After months of delays, the state’s new Acadia Gateway Center in Trenton has opened.
The $27 million visitors center was expected to open earlier this summer, but construction-related delays resulted in it remaining closed through July and August.
The building will be a place where people visiting MDI and Acadia National Park can stop, use the restroom and talk to staffers about recreational services and related businesses on the island, which draws millions of tourists each year.
The center, with solar panels on its south-facing roof and a large, soaring window that faces Route 3, opened for public use on Wednesday, according to the Maine Department of Transportation. The project has been paid for primarily by federal agencies including the Federal Transit Authority and the National Park Service, but also has received funding from the state and through the nonprofit group Friends of Acadia.
The 11,000 square-foot building is being operated by Maine Tourism Association and is similar to other visitor information centers that are run by the association, in that it will cater to travelers who may be unfamiliar with the area.
But it will differ from those other sites in one significant way, state officials have said. A major function of the facility is to serve as a transit center, where day visitors to the island can park their vehicles and instead ride Island Explorer buses to and from their destinations. Both tourists and commuters will be able to use the center as a transit hub, which is expected to help reduce seasonal congestion on the island.
The site includes 300 free day-use parking spaces, including 18 EV charging spaces and 10 oversized vehicle spaces. It also has a bus stop for Island Explorer and commercial tour buses, and an information center with park and regional tourism information, retail space, restrooms and a waiting area.
The visitors’ center has been decades in the making.
An intermodal facility at the property has been expected at the location for roughly 20 years, ever since Friends of Acadia purchased the land in 2004. The group later carved off 150 acres of the large parcel along Route 3 and sold it to the state to eventually be developed into a tourist information center and remote parking site.
Officials even held a groundbreaking ceremony at the site in 2009. For more than a decade, the property has had a park-and-ride parking lot, where people could leave their vehicles and ride the Island Explorer bus to locations on Mount Desert Island, but there were no other public facilities or services available. The park-and-ride component of the property was opened in 2012, which is when a $14 million maintenance and operations center for the Island Explorer bus system — which is not open to the public — was completed at the back of the state-owned parcel.