Thirty-six condominium units should sit just off Parkway South in Brewer, surrounded by walking trails and a pond. The condos were slated to be two- and three-bedroom units sold at market value.
Instead, trees and underbrush consume the 16-acre plot where the apartments were permitted to go in 2022.
With 35 homes up for sale in Brewer on Zillow, this development would have more than doubled the number of homes for sale in the city. The houses on the market range from $95,000 to $1.2 million.
The condo development is one of several major projects that are stalled in Brewer due to city ordinances and codes that make it difficult for developers to build. With these obstacles in place, Brewer has lost opportunities to add much-needed housing and job opportunities in the city.
Now, Brewer officials are looking into changing the city’s ordinances, zoning, land use codes and the permit extension process to make the city more enticing to developers while ensuring projects drawn out over multiple years are still compliant.
The city’s zoning and land use code, which Mayor Michele Daniels said Brewer City Council and officials are revisiting, have not been updated since 2001, according to dates included in the current code.
Those restrictions seemingly block developments in the city, especially housing.
The changes under consideration should streamline the permit process and increase development opportunities across the city, Daniels said.
“[The changes] will make the process better in the long run. It will not take away anything, I think it will add to it,” she said.
For example, one of Brewer’s ordinances limits the number of housing units to 20 per every dead-end road. This means a housing development would need to build one access road to the land per every 20 units are being built.
The 36-unit development on Parkway South would require at least two access roads, based on this city ordinance.
That can be a deterrent to developers who don’t encounter such restrictions in other cities.
Meanwhile, ordinances such as impact fees — fees placed on developers for increased use of city services including water, roads and school — add increased costs to projects in the city and push developers to find other municipalities to work with.
The housing projects, the 36-unit condominium complex on Parkway South and a 20-unit apartment development off Lambert Road, have both had little to no work done to them since their approvals in 2022 and 2024, respectively.
The condominium complex received an extension in October 2024 after its original permit timeline ended.
Other projects that received extensions — including a Wendy’s on Wilson Street; Benjamin’s Brewer, a second location of Benjamin’s in Bangor, on Acme Road; and a large-scale solar array on Arista Drive that has had multiple extensions — have had varying degrees of work completed since their extensions were granted.
The solar array has been paused by a moratorium that the City Council recently extended to expire in February 2026. The moratorium was enacted in 2023 to give the Council more time to understand the future of solar panel technology.
Benjamin’s Brewer needed the extension it received in January because work on the building’s expansion took longer than expected, Manager Richard Clark said. Getting an extension wasn’t difficult and gave the business enough time to finish the work.
Benjamin’s Brewer is set to open on Nov. 11.
The Wendy’s location has not had any visible changes.
The city and planning board are looking into modifying the permit approval and extension process to include more review if a project has been granted multiple extensions, Daniels said. This comes after a planning board member said at a recent meeting that the board has approved more extensions in the past year than in years past.
Extensions are granted when the original permit is not long enough for the project to be completed. Permits generally last between six months and two years.
The change would ensure the project is still in compliance with code or ordinance changes as well as making sure the project is inline with what was originally proposed.
“A lot of times, a year is nothing in a planning board situation. But when you come in for a second extension, you’re two years out. What if a lot changes in two years?” Daniels said.
Despite restrictive ordinances and codes, Brewer officials said local projects have also been slowed by the state and federal permitting process.
The permitting process for the two housing developments that have been approved in Brewer took less than four months to complete, said David Madore, the deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The average processing time is three months.
The delays stem from surges in permit applications in the wake of the solar energy boom, coastal resilience after the January 2024 storms and the ongoing effort to build affordable housing, “combined with the retirement or departure of several long-time DEP staff,” Madore said.
The DEP is working to fill vacant positions and speed up permitting, he said.
The suggested changes will be brought to the planning board in an upcoming meeting. It will be the board’s decision to adopt the modifications, Daniels said.
