Presque Isle is done waiting to be noticed.
The biggest city in Maine’s northernmost county has weathered steady population decline for decades. It’s seen big box stores and national chains pack up and leave, a nearby Air Force base shuttered and Canadian tourism shrink as its dollar weakened and political tensions ratcheted up.
The city’s top officials see value in what has endured — the land, the resources, the workforce — that they feel is not recognized by outside companies and developers.
So, they’ve set out to show them what they’re missing. The city is compiling an economic portfolio that it can take to developers with properties ready for immediate investment. It’s the municipal equivalent of hanging a neon “open for business” sign, and one of several ways Presque Isle is going on the offensive to redefine itself.
“Will it work? I don’t know. But I believe it’s worth a shot,” City Manager Sonja Eyler said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News. “We don’t have to. We can continue to tolerate and normalize a population decline. We can continue to tolerate and normalize a slow rate of growth.
“But truly the best way for a community to thrive is with new people, new industry, new jobs.”
Presque Isle is in what Eyler calls “a slow growth era.” It’s welcomed some large developments in recent years, among them a $5.5 million F.W. Webb facility and a 20,000-square-foot NAPA Auto Parts store.
But there are also newly vacant storefronts in the city’s downtown. And amid rising costs that have ballooned municipal budgets around the state, Presque Isle approved a conservative budget in December that featured no new initiatives and removed things Eyler said were “very much needed.” They included $475,000 for an excavator and $400,000 for paving.
Still, the budget rose by more than $275,000, and the tax base suffers as people move away.
Around 8,700 people live there, but that’s 1,000 less than in 2010. In order to thrive financially and culturally, several city officials said, Presque Isle must grow.
‘We’re going to try to grow where it makes sense to grow’
Eyler wants to be clear: her desire to see Presque Isle boom has not blinded her to residents’ needs.
“The first priority I have is stability,” she said. “You can shake it up, but you shouldn’t really stir it, necessarily. I want our community to look for ways to grow in an intentional way.”
So when it talks development, the city is focused on infill — building on unused or underutilized property in already developed areas.
“It makes a little bit more sense to grow where we already have infrastructure,” said Tim St. Peter, Presque Isle’s deputy director of economic development. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to discourage growth anywhere else. We’re going to try to grow where it makes sense to grow.”
One of those areas is Skyway Industrial Park, a 450-acre area that is already home to more than 60 businesses, among them FedEx, Coca-Cola and the Presque Isle International Airport.
The space is perhaps Presque Isle’s most robust commercial zone, and the city wants to grow it further. The park is at 100% occupancy, Industrial Council Executive Director Tom Powers said in a January meeting. It’s renovating an 8,000-square-foot warehouse and developing plans for a new speculative building this year.
“We just have to make sure that we have a market demand for what we build,” Powers said. “But as the car lot people will say, ‘If it isn’t on the lot, you can’t sell it.’”
The city is considering making the park a tax increment financing district to incentivize potential tenants, St. Peter said.
Officials also want to see growth on Main Street, Maysville Road, Industrial Street, Mechanic Street and Parsons Street.
What about housing?
Besides Industrial and commercial development, Presque Isle is targeting housing.
In its new portfolio, the city outlines what it calls a three-pronged approach: taking care of existing housing, unlocking value in buildings within the city’s downtown TIF district, and preparing ground for new housing.
But determining what types of housing it needs more of — whether that’s affordable, single-family homes or duplexes — is tricky.
“I’ve heard the whole spectrum, that we need it all,” Eyler said. “If you try to do it all, you’re probably going to do nothing.”
This year, the city will narrow down what it needs, St. Peter said. The problem? There is no complete data on its housing stock.
“Unfortunately we don’t know exactly what we have, which I am working with some state entities, with some consultants to see what we have [and] where we can go,” St. Peter said. “Anecdotally, we know that rents are high, we know that house prices are high.”
U.S. Census data estimates that housing units in Presque Isle declined by close to 3% between 2010 and 2020. That could be partly explained by the city’s efforts to combat blighted properties, St. Peter said.
Almost two thirds of units in Presque Isle were built before 1970, a higher proportion than Aroostook County (55%) and the U.S. (44%).
Most new developments, the city’s 2022 comprehensive plan concluded, are being constructed on the outer edges of the city and outside of subdivisions.
Presque Isle’s few newer subdivisions, among them an 18-unit, multifamily residential development that opened to renters in the summer of 2025, have almost entirely been subdivided buildings, rather than homes on separate lots.
‘It still doesn’t feel cohesive’
There’s perhaps no more visible weathervane for a city than its downtown. Presque Isle’s will soon be redesigned.
Through the Village Partnership Initiative — a Maine Department of Transportation project to remake city centers throughout the state — Main Street will be overhauled to improve traffic flow, pedestrian safety and how people interact with the heart of the city.
“I think about bringing my family and walking around downtown, and [there are] many other streets or towns where that’s cool and fun and it’s an experience,” said Collin Darrell, chair of the Presque Isle Downtown Revitalization Committee. “I think that’s what we’re missing right now.”
The goal is to rebuild the downtown to attract businesses and become more sustainable, Darrell said.
Construction is set to begin in 2029, after the completion of Phase II of the Presque Isle Bypass, a 6.17-mile highway addition that will reroute commercial traffic around the city’s downtown.
The initiative is 90% funded by the DOT and the state, and Main Street is a stretch of the state-controlled Route 1, so there will be decisions out of the city’s control.
This year, city leaders will learn what choices can be made locally and how to involve the public in that process, Darrell said.
The city recently joined the Maine Development Foundation’s Main Street coalition, giving it a network of other communities that have gone through similar processes, such as Waterville, Westbrook and Skowhegan.
Presque Isle will host a group of officials from other Maine towns for a think tank this summer to help inform its vision for the redesign.
The city and the revitalization committee have for years used TIF districting and beautification efforts to revive the downtown. It’s worked in some instances, and hasn’t in others. The DOT initiative is a chance to reshape the area.
“We do have some businesses thriving, we have others surviving, and we have some vacant storefronts,” Darrell said. “It still doesn’t feel cohesive to me.”
Like all of the city’s development dreams, achieving cohesion won’t happen in 2026. That’s not the goal. Leaders hope this year sets the stage for transformational future growth, and introduces the city to an audience with the means to help it grow.
“It’s taking a hard look at how we’ve done things, asking people who have maybe more knowledge how they did things and what we can learn from them, and then moving from talk to action,” Eyler said.
“We’re going to spend an awful lot of time in 2026 figuring out how we tell Presque Isle’s story.”
