Riverside revival | With a massive pollution cleanup effort complete, Corinna is plotting to rebuild its downtown

Corundel Commons Senior Housing, the newest building in Corinna, opened its doors just a few months ago. Bangor-based social services agency Penquis CAP spearheaded the $3 million project to build the 20-unit elderly housing facility that sits on a small rise above Corundel Pond, just off Route 7, the main drag through town.

The project is significant for a number of reasons. For starters, it's the largest development the town has seen in more than a decade. But the most interesting part of the building is the ground on which it sits: Corundel Commons is perched on roughly 30,000 tons of soil pushed into place by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a man-made hillock that represents the culmination of an intense environmental cleanup effort in downtown Corinna that started in the late 90s to mitigate the nasty legacy of a defunct wool-dyeing mill. "We were looking for a hill, and the EPA was looking for a place to put all that dirt," says Corinna Town Manager Dalton Mullis. "It saved them money and it saved us an enormous amount of money."

Ten years ago, the hill where Corundel Commons now sits was flat ground, an empty piece of land tucked behind the sprawling Eastland Woolen Mill. The factory was for generations the town's lifeblood, its largest employer and its most significant taxpayer. But the Eastland plant also was without question the town's biggest corporate villain. For decades, chemicals used in the wool-dyeing process had slowly leached into the ground around the 250,000-square-foot mill and directly into the Sebasticook riverbed. By the time the mill shut its doors in 1996, much of Corinna's downtown was left sitting on a toxic stew. "The river was dead for a while," says Ed Hathaway, the EPA project manager in charge of the Corinna cleanup. "You could see the chlorobenzene bubbling in the river. It was a significant site ˆ— there was a lot of contamination there."

But a radical transformation has taken place since the EPA and other federal and state agencies descended on Corinna in 1999, when the town was designated an EPA Superfund site. Gone is the Eastland mill, and gone is Main Street. Even the flow of the Sebasticook River is different, rerouted to allow the EPA to clean the polluted riverbed.

The completion of Corundel Commons was an occasion for celebration in Corinna ˆ— a first step in rebuilding and revitalizing Corinna's downtown. Even so, that rebuilding process still has a long way to go. Contamination from the Eastland site required a near wholesale razing of the downtown, and residents and local officials face the challenge in the coming years of physically rebuilding Corinna while recasting the town from a textile-dominated, industrial hamlet to something more economically sustainable.

While attracting businesses and funding real estate development are challenges, many in Corinna say the most difficult part of their redevelopment process is over. Though the EPA is still lingering, tying up loose ends and finishing a few projects, the pollution cleanup is largely complete. In the place of the Eastland mill is a large field, partially ringed with chain-link fence with a sign advertising commercial lots for sale. And in 2002, two years after the mill was torn down, Corinna residents crafted a detailed reuse plan that calls for a new downtown area full of retail shops, offices and residential space. "Right now is the fun part," says Mullis. "All the work is behind us, and we know what our goals are."

From bad to worse
When the Eastland Woolen Mill filed for bankruptcy and shutdown in 1996, it laid off 300 local workers and stuck Corinna with hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes ˆ— the final turns of the screw for a town that had seen its economy slowly dry up. By the mid 90s, most storefronts in Corinna were empty, and there was a steady procession of long-time businesses pulling up stakes and leaving town.

A Bangor Daily News article from October 1996 called the town "unemployment-ravaged Corinna," and detailed the depressed conditions, noting that the town lost its supermarket and its hardware store in the months preceding the Eastland closure. "We thought the closing of the Eastland Woolen Mill was the final straw. It was as low as you get," says Judy Doore, Corinna's town manager from 1998 through 2004. "But it turned out to be the first step in redevelopment."

These days, Corinna residents have mixed emotions about Eastland's legacy. On one hand, the mill was an important part of the town's economy. But after leaving hundreds jobless when it went out of business, the mill also added insult to injury by leaving a messy legacy of unpaid bills and contamination. The Finance Authority of Maine, for example, was on the hook for roughly $2.4 million in unpaid loans from Eastland, and attempted to auction off the 250,000 building in 1997. Then in 1998, FAME turned ownership of the mill over to the town, which began applying for EPA grants to remove asbestos and do other work in hopes of sprucing up the site for potential tenants.

Those tenants never materialized, once the severity of the contamination at the mill site became apparent. Investigations by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection turned up loads of hazardous chlorobenzenes, a byproduct of the wool-dyeing process, left behind by Eastland. (Maine DEP had been monitoring the pollution situation at the Eastland mill, and performed an emergency response in 1997 following the plant's closure. According to the EPA, Maine DEP pulled more than 54,000 pounds of hazardous substances from the mill, and ran point on the mill's cleanup until the EPA took over in 1999.)

What's more, the problems began spreading into the downtown area and the larger community. Heavy amounts of chlorobenzenes had seeped into the ground water, causing a number of residences and a local school to ditch private water supplies and hook into municipal water. And some businesses downtown felt a financial pinch after banks refused expansion or development loans because of the mill's contamination.

