John Rohman's tireless promotion of Maine's arts community helps the greater good, and boosts his business

Bangor has experienced a renaissance of sorts over the last decade. There are snazzy restaurants where there used to be none, and new downtown tenants like the University of Maine Museum of Art and the Maine Discovery Museum. The American Folk Festival now enlivens the city's waterfront every summer with its roughly 165,000 visitors funneling an estimated $6 million into the area's economy. "These things didn't exist 10 years ago," says John Rohman, CEO of WBRC Architects-Engineers in Bangor.

Rohman should know. As a former city councilor and mayor of the Queen City, Rohman was integral in promoting downtown revitalization and laying the groundwork for the renaissance. His company's also been involved in the brick-and-mortar revitalization, renovating historic structures like the 19th century Queen Anne building that now houses Merrill Financial Center on the edge of Bangor's downtown.

And while Bangor has grown, so has WBRC. During the last decade, the company's annual revenues jumped from $1.8 million to more than $7 million this year, and its staff has nearly tripled from 25 to 70.

Rohman's business and cultural strides are thanks in part to his years of community involvement. In Bangor and beyond, the 61-year-old's name can be found on the roster of many nonprofit groups, including the American Folk Festival, the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the Bangor Public Library. He's also on the board of Camden National Bank and is a trustee of Husson College in Bangor.

Rohman's efforts all come back to Bangor, where he served on the city council, including one year as mayor, from 1997 to 2003. "I think one of the best things John Rohman has done for the Bangor region is be its biggest cheerleader," says Tanya Pereira, an economic development specialist in Brewer who worked with Rohman while at Eastern Maine Development Corp. in Bangor.

Among Rohman's most valuable assets, Periera says, is his broad view of economic development. "He sees the importance of community and the amenities and the place as being critical to the decisions that businesses and people make," she says.
This view of economic development, Rohman says, has grown over the years from his love of art and civic involvement. It stresses ideas like quality of life, downtown redevelopment and the creative economy, buzz words that appear throughout the Brookings Institute report released almost a year ago.

Rohman, Pereira says, is skilled at taking those buzz words and turning them into actual economic development efforts. "He takes an intangible idea or a concept and makes it real for people," she says.

Take the National Folk Festival, which came to Bangor from East Lansing, Mich., in 2002. Rohman and his wife, Lynda, were integral in bringing the festival to the city's waterfront, according to Heather McCarthy, executive director of the American Folk Festival, which was created in 2005 to take over when the National Folk Festival completed its three-year tenure in the city.

While some doubted Bangor would be able to attract this nationally recognized travelling showcase — which never had set up shop in a city as small as Bangor — Rohman never lost sight of his vision. "I can remember meetings when folks would say, 'What's going to happen if this doesn't work out? What's our exit plan?' And I remember looking around the room and saying, 'There is no exit plan. We are committed to this,'" says Rohman, sitting on a recent September morning in his third-story corner office overlooking Kenduskeag Stream. "There were a handful of us and we made sure that it did happen."

Art history
Rohman's civic engagement got a kickstart in the mid 1990s when he was recruited to join the board of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. "That was the eye-opener for me, that belonging to those kinds of organizations could be a real asset to me personally but also to the firm," he says.

That led to his successful run in 1997 for a seat on the Bangor City Council, where his work to spur downtown development by connecting Bangor's business community to the arts caught the eye of then-governor Angus King, who appointed him to the Maine Arts Commission in 1999. (Gov. John Baldacci appointed Rohman to chair the commission in 2001. He still holds the post.)

At the commission, which funds grants to artists and organizes arts-centered programs in the state, Rohman says he's worked hard to market Maine arts and increase funding for the arts in Maine. In the past three years, the commission has helped funnel, directly and indirectly, $5 million from private and public sources like the Doris Duke Foundation and Jane's Trust in Boston to artists and art institutions in Maine.

Rohman also has the political clout to advocate for Maine's arts scene at a national level. As this issue went to press, he was preparing for a trip to Washington, D.C., where he was scheduled to meet with Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Michael Michaud to discuss arts funding for the state.

Rohman has brought a businessman's approach to running the commission. His most significant work during the past several years, Rohman says, is to change how the organization is perceived by Mainers — and the business community in particular — much like he did on a smaller scale in Bangor. "The arts were always looked at [like] somebody that had their hand out looking for something," he says. "And we've really done a great job of turning that around. We now have our hand out to shake somebody's hand to be their partner to accomplish something."

Partnerships between the business community and the arts community raised the Maine Arts Commission's profile, as well as Rohman's. "He's just a connector — he connects people from all walks of life and I just admire him for that," says Alden Wilson, executive director of the Maine Arts Commission. "It's really a natural ability, and it defines the man."

In 2004, Baldacci appointed Rohman to co-chair his Creative Economy Council, an economic development initiative based on the premise that access to cultural events, natural resources and education attract people or businesses to the state as much as traditional issues like taxes. While Rohman admits the creative economy is not the be-all, end-all, he says it's "another arrow in the quiver of economic development."

