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An Aroostook County-based credit union has purchased a prominent compound in Presque Isle for $2 million to serve as its new operations center.
The County Federal Credit Union, which has eight branches between Caribou and Bangor, officially closed on the 150 Maysville St. property on Tuesday. The purchase more than triples the size of its current operations center and will facilitate the creation of up to 20 jobs in the next five years, CEO Ryan Ellsworth said.
“We’ve had the support from our home, from the members over the years that have put so much faith in us and given us the opportunity to serve them,” Ellsworth said. “It’s created this opportunity for us to grow so that we stay relevant long into the future and make sure that we’re providing the services that the members need and want.”
County Federal purchased the building, previously known as the Stone Ridge Event Center at the Cassidy Compound, from developer Dana Cassidy, who also owns the Aroostook Centre Mall across the street.
The 23,000-square-foot facility was built in 2003 for Slopes, a restaurant and brewery that closed amid a slumping economy in 2009. A new restaurant, The Crow’s Nest, opened two years later, but closed in 2013.
Cassidy purchased the building for $425,000 in 2014, according to property records. Over the last decade, portions of the facility have served as an event center, daycare, offices for a healthcare company and most recently a hibachi restaurant, which Cassidy moved to the mall ahead of the sale.
County Federal plans to shift its operations there in the summer of 2027, Ellsworth said. Approximately 50 employees will work there when it opens, with the intention of scaling up to as many as 70 in the years that follow.
The building is intended to house all of the credit union’s “back-office” services and departments, from accounting to collections, compliance, card services and electronic loan officers.
Its current operations center, which is barely a quarter mile down the road, houses just 15 employees. Other staff are spread out across several spaces, from a leased storefront in the Aroostook Centre Mall to the basement of the credit union’s Caribou branch.
“We’d outgrown this space probably three or four years ago,” Ellsworth said of the existing headquarters at 110 Carmichael Street in Presque Isle.
“If we take them out of there and put everybody over here, we’ll all be working collaboratively together,” he said. “It’s much easier to vibe off everyone’s energy when you’re in the same space and it’s fresh and it’s new. Morale’s important. We want the staff to have a good comfortable working space, a place where they want to go.”
The credit union has branches in Caribou, Presque Isle, Fort Fairfield, Mars Hill, Houlton, Howland, Old Town and Bangor. It has about 31,000 members and has steadily grown between 3% and 5% over the past few years.
County Federal merged with Penobscot County Federal Credit Union in 2021, absorbing the Howland, Old Town and Bangor locations. The Bangor Planning Board last week approved the development of a new branch in an empty lot near the city’s downtown.
The credit union considered moving its headquarters to Bangor, Ellsworth said, but decided it was important to remain centered in Aroostook County, where it organized in 1956 as the Loring Federal Credit Union to serve military and civilian personnel at the former Loring Air Force Base.
“This is our home. This is what gave us our success,” Ellsworth said. “So we wanted to reinvest and make sure we create those jobs and pay the contractors to do our renovations back here at home in The County.”
Renovations will include new siding and roofing, changing the interior layout and replacing many fixtures, among them the carpeting and HVAC.
“It’s got great bones. It has room for us to grow. We won’t need to expand an operations center in The County for 20 years,” Ellsworth said.