Frederick Hutchinson Center in Belfast, a building previously used by the University of Maine for classes that served a mix of undergraduate and non-traditional students. (Courtesy of Samantha Warren/ UMaine System)
The University of Maine will not sell an unused former midcoast educational hub to a church as previously planned.
The system’s decision to sell the Frederick Hutchinson Center in Belfast to Calvary Chapel Belfast, part of a nationwide association of evangelical churches, drew criticism from other community organizations that bid for the center. Those groups appealed the decision to Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Ryan Low. After reviewing one of those appeals, the system found that the scoring criteria for the sale should have considered the entire value of the proposals and not just the purchase price.
Hutchinson Center will be sold to church despite community objections, UMaine says
That means the sale process for the center will restart. Whether the system will solicit a new round of proposals, or list the center with a commercial broker, remains to be seen. However, the group behind the successful appeal, a joint collaboration between the Future of Hutchinson Center Steering Committee and Waterfall Arts, will not automatically receive the contract, according to Samantha Warren, spokesperson for the system.
The Hutchinson Center once served thousands of traditional and nontraditional students in the midcoast region, and also provided conference and meeting spaces for the community. The center also hosts a connectivity hub, which provides network connectivity for numerous public schools and libraries in the Belfast, Camden and Rockland area.
The UMaine System had initially anticipated moving the internet hub as part of the sale, according to the request for innovative proposals the university put out last year. However, the Future of Hutchinson Center group’s proposal would allow the hub to remain at the center, which Low said was an added benefit the system did not originally consider in its review of the proposals
“As Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration, I uniquely appreciate that the avoidance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses presents clear financial and operational benefits that are decidedly in the best interests of the System,” Low said in his response to the group’s appeal. “And thus should have been valued in the criteria by which all proposals were scored.”
Future of Hutchinson Center spokesperson Shane Flynn said the group remains interested in purchasing the center and continuing to use it for education programming partnering with local organizations, including an added interest in arts education, as evidenced by its partnership with Waterfall Arts.
However, the university’s decision to not sell to the church was the right one, Flynn said.
“We think that the process was not correct, and it appears that he agrees with that,” he said. “Those who care so much about the Hutchinson Center are going to feel that eventually someone at the university has listened, and we are very heartened by that.”
Multiple groups raised issues with how the university system went about determining and evaluating the sale criteria even before it announced the original sale to Calvary Chapel. However, Low said that while “the university’s process had full transparency and integrity and adhered to long-standing public procurement policies,” the evaluation criteria did not allow the system to consider the value of keeping the network hub in place.
“Please know that my final decision is specific to a single deficiency of the evaluation criteria and is not a reflection on the merits of the proposals submitted by any respondent or any other aspect of the university’s process,” he said in his response to the appeal.
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