AUBURN – Androscoggin County Sheriff Eric Samson said he’s tired of getting smeared for trying to find a solution to the longstanding need for new quarters for his deputies and staff.

“I’ve just had enough,” he said, adding that he is weary of “the accusations thrown my way or the characterizations of me” by critics of the county’s plan to move the Sheriff’s Office to a former car dealership on Route 4 in Auburn.

Samson has found himself in the middle of a battle between city of Auburn officials and Androscoggin County commissioners, who paid $4.5 million in February 2022 to purchase the former Evergreen Subaru property to house a new public safety building for the Sheriff’s Office.

From Samson’s point of view, “The city of Auburn has made it all political” and issued scurrilous claims about both him and the project in a bid to block a much-needed building.

City officials have a different take.

Mayor Jason Levesque said Samson “can be upset and mad and scream that it’s unfair all he wants,” but he insisted Auburn has been reasonable from Day One about the project and still wants to work with the county.

The mayor said last week that both men “have a responsibility” to “do the right thing” and work through issues that have them at odds with each other.

“That’s exactly how it should be because that’s called the checks and balances. And you need checks and balances. That’s what our country is built on,” Levesque said.

Whether the two men, and the two governments, can put aside their grievances and work toward a resolution to the ongoing dispute, though, remains an open question.

ROOTS OF THE FEUD

At the heart of the controversy is something that isn’t controversial at all: the existing Sheriff’s Office in the historic Androscoggin County Building in Auburn is inadequate.

Everyone agrees that, at the very least, it needs a multi-million-dollar overhaul. But most people involved in the issue say there ought to be a new headquarters designed for the department’s present-day needs and open to future improvements.

“We’ve all known the Sheriff’s Office is not up to standard,” Levesque said. “That’s common knowledge and there’s no disagreement on that. I mean, it is what it is.”

For a time, there was talk of overhauling the office in the 1857 building, a work so extensive that it would have required moving the sheriff’s personnel somewhere else for at least a couple of years while contractors renovated the aging space.

But that idea faltered as county leaders wondered about what to do with the building as a whole and uncertainty that any renovation would suffice for the sheriff’s needs.

Then the pandemic hit.

Among its many impacts was something wholly unpredictable and unprecedented: The federal government handed out big money to every county government in the nation, including ones in Maine that have far more limited duties than most of the ones elsewhere in America.

It meant that Androscoggin County commissioners suddenly had millions of extra dollars to tap, though only for specified needs.

One thing they could do with some of the $22 million windfall, they decided, was to buy property for a new Sheriff’s Office.

So, with no public notice, they held a half-hour executive session in February 2022 before emerging to vote in favor of buying the 6.5-acre car dealership property.

Only Commissioner Edward Plourde of Lewiston voted against it.

“I’m very uneasy about entering into this purchase without vetting other options,” he said at the time.

Samson, however, was thrilled.

“This is great news for the taxpayers,” he said.

REACTION AT AUBURN CITY HALL

Auburn’s leaders learned about the decision when they read the Sun Journal the next morning.

“That was really a big shock and it still sits in the back of our minds,” Levesque said.

The mayor said the city had long eyed that plot and others along Center Street as an area that could be filled in with much denser development that would slow traffic and bolster property tax revenues.

Putting a public safety building there struck city officials as a bad idea.

“We needed to say ‘Stop, what’s going on here?’” Levesque said.

Samson said he didn’t expect the immediate opposition from Auburn’s leaders.

After all, he said, a study started in 2021 of potential sites had highly ranked the Evergreen property at 774 Center St. because it had the requisite space, parking and access.

But city officials wasted no time in declaring they would put a moratorium in place to block anything from happening on the site until Auburn had time to review its land-use laws to see if they ought to be updated.

Samson said he thinks the city threatened a moratorium in the hope that it would cause the county to hit the brakes on buying the property.

But the county moved forward anyway.

“I give the commissioners a lot of credit because they didn’t cower to that,” Samson said.

Auburn went ahead with its proposed six-month moratorium and later imposed another six-month moratorium as it kept working on what land-use rules to impose.

Meanwhile, nothing much happened with the county project.

“We went through the process of sitting on our hands,” the sheriff said.

Samson said he couldn’t justify spending money to work out detailed plans without knowing if they would ever have a chance to be implemented.

Four months ago, the city adopted new land-use rules that specifically target government buildings. Levesque said the language came from a successful ordinance that Augusta already had in place.

The new rules would cover the county’s plan for a new public safety building, he said, but would also include the city’s project for a public safety building on Minot Avenue. The mayor said that ought to show it wasn’t something punitive or unfair to the county.

Early in the moratorium period, Samson said the city tried to interest him in a couple of alternative sites, including a possible joint public safety building with the city on Minot Avenue.

He said the city also got him to talk with developer John Gendron about a potential land swap that would have given land on Stetson Road for the new Sheriff’s Office and put the Evergreen site back on the tax rolls.

Samson said he didn’t think Stetson Road, with a big senior living complex, was a good spot for a public safety building.

“I just felt that wasn’t respectful at all,” Samson said. Plus, he said he was “kind of uncomfortable” talking about a closed-door deal with a developer.

A HITCH IN THE RULES

Without getting lost in the legalisms inherent in any new statute, one provision stands out: That even if a project gets the approval of land-use overseers, Auburn’s City Council retained the power to veto it.

“It’s like one kid bullying the other because they have the control,” Samson said.

Samson said Auburn’s planners have generally proved reliable in putting politics to the side when they consider land-use applications.

But Samson, a former Auburn city councilor, said he doesn’t have a similar faith in the city’s politicians.

“Like we’d have any trust going through that process with them,” he said. “These people have doubled down on the politics.”

Levesque said, though, that the provision is the same as Augusta’s and no different in kind from one that gives Lewiston’s City Council the ability to kill a homeless shelter plan already approved by the Planning Board by refusing to seek the necessary license for it.

Watching from the outside, state Sen. Jeff Timberlake, a Turner Republican, made an unexpected move in the ongoing drama.

With little warning and offering a bill that still doesn’t have any wording on the Legislature’s website, Timberlake convinced the State and Local Government Committee to back a measure that would strip Auburn of its ability to overrule its planners if they endorse a government building project.

Levesque quickly blasted the move as “an abuse of power” and said Samson “is manipulating the residents of Androscoggin County” by calling for help from lawmakers.

But Samson said he had nothing to do with Timberlake’s legislation.

“This wasn’t my doing,” he said.

The sheriff said he resented that Levesque dragged him into the fight in Augusta even though he “never worked with Sen. Timberlake on it” or pushed it with any other legislators.

It appears the bill, which critics said would undermine home rule provisions for municipalities, has been shelved.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The county has to decide whether to put together the studies and paperwork required to win a planning permit under the new city land use regulations.

That appears to be a necessity for the project to move ahead.

Levesque said he hopes Samson will reconsider working with Auburn.

At the end of the day, the mayor said, the sheriff needs “to learn from this process. He’s an elected official. He is responsible to the constituents of the county.”

Perhaps time has tempered the heat surrounding the issue somewhat.

Levesque said he’s confident that decision-makers will manage to tone down the rhetoric that has surrounded the controversial project and begin focusing on the issues involved in it.

“When we stop talking, that’s when bad things happen,” the mayor said. “We’ve got to repair the relationship.”

In the end, Samson said, what’s important is that he and other officials “get it right” because whatever they build, it may house the Sheriff’s Office for the next 150 years.

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