That’s Our Dump!
The rebirth of Thompson’s Point?

By Anders Nielsen

Thompson’s Point, a roughly 30-acre spit of land jutting into the Fore River, is the biggest dump in Portland.

Located behind the Amtrak and bus station, across the river from the jetport, just west of I-295, this site has been an industrial wasteland for decades. Several large — and largely empty — weather-beaten structures occupy the property along with a handful of shorter, equally beat-up buildings. During a walk around the point you’ll encounter all sorts of random refuse: piles of rusty metal, old logs, a stove, a small bulldozer with a rusted plow and rusty coffee can over its exhaust pipe.

During the day there’s activity at a dozen or so businesses: a garage door company, a plumbing business, Mister Sparky electrical service and repair. ASAP Taxi has a garage in a cavernous brick shed. At the southern end of the point, the Maine Department of Transportation maintains piles of mulch and industrial junk.

At night, Thompson’s Point rocks. This is the site of the most storied practice space in the history of Portland music: Prime Artist Rehearsal Studios. Among the bands that have honed their sound here are Twisted Roots, Rustic Overtones, Ocean, Phantom Buffalo, and Pigboat.

Prime graphically exemplifies the point’s state of decay. The front is a weedy parking lot fenced with chain link and barbed wire. Around back it looks like a Satanic cult had a campfire. Stumps encircle a trash-filled fire pit. The skeletons of small woodland creatures hang from a fence among cymbals and a string of prayer flags.

The inside ain’t much nicer. “The vibe is awful,” said former Overtone Spencer Albee, who practiced at Prime for years before securing a cleaner space elsewhere on the point. “I went in a few years ago and it smelled like someone had pissed on the piss that was there when we were there.”

Before the White Man came, Thompson’s Point must have been gorgeous. The surrounding marshland is still pristine.

In the first half of the 19th century, Thompson’s Point was the southern hub of barge and boat traffic on the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, a 38-mile waterway that connected Portland to Sebago Lake. The canal was used to transport wood products and other goods from the state’s interior to the harbor.

In the second half of that century, the rise of the railroads made the canal obsolete, and Thompson’s Point changed accordingly. Rail cars were repaired there in the big brick sheds. Maps from this period show train tracks crisscrossing the whole area. A train shed that once stood at Union Station was dismantled and moved to the end  of the point, where the DOT’s dump is.

During World War II, the federal government took over. The sheds were used to store steel for Liberty Ships under construction across the harbor. A cement manufacturer moved there in the 1950s, and the site has been used for industrial purposes ever since.

That could change early next year, when all of this is scheduled to be demolished to make room for a mammoth project called The Forefront at Thompson’s Point. Plans include two multi-story office buildings, a 700-car parking garage, a 125-room hotel, restaurants, a sports medicine laboratory, a concert venue, and an events center designed to accommodate conventions and home games for the NBA Development League team the Maine Red Claws.

The group behind this project is led by several members of the Red Claws’ ownership group, most notably former TD Banknorth executive Bill Ryan Sr. The Forefront is expected to cost upwards of $100 million. Its location makes construction particularly expensive. For example, the mucky marine clay beneath the site, euphemistically referred to as “blue goo,” will require that pilings be driven as far as 100 feet underground to support the structures above.

Ryan and his associates have deep pockets and big-money connections, but they say the combination of private investment and bank loans won’t be enough to make The Forefront a viable development.

That’s where you come in.

Earlier this summer, Ryan and company convinced city officials to give them a property tax break worth at least $31 million over the next 30 years. So though the Forefront is being planned and built by wealthy private investors, its profitability will depend on tens of millions of dollars of public money.

Thompson’s Point is now our dump, too.

photo/Chris Busby

A slam dunk

The impetus for the Forefront was the Red Claws’ desire to have their own practice space. The team currently plays its home games in the city-owned Portland Expo, but scheduling conflicts with high school sports events have occasionally forced to team to work on their lay-ups elsewhere.

The team’s owners originally eyed property in Bayside, said Chris Thompson, a member of the Forefront development group. Thompson is a former professor at Maine College of Art and an art historian and critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications (including The Bollard). He’s also done some hotel development through his company, Parallax Partners, Inc. Thompson and the Red Claws owners discussed building a practice facility and a hotel in Bayside, but soon set their sights on the much larger Thompson’s Point property, and their plans mushroomed from there.

The Forefront developers make an unconventional team for a project like this. In addition to Thompson, an arts academic, there’s Bill Ryan Jr., son of the banker, a former attorney who owns Oxford Plains Speedway and is the principal owner and chairman of the Maine Red Claws.

Jon Jennings, a co-owner of the Red Claws and general manager of the team, is also on the squad. Jennings’ background includes 11 years as assistant coach of the Boston Celtics. He worked on racial issues for the Clinton administration and was an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice in the late 1990s. In 2004, Jennings ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in Indiana as a Democrat,  but has shown no interest in a political career in Maine thus far.

Another hotel developer and Red Claws owner, Steve Griswold, is also involved, but Thompson said The Forefront is a larger and more complex undertaking than any of the principals has taken on before.

Projects of a similar size and type have been proposed in Portland in the past, but none ever got off the drawing board.

In the late 1990s, the charitable Libra Foundation proposed construction of a $46 million sports complex in Bayside. The foundation’s president, Owen Wells, said Libra was willing to contribute real estate and as much as $20 million for the project. As is now the case with Thompson’s Point, city officials hoped an arena in Bayside would revitalize a blighted part of town.

