately was rejected because the firm failed to provide sufficient information about where it would obtain the salmon eggs it intended to cultivate in the bay.
In March, American Aquafarms signed ownership of the property to its CEO, Keith Decker as collateral for a loan he had made to the company, company officials said. Two months later, Decker resigned as CEO and decided to auction off the property.
Stef Keenan of Keenan Auction Company, which handled Thursday’s sale, said that the town’s assessed value of the 94-acre property is $3.2 million. He told prospective buyers before the auction that in addition to the winning bid, the new owner would be expected to pay off a little more than $300,000 that is owed in back taxes and liens that have been placed on the property.