GARDINER — Work is scheduled to get underway later this year on some of the former T.W. Dick parcels on Summer Street, but they are not all the projects that were originally envisioned.
Developers Collaborative, the firm that Gardiner city officials identified in December 2015 as its preferred developer after a search, is planning to build 15 units of workforce housing at the west end of Summer Street, and it will build an 8,000-square-foot facility to lease to Fresenius Medical Care, an international company that provides kidney care and other medical services.
Groundbreaking is scheduled to take place Aug. 1.
“They are a real strong tenant and we’re happy to have them,” said Kevin Bunker, of the Portland-based Developers Collaborative.
Calls to the company’s North American headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, were not returned Friday.
The components of the original master plan for the four former T.W. Dick parcels that the city of Gardiner acquired were affordable workforce housing, affordable senior housing and a medical arts building for MaineGeneral Health.
“The only thing that’s the same is the workforce housing,” Bunker said earlier this week.
The plan is to build 15 units — three one-bedroom apartments, nine two-bedroom apartments and three three-bedroom apartments. The smallest unit would rent for $510 a month and the largest would rent for $781 a month, Bunker said.
While no firm start date has been set, Bunker said the buildings are in the design phase now and he expects construction could start in the fall and wrap up about nine months later.
In evaluating housing data for this southern Kennebec County city, the need for workforce housing is apparent.
Richard Taylor, research and communication manager for the Maine Housing Authority, reviewed workforce and income data for the city as well as its inventory of housing options. In a city where more than three-quarters of the housing stock was built before 1979, he said, there is demand for affordable housing that the current supply cannot meet.
For Developers Collaborative, the carrot that attracted it to submit a proposal in 2015 was the MaineGeneral facility.
Gardiner officials, in collaboration with MaineGeneral Medical Center, were planning the development of a medical arts building at 1 Summer St., and hospital officials had provided a letter of intent to locate a facility there that could replace the existing MaineGeneral building on Dresden Avenue and allow for some expansion.
As the original proposed timeline dictated, that building should have been completed in June.
On Thursday, MaineGeneral spokeswoman Joy McKenna said the site remains of interest to MaineGeneral, but there is no commitment.
“We would love to figure out how to get them there, but there’s no path forward,” Bunker said.
The other two pieces will carry the deal, he said.
At this point, there are no plans to develop affordable senior housing, he said. When Developers Collaborative was pursuing financing through the Maine Housing Authority, company officials were advised that the scoring system had changed to give preference to workforce housing.
At the same time, while voters in 2015 approved a statewide referendum to fund $15 million in bonds for senior housing, Gov. Paul LePage has declined to release them. Attempts in 2017 by state lawmakers to compel the release of the bonds fell short of attracting enough votes needed to override a veto by the governor.
Having a developer interested in redeveloping the industrial sites was a key factor in securing state and federal cleanup funds for three of the parcels where testing showed contamination existed from 200 years of industrial use along Cobbosseecontee Stream.
While Developers Collaborative sought and was granted a tax increment financing district and credit enhancement agreement for the housing project, no such agreement is in place for the kidney care facility.
Developers Collaborative has an option on the 1 Summer St. parcel, but for now it remains a city property.
“There’s certain amount of work on all the properties that the city needed to do and pay for while they are under our control,” said Patrick Wright, the executive director of Gardiner Main Street and the city’s economic development coordinator.
Once the state Department of Environmental Protection signs off on the remediation work that was needed on three of the four parcels, the brownfields project will be done.
While work will begin on other parcels, Wright said the 1 Summer St. parcel will be seeded and mulched.
Jessica Lowell — 621-5632
Twitter: @JLowellKJ
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