Brunswick is moving forward with improvements to its aging Public Works facility on Industry Road but won’t expand the facility after the Town Council shot down a plan to purchase an adjacent property for $1.75 million.
Deciding not to purchase the property at 2 Industry Road, councilors voted Monday to borrow $4.7 million for the first phase of the Public Works overhaul, instead of $6.5 million initially recommended by town staff.
The town will still be able to start the initial phase of the project — building a new fuel island and salt shed, making improvements to the utilities at the existing property and completing an overall site design. The work likely will be completed over the next three to five years, Assistant Town Manager Jay Astle said Monday night.
If it had been purchased, the additional 1.1 acres would have increased usable space for Public Works by 16%, though the town would not have been able to use it for about five years because there are business tenants in the existing building on the property.
The purchase of an extra acre would have allowed the new administrative building, fuel island and salt shed to be positioned in the front of the property, improving traffic in and out of the site, Astle said Monday. It also would have allowed Public Works to potentially take in vehicles from other departments, such as fire and Parks and Recreation, for maintenance.
In the next phase of the project, the town plans to design and build a new administrative and maintenance building for an estimated $6 million, though that funding will not be considered by the council for a few years.
Brunswick has been weighing updates to its 42,000-square-foot Public Works facility, located at 9 and 10 Industry Road, for years.
The primary building, which includes administration, four mechanics bays and eight vehicle bays, was constructed in the 1950s and is uninsulated and undersized, Town Manager Julia Henze wrote in a Nov. 13 memo. An overhaul of the department’s seven buildings was first added to the town’s Capital Improvement Program in 2020.
A study conducted by Wright-Pierce in 2024 determined that according to the needs of the department, the updated facility would need to be about 116,000 square feet. As projected, the total cost of the project would be around $40 million. Town staff considered building a new facility in multiple alternative locations but ultimately decided to keep it on Industry Road.
The council voted 6-3 to eliminate the 2 Industry Road purchase from the project and approved the funds to move forward with the remainder of the phase with a vote of 8-1, with Chairperson Sande Updegraph as the only “no” vote.
Some councilors said the town would be getting ahead of itself by acquiring additional property at this point, instead suggesting that more urgent parts of the project can begin without expansion, while others, including Updegraph, supported the potential purchase.
“We do not have a corroborated need for that parcel,” District 7 Councilor Steve Weems said at Monday’s meeting. “We can, at the same time, do everything that’s urgent to do now without buying 2 Industry Road, and that is, essentially, building the new fuel station … building the salt shed and doing the needs assessment, engineering, planning work and design work to know what the overall facility plan is.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Katie Langley can be reached at [email protected].
