A fiery debate about the role of religion in public life is playing out in Belfast, after the University of Maine System originally offered to sell a shuttered local facility to an evangelical church, then withdrew the offer and ultimately selected a secular organization as the buyer.
The original offer to sell the Hutchinson Center to Calvary Chapel Belfast prompted a backlash from many in the community, who argued that it should remain a public gathering and education space rather than one that serves a single faith community.
The debate has only intensified in recent weeks, after the UMaine System rescinded the offer to sell the facility to the church and ultimately chose a different organization that supports lower-income residents as the buyer. It has said that it changed its plans after discovering that it used the wrong criteria to judge the first round of bids.
But Calvary Chapel Belfast has now claimed in a lawsuit that it was the victim of religious discrimination and accused the UMaine System of giving in to the original backlash against the transaction — a claim the system has denied. The church also filed an unsuccessful appeal of the latest offer.
While the Hutchinson Center is not the only facility that the state higher education system has looked to sell in recent years, the ongoing acrimony about its future has demonstrated the heated debate that can result when conservative religious organizations seek to take over cherished public educational facilities, especially in more progressive communities such as Belfast where some residents may disagree with their beliefs.
“That’s one church and one community,” said Carol Fricke, a Belfast resident who opposed the original offer to sell the Hutchinson Center to Calvary Chapel Belfast. “They’re a smaller community. They represent people that belong to the church. I’m not that familiar with the church, but the things I read about the church are that they are not as inclusive as I would have hoped.”
Many others also felt strongly about the initial offer to sell the center to the church, which prompted more than 135 people to send written comments to the UMaine System.
But now that the UMaine System has rescinded the original offer and chosen to sell the center to another buyer — Waldo Community Action Partners — Calvary Chapel Belfast and its supporters argue that they’re the ones being excluded.
The pastor of Calvary Chapel Belfast, Greg Huston, declined to comment on the debate.
But in the church’s lawsuit, it claimed that the other bidders for the Hutchinson Center — Waldo CAP and a committee mostly made up of local citizens — conspired to make it “a constitutional orphan in the community.”
It singled out state Sen. Chip Curry, a Waldo County Democrat who sits on the board of Waldo CAP and in March criticized the possibility that a church could buy the Hutchinson Center based on the bidding criteria set by the UMaine System.
During testimony for a failed bill that would have transferred the Hutchinson Center to Belfast, Curry said he was “concerned” that the bidding process was not tied to education access, and he suggested that could lead to a “very awkward situation if a church wins the facility, or someone who wanted to condo-ize it for development.”
In its lawsuit, the church said Curry was part of an effort to “stoke animosity towards the Church, incited a mob opposed to the Church, and bent UMS’s will to ultimately rescind the Church’s fairly obtained award.”
Curry has not responded to requests for comment, and Waldo CAP has denied that it conspired with the university system to thwart the initial offer of the Hutchinson Center to the church. During the second round of bids, Waldo CAP raised its proposed purchase price to $3.6 million, up from $1 million in its first offer. The church’s bid in the second round was $1.1 million, up from $1 million in the first round.
The UMaine System has said that it revoked the initial offer after realizing that criteria for evaluating those bids did not take into account how much the new owner would charge it to lease back a community internet hub at the Hutchinson Center. It has denied that it caved to public pressure to rescind the offer to Calvary Chapel Belfast
Other members of the church have also been reluctant to comment on the situation.
“Sadly, anything that I, or anyone else in our church were to say would result in us getting attacked by those that oppose,” said one member, Chayann Colby of Belfast, in response to a reporter’s request.
However, not everyone in the Belfast-area feels so strongly about the fate of the Hutchinson Center, which was originally built with funding from MBNA founder Charles Cawley and later donated to the university system.
During an interview in downtown on a recent afternoon, Bob Portner of Unity recalled being “overall ambivalent” about the prospect of the church buying it.
Another passerby, Edward Earle of Belfast, said his main concern wasn’t that the church might buy the center, but rather that the UMaine System was seeking the highest bidder for the public asset.
“They should’ve started with the premise that this money was provided for a public purpose, and should remain a public value,” Earle said. “That’s where the University of Maine blew it from the very beginning. They said, ‘This is ours, we want the best buck, and the hell with Belfast.’”
