A company owned by the city of Brewer purchased two buildings on the waterfront that belonged to a longtime ice company.
SBR Real Estate Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of the city, purchased two buildings at 1 and 11 Union St. in Brewer from Getchell Brothers for $550,000, with the goal of decontaminating the sites. The Brewer City Council unanimously approved the purchase in a special meeting Tuesday without discussion.
Founded in 1888 by two brothers, Getchell Brothers was known for providing packaged ice to grocery, convenience and liquor stores in Maine. The family-owned company moved to Brewer in the 1940s, though Brewer’s economic development director, D’Arcy Main-Boyington, didn’t know precisely when the two Union Street buildings were constructed.
The ice company used one building, adjacent to Brewer City Hall, as a warehouse and office space and the other was used for ice production, she said. The two buildings have been empty for several years, but Main-Boyington didn’t know exactly when Getchell Brothers stopped using the facilities.
In October 2021, Philadelphia-based Arctic Glacier purchased the company to expand its reach into New England. At the time, Getchell Brothers operated a high-capacity production facility in Sanford and another modernized production facility in Bangor with additional cold storage capacity.
The Getchell Brothers was also “the leading producer of quality packaged ice and dry ice for customers throughout Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts,” according to a joint statement from Arctic Glacier and Getchell Brothers.
The city, operating through the LLC, plans to clean the buildings of environmental contaminants with the help of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and put them back on the market, according to Main-Boyington.
The company will also apply for a grant to complete the remediation work, which could begin as early as this summer or fall, she said.
The city established SBR Real Estate Holdings in 2004, Main-Boyington said, in the event a building is found to be contaminated years from now. If the city itself owned the building, it would be among the former owners tasked with cleaning it up, and the high cost to do that would fall back on taxpayers.
Main-Boyington said she did not know of any developers who are interested in the buildings as of Tuesday.
She said it’s common to find contaminants, such as asbestos, in older buildings along the Brewer and Bangor waterfronts, as builders could use certain materials that are known to be dangerous now.
“Now, it’s a violation of EPA rules to have them there, and you have to clean them out,” Main-Boyington said.
Additionally, both the Brewer and Bangor waterfronts were once home to various industrial sites, including lumber yards, ice harvesting and shipyards. The waterfronts are also built on fill, and the laws on what materials were allowed to be used for fill were looser than what they are today.
