Eric C. Brown, Ph.D., is executive director of the Maine Irish Heritage Center.

On Sunday, the Maine Irish Heritage Center celebrated St. Patrick’s Day early with our largest ever open house, welcoming around 750 attendees over the course of a spirited afternoon filled with music, dance, art and the bonding of communal experience. 

This yearly gathering is a signature example of our mission: to preserve and enliven our historic building in Portland, to promote and showcase Irish culture and, most importantly, to serve as a true community center. 

Gov. Janet Mills’ proclamation declaring March 17, 2026, Maine Irish Heritage Day, singled out the deeply unifying effect of shared heritage, in which “Irish-Americans join with men, women and children of all other ethnic origins who, for one day, become Irish and celebrate Saint Patrick and the love of Ireland.”

We embrace this spirit of Irishness year-round, serving not only as the home for groups like the Stillson School of Irish Dance, the Claddagh Mhor Pipe Band and the Irish American Club, but also at various times for the Portland History Docents, Window Dressers, Alcoholics Anonymous and numerous other organizations.

We also invite the public to experience the space through an array of programs that includes concerts, historical lectures, poetry readings, theater performances, genealogical services and book talks. We actively collaborate with other cultural and heritage centers in Maine, New England and Ireland itself.  

For nearly 25 years our commitment to benevolently serving the public good was supported by the city of Portland. That changed in January, when the city assessor’s office ruled that we no longer qualified as a “charitable and benevolent” institution, revoking our longstanding property-tax exemption and confronting us with a financial impact upward of $50,000 in the next fiscal year. For context, our total operating budget is around $300,000, and we typically bring in around the same amount or less in revenue. This is to say, we are literally a nonprofit.

The city’s decision was shocking not least because the most recent City of Portland’s Local Economy Report states that “a vibrant arts and culture community is essential to the City’s economic well-being,” and because we have not changed our mission in any way nor has there been any change to state law that would justify this abrupt reclassification.  Nor were we the only nonprofit to be targeted, as so far more than a dozen others — from Maine Public and Mayo Street Arts to Avesta, Hill Arts, the Lions Club on Peaks Island and a Dempsey Center home for cancer patients — have been or are being similarly affected. 

The city has claimed this is all the result of “the most thorough review of tax-exempt properties that has been conducted in some time” (Press Herald, Feb. 19) but is also on record as applauding the work of the assessor’s office in “redefining or reframing what a not-for profit is” (Finance Committee meeting, Nov. 6, 2025).  “Redefining” goes far beyond “reviewing,” and should be beyond the authority of local assessors to assume on their own.

In short, the Portland Assessor’s Office is interpreting state law in a way that no other assessors in the state are doing and no other assessors in Portland’s history have done, exploiting a loophole originating in 1867 Massachusetts case law and adopted verbatim by the Maine Supreme Court that defines “charitable” without explicitly mentioning arts, culture, heritage or historic preservation. This literalist approach has far-reaching consequences across Portland and, in exposing this vulnerability, will also set a precedent that will threaten other arts and culture institutions statewide.  

On a day when I would rather be remembering the Irish lullabies my father sang to me as a child, or the shepherd’s pie my mother cooked, I am reminded instead of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats’ lament to St. Patrick: “For all your croziers, they have left the path / And wander in the storms and clinging snows.” 

I join many other nonprofit and community leaders in Portland and beyond in urging the city to reconsider these errant decisions, and for the state Legislature to take up this issue, amend the statute and prevent further misguided wanderings.