But the numbers didn’t work. It was projected that the arena could generate most of the remaining $26 million needed to cover construction costs, but the possibility Portland taxpayers would have to cover any shortfall ultimately sunk the deal.

In early 2005, it was real estate kingpin Joe Boulos’ turn to pitch. His project, proposed for the parking lots at Congress Street and Franklin Arterial, would have included a 10,000-seat arena, plus a 140,0000-square-foot convention center, a 250-room hotel, a 17-story office building and a parking garage.

Once again, taxpayer money would have been required to make the project fly. In this case, there was talk of raising the state tax on meals and lodging to help finance the convention center and arena parts of the development. When Gov. John Baldacci and state lawmakers balked at that idea, Boulos’ project hit the scrap heap, too.

Convention centers and arenas almost always require significant public subsidies. In Portland, two of the preeminent arts and sports venues are publicly owned: Merrill Auditorium and the Cumberland County Civic Center. Historically, there has not been enough public support or political will to use public funds to prop up private projects like this.

Yet the $31 million tax subsidy for The Forefront sailed through City Hall, and the project has few detractors. Why?

One reason is the collapse of efforts to redevelop the Maine State Pier two years ago. City councilors are still feeling the sting of criticism that deliberation and disagreement caused both pier proposals to fizzle in the weak economy. The issue is already being used as campaign cannon fodder in this year’s mayoral race. The prospect that another $100 million hotel/office/etc. project on the waterfront could wither on the vine while the city weighed its merits and the public weighed in was clearly on councilors’ minds.

So instead of months of PowerPoint presentations and public hearings, the Forefront deal was fast-tracked. The developers pressured the city to act quickly. They said investors and potential tenants might have second thoughts  if the process was not expedited. A special City Council meeting was convened in mid-June just to save a couple weeks’ worth of time.

Another reason the Forefront hasn’t sparked much debate is the way the deal is structured. We’re not spending $31 million of our tax dollars on the project. Instead, we’re allowing the developers to keep $31 million in property taxes the city would otherwise be owed over the next 30 years. And the city will get some new property tax revenue from the project: $26.4 million through the early 2040s.

Something is better than nothing, right?

Double dribble?

Documents prepared by city staff outline other benefits the Forefront promises to provide: more than 1,200 jobs during construction and about 450 jobs once everything’s up and running, plus millions of dollars in increased “economic activity” every year.

The Red Claws have sold out every home game they’ve played at the Expo, which seats just over 3,00o fans, so filling the 3,500-seat arena proposed for Thompson’s Point won’t be a stretch. But the viability of other parts of the development is less certain.

The convention center seems like the riskiest bet. The developers say they have studies that show an events facility of the size they’re planning (about 90,000 square feet) is exactly what the Portland market needs. Not everyone is convinced.

“I don’t think they did their homework,” Gus Tillman, general manager of the Holiday Inn By The Bay, told the Portland Press Herald. The Holiday Inn has about a third as much convention space as the Forefront will have, but Tillman said that’s the amount of room most convention planners are seeking.

The Brookings Institution has documented a steep drop in demand for convention facilities. This decline coincided with an increase in the amount of convention space available in the U.S., and increased competition among communities vying for convention business. The Brookings report came out in 2005, three years before The Great Recession.

If the convention center is successful, the hotel will be as well. But the converse also seems likely. (Blogger Carol McCracken of Munjoy Hill News reported that the Starwood Hotel chain is expected to run the one on Thompson’s Point under its Aloft brand of “hip hotels.”)

The music hall attached to the events center would have a capacity of about 4,500. That falls roughly halfway between the size of the Civic Center (about 7,000) and the newly refurbished State Theatre (about 1,700). Local industry observers predict the Forefront’s facility would siphon concert business from both venues, as well as from city-owned facilities like Merrill Auditorium, the Expo, and the Maine State Pier, which will host many more concerts than the Civic Center will this summer.

“I think it’s gonna be hard for them to fill those rooms because there’s too much going on and not enough people around to make it work,” said Rob Evon, owner of the Port City Music Hall downtown. “Portland is a tertiary market,” he said. “We’re on the back burner because the economy is causing bands to be more selective, so smaller markets get skipped.”

Thompson said the Forefront team has been studying the concert market since the project’s inception over a year ago. “We are convinced that the mid-size concert venue is missing in this market and could attract acts that are not coming to Maine currently,” he said. “Maine has a stronger market than one might think, and we think it has a lot of potential to grow and diversify.”

Given the size of the venue, there’s been speculation that a national outfit like the House of Blues franchise will operate the music hall, but no announcements have been made. House of Blues is owned by Live Nation, and the concert giant’s ability to offer tour-length deals with artists could give it a distinct advantage here.

The developers are confident the Forefront will be a success. “As excited as we are about the individual parts” of the project, Thompson said, “the whole is more than their sum. The project will create a sense of place that blends a destination location for events, entertainment, restaurants, and cultural life together with public and civic spaces — the trails, the access to the Fore River…”

Taking the larger view, Thompson’s Point — which is, geographically, a mini-peninsula —could be a smaller version of the Portland peninsula culturally, as well.

In anticipation of that day, the remaining businesses on Thompson’s Point have been making plans to relocate. Bands that relied on Prime Artist for rehearsal space are scrambling to find other rooms to get loud.

If all goes according to plan, by the fall of 2013, the biggest dump in Portland may be the biggest attraction in town.