Former Gouldsboro sardine cannery sells for $975K at auction
Two Schoodic-area businessmen with a background in the building trades were the winning bidders Thursday morning in an auction of a defunct seafood processing plant in Gouldsboro.
Tim Ring, founder of Ring Paving, and Kevin Barbee of Barbee Construction won the auction for the sprawling former sardine cannery with a bid of $975,000.
Ring, a current partner in K&T Rentals, said after the auction that he and Barbee did not have specific plans for the building. They view it as an investment property and don’t yet know how it will be used, he said.
“I really have no idea,” Ring said with a chuckle. “Hopefully something will open up.”
Gouldsboro resident Becky O’Keefe said after the auction that she was very excited that local businessmen bought the property and are open to maintaining it as working waterfront.
“This is the best outcome I could ever hope for,” O’Keefe said.
Eve Wilkinson, town manager for Gouldsboro, said the town is quite happy that the property has a new owner who wants to breathe life back into the building.
“”I’m so excited I can’t stand it,” she said. “We’ve all been hoping someone will get it going again.”
The 100,000-square-foot facility, which originally was built in the early 1900s as a sardine cannery, has been expanded and modified over the years, each time with a single owner who used it to process seafood. After Bumblebee Foods closed the sardine operation down in 2010, it was revived as a lobster processing plant, first by Live Lobster and then by Maine Fair Trade Lobster.
The latest owner, before Thursday’s auction, was American Aquafarms, which said it wanted to use the plant to process salmon that it planned to farm in Frenchman Bay. That proposal met stiff opposition from area residents, however. The company’s application to Maine Department of Marine Resources ultimately was rejected because the firm failed to provide sufficient information about where it would obtain the salmon eggs it intended to cultivate in the bay.
In March, American Aquafarms signed ownership of the 100,000-square-foot building to its CEO, Keith Decker as collateral for a loan he had made to the company, company officials said. Two months later, Decker resigned as CEO and decided to auction off the property.