Months after the customer support giant Sitel closed its downtown Caribou call center in 2019, a local developer bought the property, seeking to create apartments on the second floor and find a tenant for first floor office space.
Six years later, the nearly 27,000-square-foot building at 63 Sweden St. remains vacant. And with tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes piling up, the city of Caribou foreclosed on the property last November.
City councilors signalled their intent Monday night to pursue the deed to the property to return it to the tax base. City Manager Penny Thompson said the property owner — developer Dana Cassidy — had previously offered the deed to the city.
“Honestly, our downtown is never going to be able to be improved until this building is addressed,” Councilor Tamara Lovewell said. “It’s just going to sit there and be a liability, it’s being vandalized, it’s not producing any kind of income or benefit to the city. I really would like to see us try to get that.”
Cassidy — who also owns the Aroostook Centre Mall in Presque Isle — owes property taxes from 2023 through 2025 totalling $26,659, and $7,066 in unpaid water and sewer bills, according to records provided by the city of Caribou.
The property, when Cassidy purchased it, was valued at more than $1.3 million. He believed it was worth much less, around $150,000, and sought a tax abatement in 2021 that was denied by both Caribou’s board of assessors and the Aroostook County Commissioners.
Caribou’s assessor reduced the valuation to $522,000 in 2022. Cassidy said he purchased the property for $50,000.
Issues with sprinklers in the former Sitel facility have caused mold, Cassidy said in 2024. The deteriorating conditions factored in the city’s decision to lower the tax valuation, Thompson said.
The council waived foreclosure on the property, and many others, in 2024 as it explored its best path toward tackling run down and vacant buildings in the city.
To rehabilitate the building would cost several hundred thousand dollars, Cassidy said in a phone interview Monday, a cost he didn’t believe was worth it.
“I said, ‘Hey, if you think it’s worth it, go ahead and take it,’” Cassidy said.
“You want to screw the biggest taxpayer, or one of the biggest taxpayers and then laugh at them?” Cassidy said, referring to the abatement denial in 2021. “Go ahead. I’m laughing now.”
Cassidy said he had a telecommunications tenant lined up for the site shortly after purchasing it, but the deal fell through and the company landed in a different building.
The council voted 6-1 Monday, with deputy chair Jody Smith opposed, to authorize Richard Solman, the city’s attorney, to contact Cassidy and inform him that the council would accept the deed to the property.
The unpaid water and sewer bills would be paid for out of the city’s downtown tax-increment financing funds, Thompson said. TIF districts are geographic areas where a municipality can leverage property taxes from that area to cover infrastructure improvements.
“I personally feel like the more control we can have over that building, the better,” Councilor Lori Knight Phair said.