November 16, 2022
The B&M Baked Bean Factory
Interior view of Fort Gorges
As an organization that’s been around for nearly 60 years, we are involved in a lot of different things, and we want to make sure you know the full scope of what we do.
We are the only dedicated nonprofit devoted to the preservation of this area’s sense of place, our built environment, and our neighborhoods.
What does this mean for our work?
We attend most Portland Historic Preservation Board meetings, and regularly submit comments on projects that are undergoing review. We work with developers, architects, and individual homeowners to ensure that their projects are in harmony with preservation and historic district standards. Some projects we’ve advocated for recently include the Local Landmark designation of the former B&M Baked Bean Factory, now the anchor building for the new Roux Institute campus, the establishment of the Munjoy Hill Historic District and the endorsement of the contract between the Friends of Fort Gorges and the City of Portland to operate and offer programming at the fort. Advocacy efforts like this ensure that new construction works harmoniously with the existing built environment, and the sense of place we all know and love isn’t lost.
We also work to ensure that maintaining and rehabilitating older buildings is affordable. Not only is adaptive use of existing structures environmentally more friendly than new construction, a matching benefit is the ability to create more affordable housing in spaces that are vacant or underutilized. Historic tax credits help to carry the cost of renovations, while a city’s density and architecture remains intact.
We worked closely with partners to get LD 201 passed, which extended the sunset of Maine’s State Historic Tax Credit program to 2030. Currently, only income-earning properties are eligible for Historic Tax Credit funding, but we’re working to change that so that individual homeowners will also be able to benefit from this program. These efforts will result in long-overdue incentives to assist homeowners maintaining their historic homes as they increase energy efficiency, carry out routine maintenance, or undertake modernization efforts.
Historic Tax Credit Project at the former St. Dominic’s Parochial School for Boys on State Street
Historic Tax Credit Project at the former Mercy Hospital building on State Street