AUBURN – Plans for a new industrial park could come before the City Council in two to three weeks, according to development officials.
Developers said Monday they’d be asking the city to invest $2.6 million in the development, a five-phase industrial park that could eventually add 800 acres for new industry to the area around the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport.
“No other place potentially offers a business what we can offer in Auburn,” said Lucien Gosselin, president of the Lewiston Auburn Economic Growth Council. The new park would be built in the city’s new Foreign Trade Zone and Gov. John Baldacci’s Pine Tree Zone, near the St. Lawrence and Atlantic railroad.
“These are benefits only available here,” he said. He hopes to see construction on the first two phases begin in the fall, with completion some time in 2006.
Members of the LAEGC and the Auburn Business Development Corp. briefed city councilors in a Monday night work session. The city has come a long way, they said.
The city was granted Foreign Trade Zone status in October. That zone lets manufacturers have raw materials shipped to them duty-free. They can then manufacture their goods and ship them to international customers duty-free. The tariff savings could encourage manufacturers to bring their business to Auburn.
Auburn will also get one of the governor’s new Pine Tree Zones, an effort to spur economic development in Maine by offering incentives to new and growing manufacturing, banking or high-tech businesses.
The combination makes Auburn an unbeatable place for industrial development.
“I call it the port of Auburn,'” said local attorney Peter Garcia, a member of the growth council’s board of directors. The St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, in partnership with the Canadian National Railroad, links the city with Vancouver, making it a natural place for getting raw goods and shipping manufactured goods.
That’s why the city needs a new industrial park, Garcia said. The Kittyhawk Industrial Park is almost full.
“We effectively have nothing left,” said Garcia. “If a company came to us today and said they needed space for a 300,000-square-foot building and 300 new employees, we just couldn’t do it. But with this plan, we could.”
The city’s investment would pay for new roads, sewer and utilities for the first two phases of the industrial park. Those phases would be built on about 80 acres between Kittyhawk Road and Foster Road. Future phases would be north and south of that development.
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