Bangor is gearing up to start construction on a nearly $10 million renovation project to its Community Connector bus storage facility, which will include the addition of a driver training center.
City officials hope the upgrade will make the outdated facility more functional and help with driver retention, which has been a persistent issue in Bangor and across the country. Until the transit system can get more drivers, it won’t be able to restore Saturday bus service.
The Planning Board approved a land development permit for the project earlier this month, but the renovation has been in the works for years.
Parts of the site at 511 Maine Ave. haven’t been renovated since it was built in the 1960s, according to Laurie Linscott, the city’s transit administrator. The building needs significant electrical work, and parts of the ceiling are falling down. An addition that was built in 2004 doesn’t need quite as much work, but it will get a new roof and other fixes to replace items that have reached the end of their useful life.
The city determined that it would be cheaper to repair the storage building than to tear it down and build a new one, Linscott said. She secured a nearly $8 million federal grant for the project in 2023, which covers most of the project costs. The city is also contributing about $1 million, and another $1 million comes from the Maine Department of Transportation.
The storage facility, which is more than 35,000 square feet, has had various uses over the years and once operated as a recycling center. Community Connector previously shared the space with the public works department, but took over both sides of the building for bus storage as the city’s public transit fleet has grown, Linscott said.
The renovation will help the transit agency clean buses more efficiently and add a new drive-through vehicle wash that can be used for city vehicles from across departments, Linscott said. That will have space for vehicles up to 16 feet tall, Peasley added.
The project will also set up the infrastructure for electric vehicle charging, Linscott said, as part of broader plans to transition to hybrid and electric buses.
The city plans to break ground on the renovation this winter and wrap up by late spring or early summer 2028, according to Hannah Peasley, a civil engineer for the city who’s working on the project. During the construction, buses will be stored in a nearby space owned by the airport.
That work will include building a more than 6,000 square foot addition on the side of the building to house a new training center with a 40-student classroom, a break room, bathrooms, bus dispatch, offices and lockers for the city’s bus drivers, Peasley said. Those are all amenities that the current bus storage facility lacks.
The addition is intended to help with driver retention and increase training capacity, according to Linscott. The new facility will have dedicated space for ongoing annual driver training that is usually held elsewhere, in space borrowed from other city departments. It also gives the city the option to hold commercial driver’s license training in house.
Bangor, like many cities nationwide, has struggled with a driver shortage for years. A 2023 report by the American Public Transportation Association found that 96% of surveyed transit agencies were experiencing a workforce shortage.
The training for a commercial driver’s license is a lengthy process, and drivers often leave public transit jobs for higher-paying work in the private sector. Transit agencies also have an aging workforce, with a significantly higher average age than U.S. workers more broadly, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“If we need to, we will,” Linscott said of the possibility that the city would offer commercial driver’s license training in the new facility, but she added that she also recently got a state grant to offer that training through a partnership with Eastern Maine Community College.
That partnership could be “a way of getting us over the hump to get some more drivers and get Saturday service back,” Linscott said. She hopes to fill that class by January, which could produce more drivers by July.
Bangor City Council also approved more than $100,000 in this year’s budget to transition some bus drivers to full-time status, which could also help address staffing challenges. That transition will likely be implemented in January, Linscott said.