City Council discusses future of former Erland Sleight School

February 1, 2007

The Old Town City Council met Monday night to discuss several business items on the city’s agenda. Among the business items up for discussion was the future of the Erland Sleight School on Main Street, formerly used as a training center when Georgia-Pacific owned the Old Town mill. The school is currently owned by Red Shield, Environmental, LLC, which purchased the mill last fall with a loan from the city. As part of Red Shield’s negotiations with the city, it agreed to sell the former Erland Sleight school to the city for $30,000.

Peggy Daigle, Old Town city manager, told the Council that she would like to move ahead with the legal paperwork that would facilitate the city’s purchase of the building. She said that UMaine engineering students are currently conducting in-depth research into the facility to find out the city can “deal with it without doing a major overhaul.”

“It’s a good building, and if we could get in there with a minimum amount of money, it would be a good fit,” she said. “It could be short term or long term, but it would be a good fit. But if it remains unheated and vacant, it won’t be a good building.”

Daigle said that the building could be used for incubating new businesses or as a potential new location for the city hall offices.

“It’s a marketable building,” she said, noting that if it were used for municipal purposes, it would take the city about a month to move in.

Red Shield is currently heating the building, she said, but the city will repay them for the cost of the oil. She added that the $30,000 needed for the city to purchase the facility could come from two possible sources, which would be from $1,000 that is set aside for city hall on a yearly basis or money from the landfill.

Council members voted to start the legal paperwork on the possible purchase.

An item not listed on the agenda---the question of whether to allow bow-only deer hunting on Marsh Island—also became a topic of discussion Monday night. The Orono Town Council recently held similar discussions at their January meeting, during which Mark Caron, regional biologist for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife explained that if bow-only deer hunting were allowed on Marsh Island, it would actually be a matter of adding the Island to the expanded bow-only hunting map that already exists in the Greater Bangor area. The idea of a bow-hunting deer season for Marsh Island had previously been discussed, but the idea was dropped when the University of Maine refused to participate.

Several council members expressed concerns over the expansion of bow-only hunting onto Marsh Island, pointing out that the area in which the expansion would take place was “a very densely-populated narrow strip of land” that bordered the disproportionately larger amount of property owned by the University. City manager Daigle said that she would be attending a public meeting on the bow-only hunting expansion question in Orono on Feb.12. and encouraged other council members to attend as well.

The upcoming season of budget cuts promptedsome discussion as the council voted to schedule a second reading for final approval on March 2 of bonds and notes in amounts not to exceed $1,000,000 to be used for improvements to city schools. Included in the improvements will be a roof replacement at Leonard Middle School and Old Town High School, paving at Old Town Elementary School, Leonard Middle School and Old Town High School, improvements to the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems at Leonard Middle School and Old Town High School, and other unspecified improvements described in a facility audit conducted by the James W. Sewall Company.

“This is hopefully the first of not too many steps toward acreditation of our schools,” Daigle said. “It’s a significant step on the part of the city to get this done.”

Discussion of the financing of improvements to the schools prompted council member Gary Sirois to comment on the fact that there were no school board members were present at the meeting.
“We (the city council) make every effort to send someone to their meetings, and they seem to boycott (our meetings) until budget cuts,” he said.

Referencing the council’s efforts to extend financial help to the schools, Sirois said that “someone from the schools should be here to talk to us about it.”

Earlier in the meeting, the Council took a moment to acknowledge the presenceo of Old Town third grader Baxter Smith who was there with his father and his teacher, --- St. Pierre. St. Pierre said that her class would soon be holding mock city council elections and that she had encouraged members of the class to attend Monday night’s meeting. Smith was the only one who showed up.

“He got in the car and said, ‘Come on, let’s get to the meeting,’” his father said. “He was very excited about it.”