CEI's new Brunswick headquarters consolidates operations
Photo / James McCarthy
Coastal Enterprises Inc.'s new headquarters at 30 Federal St. in Brunswick consolidated offices in Wiscasset and Portland.
Coastal Enterprises Inc. consolidated a number of satellite operations around Maine when it moved into its new headquarters in Brunswick last month.
The nonprofit lender, specializing in rural business development and financing, was founded in 1977 in Wiscasset. The new headquarters, costing about $5.04 million, $227 per square foot, consolidates offices in Wiscasset and Portland. The offices include those of its for-profit subsidiaries, CEI Ventures Inc., CEI Community Ventures Inc. and CEI Capital Management LLC, and its not-for-profit subsidiaries, CEI Investment Notes Inc. and CEI Housing Inc.
About 72 of CEI’s 88 staff members are now based at the new headquarters at 30 Federal St.
John Egan, senior vice president of lending and investment who oversaw construction, said the driving force of the move was to get everyone under one roof.
“Our location in Wiscasset was insufficient to meet the demands of running our business,” he said in an interview with Mainebiz. “We were looking at the opportunity to upgrade there. But we decided that, if we were going spend money to upgrade, we’d look at a better location.”
The headquarters also signals CEI’s continued evolution, Egan said.
“We went out of our way to make sure we could see the company growing in this location,” he said. “This building is designed to have a 100-year lifespan. That’s an ambitious arc for a nonprofit. We wanted to make a statement about how the building reflect CEI’s investment in environmental sustainability. And with the access we provide to the public, it highlights CEI’s focus on the equity part of our mission. The building reflects the mission of the organization.”
Egan said the new headquarters met considerations including:
• The new building — designed by CWS Architects and built by Allied Cook, with landscape design provided by Sebago Technics — is centrally located in the midcoast region, between Wiscasset and Portland, and central to much of CEI’s workforce.
• Consolidation is expected to provide greater opportunities for collaboration and efficiency among staff members.
• New construction allowed CEI to build to LEED Platinum standards.
• The new site obviates summer traffic congestion seen along Route 1 at the Wiscasset site.
The town “rolled out the red carpet” to CEI once the site became available, Egan said.
“The town went out of its way to make sure things went smoothly with our permitting, construction, and move-in,” he said.
CEI had to demolish two buildings, the former Brunswick Town Hall and Brunswick Recreation Center, before building the new headquarters. The town transferred the properties to the Brunswick Development Corp., which sold them to CEI for $300,000 in June 2014.
In their place is the LEED-certified, two-story professional office building with an approximately 10,800-square-foot footprint and 22,200 square feet of space overall. Ground was broken in October 2014.
The brick-over-steel-frame building, designed to conform with Federal Street’s village feel, incorporates state-of-the-art geothermal heating and cooling system technologies, solar roof panels and other energy-efficient details, such as a well-insulated building envelope, a white reflective roof, LED light fixtures throughout, employee bike racks and infrastructure for an electric car charging station, which is planned for the future.
The site provides other community-friendly elements. The grounds incorporate more porous surface than it did in the past, facilitating the natural infiltration of stormwater, thus reducing the burden on Brunswick’s subsurface stormwater system.
The site provides all the parking space needed by employees, so there’s no consumption of public parking, and the lot adds parking capacity to downtown Brunswick weekends and evenings, when the general public can use it.
“Probably the best highlight is our conference room, which can hold 94 people and which can be used by community groups for their functions,” Egan said. “Our president, Ron Phillips, made it a priority to have that available for community groups to use.”
CEI continues to maintain a small office in Portland, where several staffers work with new immigrants and refugees, and a number of CEI business counselors, loan officers, and program development specialists will remain in their existing offices to serve clients in the regions of Springvale/Sanford, Portland, Bath, Wiscasset, Lewiston, Farmington, Augusta, Fairfield, Farmington, Ellsworth, Bangor and Machias.
In the meantime, founder Phillips’ plan to move on to other endeavors in the spring of 2016 remain on track, said Egan. The search for a new CEO is underway.
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