So Corinna officials in 1998 worked to get federal assistance in cleaning up the mill. Initially, the town planned to apply for the EPA's Brownfields Program, which would have provided roughly $200,000 in aid. But through discussions with the EPA, Corinna officials opted instead to try to place the Eastland site on the agency's National Priority List, which potentially would bring in considerably more federal dollars to tear down the mill and clean up the contamination. The strategy worked: In the summer of 1999, Corinna was assured EPA funding through the agency's Superfund program (which meant Eastland was among the country's worst hazardous waste sites). Initial cost estimates pegged the cleanup at more than $9 million. According to the EPA's Ed Hathaway, the project's price tag has ballooned closer to $50 million.

According to Doore and Mullis, it's been money well spent. The town has worked closely with the EPA and other agencies, like Maine DEP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to work its vision for a rebuilt Corinna into the cleanup process. Because of vigilant attention to the ins and outs of the cleanup schedule, the town was able to tack a large amount of downtown redevelopment into the EPA's Superfund budget, such as the man-made hill that served as a building site for Corundel Commons. "It was truly a cooperative effort," says Doore, who now works as town manager in Dexter, just to the north of Corinna. "That's how Corinna was able to get rebuilt."

The new Main Street
For those who haven't been back to Corinna in, say, the past decade, the town will certainly look different. Route 7, which leads north from Newport into downtown Corinna, used to come to a dead stop in front of the Eastland mill. A right onto Main St. zipped you through downtown and over the Sebasticook River, which flowed directly under the mill facility, and a jog left past the river took you north to reconnect with Route 7 again.

These days, rather than moving haltingly through town, Route 7 now bends gently over the Sebasticook River, arcing through Corinna's downtown towards Dexter. Moving a road may not seem like a big deal, but people like Doore cite it as a prime example of the benefits of working in conjunction with agencies like the EPA.

The road, according to the EPA, needed to be moved during the cleanup process to bypass the area where the mill would be torn down. Initially, the EPA in early July of 2000 proposed building a temporary bypass, with traffic returning to Main Street following the mill tear-down and cleanup. "We hated the road; it's all right angles," says Doore. "The EPA said, 'We'll build a temporary road,' so I went to them and said, 'What will it take to have you build a road the way we want it?'"

The answer, Doore says, was that Ed Hathaway said he needed a plan, accepted and approved by the town, on his desk in Boston in just three months. Doore and town officials quickly applied for and received a $12,000 Community Development Block Grant from the state, and hired an engineer to design the new road. After debating more than five proposals, the final plan was delivered to Hathaway's desk one day before the October, 2000 deadline. "We had public hearing after public hearing, and design after design, and it all happened in 90 days," says Doore. "And it was because people cooperated."

Not everybody in Corinna is as enamored of the new road, however. Alan Brown, owner of the Village Square General Store & Restaurant, says he'd rather have Main Street back the way it was. That said, he admits that he's prepared to live with the new Route 7 running through town. After all, the new road offers plenty of access to Brown's store, which sits just over the river, off Route 7.

At midday on a recent Wednesday in April, more than two dozen cars were parked in neat rows in Village Square's large dirt parking lot. The lunch rush was in full effect inside the building ˆ— the town's original Odd Fellow's Hall, which was jacked up from its original spot on Main Street, put on wheels and rolled to its new location in 2000 during the cleanup. (For more on moving the Odd Fellow's Hall, see "Buildings in motion," page 28.)

A longtime Corinna resident who now lives in Dexter, Brown says the business has exceeded his expectations. "We were full from the day we opened," he says of the grocery store and restaurant, which opened in early 2005 and employs roughly 20 workers. "I thought this town was dead, but there's a little life in it."

Many townspeople and local officials are hoping there's a lot more life in Corinna. They bank on the reuse plan, which the town drew up in 2002, being the blueprint for the town's revitalization. The plan, which was funded by an $82,500 federal reuse grant from the EPA, included strict zoning and architectural guidelines, including specifications for construction materials (no concrete block buildings) and architecture (gothic style, says Mullis).

Those regulations were intended to produce buildings that would complement Corinna's downtown architectural centerpiece, the Stewart Free Library. The well-maintained building, built by Levi M. Stewart in the late 1800s, houses the town's administrative offices as well the town library and Stewart's personal library, which librarian Cindy Jennings says is considered the best collection of Civil War tomes in New England. "If we were going to rebuild the community, if we were going to convince federal and other agencies to invest money in our community, then we had to have these ordinances," says Mullis. "If we didn't put it in place, we wouldn't get that money. And we couldn't have done it ourselves."

The town, however, still faces the challenge of actually filling the now-empty downtown area with buildings. Mullis says the town was left with about 25 acres of "beautiful" land on the banks of the Sebasticook, but also acknowledges that Corundel Commons, the senior housing facility perched on the man-made hill, is the only new development in the downtown area. Whether new buildings follow in that facility's footsteps remains to be seen. Alan Brown, for one, isn't sure what the town will look like 10 years down the road. He knows, however, that Corinna probably won't ever look like it used to. "I don't know if you can ever replace what we had here," says Brown. "Little by little, we lost everything. But now, we kind of have to make our own economy."