The long-vacant International Woolen Mill. Photo: City of Sanford
By Renée Morin
The city has taken a step toward addressing significant public safety concerns posed by people breaking into the International Woolen Mill complex downtown. At its meeting on Tuesday, the City Council designated 10 International Drive as an abandoned property.
This designation gives the city greater power to work on problems with the property without getting approval of the owner.
The defunct Regco Inc., owner of the property, has been largely unresponsive to the city’s communications up to this point, said City Manager Steven Buck. He said that in recent years the city has had issues with people trespassing and entering the building. Until now, police couldn’t enforce criminal trespass laws on the property because the owner only recently gave permission to enforce them.
The mill hasn’t been used since 2000, said Deputy Mayor Maura Herlihy. A 2020 structural assessment found safety issues with the floors, roof, and retaining walls, making the building unsafe to enter. Buck said the owner has no plans to secure or rehabilitate it.
The Police Department has 35 pages worth of phone calls logged specifically involving the property. Chief Code Enforcement Officer Jamie Cole said efforts to secure the building, such as welding the doors, have failed, and that the building is currently unsecured.
“It is too large a complex,” said Buck. “The minute you secure one spot they bust in and break into another, and obviously the property owner of record makes no attempt to secure the building, because they’re not occupying or using the building for any purpose at all.”
He said that the city spent over $25,000 in the past year trying to close the area, and that arrests of trespassers have not resulted in prosecutions. Several fires have been extinguished in the building.
“If this building ever gets to a point of them not being able to get there in time, it’s an uncontrollable site. It will make [the] Stenton Trust [Mill Fire] look like child’s play,” said Buck. In addition to the safety concerns, Buck also said that people use the property as a dumping ground. A few weeks ago, the city removed 20 cubic yards of trash from the site.
In 2023, the city applied for and later received a federal $5 million grant to remediate and demolish the building’s attached boiler house, the back wall of which was the retaining wall to Pioneer Street.
The property is tax delinquent, Buck said. Not wanting to assume the environmental cleanup and insurance costs, the city has so far refrained from foreclosure.
The city is working with the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority to acquire and tear down the buildings without assuming significant debt. Buck estimates the process will likely take at least 18 months and cost tens of millions of dollars.
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