SKOWHEGAN — A proposal to sell an industrial park building to Maine Grains for the company’s planned expansion appears to be off the table.

The board of the Skowhegan Economic Development Corp., a quasi-municipal entity, decided at its monthly meeting Tuesday not to pursue a sale of the Northgate Industrial Park building any further.

Bryan Belliveau, Skowhegan’s director of economic and community development, told the board that nobody submitted an offer by the Dec. 31 deadline on a request for proposals.

Even Skowhegan-based Maine Grains, which prompted the public RFP process after expressing interest last year in buying the building off North Avenue, did not submit a formal proposal.

Instead, the company sent a letter saying it was broadening its search for a site for its expansion project but was interested in learning the results of the RFP process, Belliveau said.

Nobody from Maine Grains was at the board’s meeting, which was open to the public.

Maine Grains co-founder and CEO Amber Lambke confirmed in an email Wednesday she is continuing to explore other options.

SEDC board members were concerned that selling the building would eliminate what is essentially SEDC’s only source of ongoing revenue. 

Belliveau said Wednesday that rent from Northgate has helped subsidize the operation of the Renaissance Building downtown. Other than those two buildings, SEDC owns only one lot at the Southgate Industrial Park off Waterville Road, he said.

The board also discussed needed capital improvements at the Northgate building, such as repairing siding, roofing and a sprinkler system, as well as potential interest from tenants in expanding into vacant space.

In December, SEDC opened up a request for proposals to buy the 36,000-square-foot building, which has three current tenants and 14,500 square feet of vacant space.

The move came after Maine Grains approached SEDC earlier in the year about acquiring the building. A lease has also been discussed, but Lambke said she would need to own the building to secure certain financing.

Maine Grains had previously submitted a purchase offer of about $1.43 million, Belliveau said. That was based on approximately 150% of the building’s assessed value, $975,000.

SEDC, however, received an income-based appraisal that put the market value of the building at $1.75 million, he said. The appraiser also produced an estimate using another approach, he said, but it was deemed meaningless because it factored in Maine Grains’ expected $1.6 million investment had it bought the building.

Lambke, who opened Maine Grains’ grist mill in the former Somerset County Jail in 2012, said in a December interview her business scrapped plans last summer for a major expansion next to its current facility, the site of the former Kennebec Valley Inn at 42 Court St. The company then began looking at other properties, including Northgate.

Lambke bought the Court Street lot in 2020 through another company, Land & Furrow LLC, after the hotel was demolished in 2018.

Plans for that site have evolved several times since then. In December 2024, Maine Grains announced plans for an 80,000-square-foot building that would house a new equipment line to produce grain-based foods and other items. The company currently sells only raw ingredients.

But the economics of financing a major construction project did not work out, Lambke said. Construction costs were expected to far exceed the appraised value of the finished building, according to Lambke.

The idea for the Northgate site — or any other property Maine Grains pursues — was still to house the new production machinery, technically known as a precision single screw extruder. Lambke said that kind of equipment is not available on the East Coast and other businesses are interested in collaborating with Maine Grains.

When up and running, Lambke expects the new facility to employ 15 people. Maine Grains employs 20 people at the grist mill, and the associated Skowhegan restaurants, The Biergarten and The Miller’s Table, employ 42 more, she said.

The new extrusion equipment is being manufactured in Germany; Lambke said it is expected to be shipped this month.

She has told the SEDC board the cost of the equipment was $1.4 million, and she anticipated a cost of about $1.6 million to fit up the Northgate space to meet certain requirements for producing food. The project is supported by several grants.