Five years after Congress passed the act that funded the project, Acadia National Park’s new maintenance building is nearing completion.
The new building at Acadia’s headquarters on Eagle Lake Road will replace an old structure that does not meet current building codes. It was originally built in the 1930s and expanded in the 1960s. Work on the 32,000-square-foot building, and a handful of associated outbuildings, began in the spring of 2023 and is expected to wrap up later this year.
For years Acadia and other National Park Service properties struggled with limited funding that resulted in maintenance being neglected and projects being deferred. This remained the case even as visitation to Acadia jumped significantly in 2016, when both Acadia and the park service celebrated their 100th anniversaries.
In 2020, to address the park service’s maintenance backlog, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act, which designated $12 billion in funding for National Park Service building and upkeep projects, including funds for a new maintenance building at Acadia, which was projected to cost around $30 million, and other Acadia projects.
Acadia’s superintendent, Kevin Schneider, said Friday he did not have an updated cost estimate for the project, but added that since the funding act was passed, both construction costs and the number of people who visit Acadia each year have gone up sharply.
Removing ledge at the building site ended up being more time-consuming and expensive than expected, he said, but the new maintenance facility is expected to meet Acadia’s needs for several decades.
“The park’s visitation has changed dramatically, and building requirements also have changed significantly” since the prior maintenance building was constructed decades ago, he said. “This is a modern building that will last 100 years.”
The new building, roughly 400 feet long and 90 feet wide, will primarily house maintenance functions such as a carpentry shop, welding space, a shop for plumbing and electrical projects, another for masonry projects, a paint shop, vehicle maintenance and washing bays, and space for the trails crew and other maintenance workers to store and tune their equipment and tools.
There also will be offices, desk work spaces for intermittent users, storage for cleaning and restroom supplies such as toilet paper and small conference rooms. The building also will have lockers for employees and volunteers, showers, modern IT network facilities and a large conference room that can accommodate up to approximately 100 people. Outside the main entrance will be a landscaped courtyard area with a large overhanging roof that also can be used as a gathering space.
There also will be more than 100 new parking spaces — which currently are often in short supply at park headquarters — and a new septic system to serve the entire campus.
Jason Flynn, who is serving as the park’s project manager for the building’s construction, said that with the new facilities, Acadia hopes to get longer usage out of equipment, vehicles and tools that may not have been maintained as well as they could have been with the limited resources available at the existing maintenance building, which will be demolished and removed after the new one is completed.
He said the new building, though it will not be open to park visitors, also is expected to improve services throughout the park. He compared it to a restaurant, where a properly designed and equipped kitchen helps to improve the dining experience in the front of the house.
“The back of your house needs to be dialed in,” Flynn said.
Schneider said that it is great to be close to completing and moving into the new maintenance building as the fifth anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act comes up next week, but there still are more capital improvement projects that Acadia needs to pursue.
If Congress were to approve the America the Beautiful Act, as proposed by Maine Sen. Angus King, the park likely would seek funding from the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund for a new Jordan Pond House, Schneider said. The structure that houses the restaurant and gift shop, which is a heavily visited site in Acadia, was built in 1982 and also has outlived its expected lifespan and needs to be built anew, he said.
