Local:
Congrats to Portland’s Historic Preservation Program!: Congratulations to our colleagues at the City’s Historic Preservation Program for being recognized by the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions with the 2026 Best Practices in Technology Award for their Portland Historic Designations Mapper! Watch the award video shown during the ceremony! The team accepted the award at the July 2026 Commission Excellence Awards Celebration, at the organization's biennial conference, FORUM 2026: Preservation Currents, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. GPL supported this nomination and we are HUGE fans of the Mapper! We use it all the time and encourage you to take it for a spin if you haven’t already!
Reimagining Franklin Street: The City of Portland’s planning team working to redesign the Franklin Street corridor is ready to share their vision, which was created from input from a series of open houses and stakeholder meetings including GPL. Join us to hear about the draft street design concept on Thursday, September 10th at the Rines Auditorium in the Portland Public Library (5 Monument Square) from 5:30 to 7:30pm. After a presentation, attendees will be able to talk with the project team and provide feedback.
Hearts of Pine: Portland’s own Hearts of Pine professional soccer club announced plans to build a new stadium at Cassidy Point along Portland’s working waterfront. We are huge supporters of the team here at GPL, even flying the Hearts of Pine flag at the Observatory on game days! This proposal will go through a series of reviews before it can move forward, starting with the upcoming neighborhood meeting on Thursday, August 27th at 6 pm at the Waynflete School auditorium. As the community considers the needs of the team, the city, and residents, we will be gathering more information on a number of considerations:
The working waterfront is iconic to Portland and has historically been carefully protected. We’re eager to understand how a stadium would impact Cassidy Point’s important function as a deep-water port.
We are advocating for the rehabilitation and continued use of the historic Portland Expo, which is part of the sports complex that includes Fitzpatrick Stadium, the current home of Hearts of Pine. There is a lot of opportunity to redesign the complex to serve all of the teams and fans that use the complex.
There have been conversations about moving the train station from the Transportation Center back to the peninsula and now the Federal Railroad Administration has announced $48M to move the station to St. John Street, near Cassidy Point. GPL has advocated, along with City leadership, to select the site where the former Union Station stood and where infrastructure still exists for a walkable, accessible urban core.
State:
Grant Opportunity: The Maine Redevelopment’s Lighting Stabilization Grant program helps municipalities address distressed properties they own. Do you know of a municipal-owned historic property that is at risk of further deterioration and needs emergency stabilization? Learn more about this grant opportunity for work such as roofing, siding, foundation repair, etc. Applications are due August 31, 2026.
National:
Section 106: While most of the day-to-day preservation work that you see in your neighborhoods is governed by zoning and ordinances at the local level, there is a process for reviewing federal projects as well. This process, called Section 106, was enacted as part of the National Historic Preservation Act sixty years ago and has protected countless historic resources across the country. When federal licensing, permits, or funding are involved in a project, there is a mandatory review and stakeholder engagement process to identify and assess impacts to historic resources. In a handful of cases, the project is redesigned to avoid destroying things like historic cemeteries and archeological sites that were discovered in this process, places with Indigenous history and significance, historic buildings, viewsheds, and landscapes, and many other places that capture American and Indigenous stories.
In a catastrophic move by the Trump administration, the regulations for Section 106 have been revised and, if approved, would virtually eliminate this critical process. Review would become voluntary, the definition of what is considered “historic” would become extremely limited, and communication with stakeholders, like the impacted communities, would be at the discretion of the federal government.
In short, Section 106 protects historic places and without it, we’ll lose them.
The official comment period has not yet opened, but there’s action to be taken now:
Learn more at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, Preservation Action, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, and most news sources such as the Washington Post, CNN, and NPR.
Write to the governor, who needs to hear from thousands of Mainers on this issue. The National Trust has an easy form you can use. It will provide language that you can use or customize.
Write to your elected officials: there’s a form to help with this, too.
Stay tuned. We’ll let you know when the official comment period has opened. When this goes to court, preservation lawyers cite letters submitted during that comment window.