His work on behalf of Maine and its art community has also launched him onto national and international stages. Last year, he was elected president of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, which oversees local art agencies like the Maine Arts Commission throughout the country. In that role, Rohman attended a White House event last year sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2005 he was invited to speak at a conference in England on the creative economy. "He's a natural leader," Wilson says. "Some people are born with leadership genes and John's got them in spades."

Bold lines
Rohman was born in Delaware in 1946 and grew up in Virginia. His father was a career military man and the family moved around frequently. When Rohman, who has 12 brothers and sisters, was in high school the family moved to Augusta, where his father was attached to the Naval Reserve Center. In 1964, he graduated from Cony High School and went on to the University of Maine in Orono, where he received a degree in engineering in 1968.

Rohman was drafted into the U.S. Army after college and joined the 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam, where he spent almost an entire year deployed in combat in the jungle. "It was one of those experiences that I certainly would never choose," he says. "But on other hand, it's an experience that's shaped my life, and I think it's shaped my life positively. You have a whole different perspective on life. You realize how fleeting it can be and realize how arbitrary it can be, too."

After returning from Vietnam in 1970, Rohman moved to Bangor and landed a job with Eaton Tarbell, who at the time was a well-known Bangor architect. In 1973, Rohman joined Higgins, Webster and Partners, the Bangor firm that would eventually become WBRC. During that time he began working toward a degree in business management from Husson College.

It was while working at Higgins Webster that the seeds for his interest in the arts were sown, he says. Rohman began his professional career as an engineer but, after almost 20 years at WBRC, he decided to focus instead on the more artistic field of interior design. So he commuted to Boston for two weekday classes at the Boston Architectural Center while still working at the firm. "He never missed a beat," says Stephen Rich, who Rohman hired as a young architect 25 years ago and who is now WBRC's chief operating officer. "It really shows a commitment to lifelong learning and an absolutely fearless attitude about learning and changing and evolving and growing."

The firm became WBRC in 1989 — the "R" stands for Rohman — and in the early 1990s, the major partner in the firm, Alan Baldwin, moved south. After Baldwin left, Rohman became the major shareholder and principal in the firm. Rohman could have kept the old hierarchical structure, with himself as the new head honcho, but instead agreed with some of the junior partners and ceded some of his ownership and responsibilities to his coworkers to create a more equitable firm. "[Rohman] had the foresight to let some younger guys step up and share shoulder-to-shoulder in the debate process and leadership process," says Rich. "That was a pretty big gamble: Give up some ownership, give up control and say six of us would do better than one. That's putting aside ego for a plan."

There are nine current partners at WBRC, five of whom have an equal share in the firm, Rohman says. "What we're working for is equality of all the partners."

WBRC is a full-service architecture and engineering firm working in commercial, civic, health care and education, the last of which currently accounts for roughly half of the company's projects, Rohman says. Last year, WBRC landed a contract to work on Penn National Gaming's $135 million Bangor racino project, which Rohman says is the largest engineering project the firm has ever done.

WBRC during the past four years has opened an office in Sarasota and in Portland. In the case of Florida, Rohman says it was an opportunity to enter a market experiencing a building boom. "We're really bringing that New England work ethic down to Sarasota and it's serving us very, very well," Rohman says.

Some of the growth the firm has experienced over the last several years is due to Rohman's high profile in the state as an advocate for the arts, says Alan Bromley, who Rohman hired 27 years ago and is now WBRC's chief financial officer. "He seems to know everybody, politicians to other corporate leaders," Bromley says. "Everybody that knows him tends to like him so he's generating goodwill out there for the WBRC name."

Creating culture
When Rohman retires from WBRC, firm COO Rich says there will be some big shoes to fill. "He's a very good example to follow, but I don't wonder how he does it because it's what has to be done. One of us is going to have to do it when he retires," Rich says. "The success of our business is going to be always contingent with our relationship with the community, and our relationship with the state and national organizations."

In the end, Rohman knows the work he does in the name of the creative economy and the arts benefits his firm and others by creating a city and state that attracts talented young professionals. "I think one of biggest things that John has been a part of is giving the Bangor area a shot in the arm," Brewer's Pereira says. "Really giving it the ego boost it needs to say 'We can compete when businesses are looking for locations, or people are looking for jobs and opportunities.' People used to say 'You have to go south to do that, you have to go to Portland or Boston to do that.' It's become a place people want to be. You can't put a dollar value on that."

Last month, Rohman walked through the firm's education studio. He stopped at a desk and leaned over the shoulder of Shane Dunn, a young architect fresh from Syracuse University whose screen displayed a three-dimensional rendering of a building WBRC designed for Maine Maritime Academy. Dunn had created a video that takes a viewer on a flight around the building, showing it from different heights and angles. He is an example of the kind of young employee Rohman wants at WBRC. Dunn, who is from Augusta, found enough exciting about his home state to stay, and Rohman knows enticing talent from away is just as critical as keeping bright minds here.

Right now, WBRC employs a structural engineer from Spain and architects from Texas and Colorado, even Switzerland. These people weren't attracted to Bangor just because of WBRC, he says. "I'd love to believe that folks couldn't wait to come work for WBRC, but part of the attraction is the way of life," Rohman says, standing beside Dunn. "They look at [Bangor] as the gateway to hiking and biking, the gateway to the coast."