Bucksport is trying to reinvent itself after the December closure of the Verso paper mill, which employed 570 people — about 140 of which lived in town — and provided nearly half the town’s tax base.
The guy who’s been at the center of all this is Dave Milan, the town’s economic development director. But he’s leaving for a similar post in Orono. Today is his last day.
He said that a few companies have expressed interest in coming to town, but they’re waiting to see what happens with the property first. The current owner, a subsidiary of the Canadian scrap metal company American Iron & Metal, is set to start demolition this year, and the town is surveying residents to ask whether the property should be turned into something totally different.
“The big question is we don’t own it. AIM owns the property so it’s up to them how they’re going to redevelop it,” Milan said. “But they have invited us to the table. I’m comfortable that the town will be involved in what the future of that property looks like.”
Milan spoke at length about what’s possible for the town. Here are the biggest takeaways:
Bucksport is located at the intersection of two rings of what’s called the Three Ring Binder, the fiber optic backbone that transmits data at high speeds across the state. And the town could benefit from the nation’s increasing need for data centers — which store all the cloud data we’re creating at an incredible rate.
“A data center uses a lot of electricity, and it uses a lot of water to cool the computers, and typically the companies that have large data centers, they have to pay for a lot of water. So if you own the water, you can get it a lot more affordably.
“The data center is anything from a 30,0000- to 100,000-square-foot building. The mill property is almost about a 300-acre facility. There could be multiple data centers. It could be a data center campus.”
Here’s the thing: One data center won’t replace the 570 lost jobs. The town would need to bring in a few, and probably include a variety of businesses on the site that can compliment each other.
“I think the data centers are the kinds of businesses that are going to last the next hundred years. You want to find an emerging industry, not a dying industry.
“You could put five of those facilities in there and they’ll employ 250 people, then there 250 jobs.
“You co-locate a number of business as a cluster that can benefit from the other one being there. You can have three or four data centers there and then look at, ‘OK what kind of companies tend to be located near a data center,’ and the go after those people. That’s what the town should be looking at: What types of business clusters can take advantage of the assets out of there.”
Town leaders are surveying residents on what direction they’d like to go with the mill property — whether it should be redeveloped as residential, stay industrial, or be turned into some kind of green space, for instance. But Milan thinks Bucksport should still host some kind of industry.
“My opinion is it should stay as some type of industrial use. [It has] higher property taxes, and it creates jobs that provide livable wages for the citizens.”
Bucksport could attract more telecommuters — but it needs to upgrade its housing.
“Quality of place is going to become even more important for employees. You want to raise a family and [live in a] place that has the activities you want to do. The places that are best prepared to be able to telecommute your work are going to be the winners when it comes to attracting new populations.
“Right now the realtors are telling me that obviously, as with anywhere in the state, there are plenty of places that are up for sale, but I think our current housing market is more dated. We’re an old community. We’ve been around since before the Revolutionary War. There are a lot of homes there that were built in the later part of the 1700s. I think that we could use more modern housing stock.”
Milan thinks that the town should re-think how it issues business permits so that new companies know what they’re getting into when they try to set up in town.
“I have had multiple, multiple projects that I have attracted to come to [Bucksport.] And then I have helped them get through the permitting process, and at the end of the process when they open their business, they told me that ‘if we had known the permitting process was going to be this painful we never would have done it, and we’re just really happy you were there to get us through it.’
“I recently had an applicant that I worked on. Every time he would come to the town and provide the information that he was being asked for, then additional information was being asked for after that. It seemed like it was going to go on forever. Those are the kinds of things that you really have to avoid.
“The key is that they need to be able to make it consistent and predictable so that people know what the process is and how they can get through it.”
The town had saved about $8 million in its reserve account at the time the mill announced its closing, which will come in handy without that tax revenue. That’s a lesson other towns can take from Bucksport: Have a backup plan.
“There are very few communities that you can compare one to the other. It seems like every community has some unique aspect to it. But I think that what can be learned is that for communities that have a single large taxpayer, that the two things you need to learn from this is you need to plan for an end to that industry — which we have done [by saving money] — and you need to be willing to come together as a community to plan for the next chapter.”