Bangor’s recent renaissance is the result of following its Comprehensive Plan, a road map created by the city council and periodically updated.  This plan, originally created in the 1980’s, called for the city to clean up and develop its waterfront, a diamond-in-the-rough that needed polishing after over 200 years of primarily industrial and maritime use.

Old rail beds were torn up and dilapidated buildings torn down to make way for a beautiful new waterfront park, actions which eventually led to the selection of Bangor as the site for the North American Folk Festival for three straight years from 2002 to 2004.  So successful were those festivals in attracting artists and musicians as well as Mainers and tourists alike that Bangor decided to create a folk festival of its own. 2005 saw the debut of the equally-successful American Folk Festival to Bangor, and the 2006 festival that took place August 25 - 27 set attendance records.

Another factor in the upswing of Bangor’s fortunes is the new “Racino” (so named because it’s essentially a casino but located on the grounds of a horseracing track) that opened in 2005, generating new jobs in the area and leading to more visitors – and thus more dollars for the local economy.

Brewer, meanwhile, was busy building an infrastructure to lure companies in the bio-technology and healthcare sectors. The result was the 72-acre Brewer Professional Center, which opened in the spring of 2004 in what is now Brewer’s tallest building. It is already home to Eastern Maine Health Systems (EMHS), owner of EMMC, the largest hospital in Maine north of Portland.

The good news for Brewer doesn’t stop there. Pending state approval, a second building will go up that will house EMMC’s planned $42 million Cancer Care Center as well as the newly created Maine Institute for Human Genetics and Health, a joint venture between EMHS, the University of Maine and Bar Harbor-based Jackson Laboratory.  In August 2006, Neimann Capital LLC was selected by the city to clean up, restore and turn the now-closed Eastern Fine Paper Mill into a mixed-use complex of apartments, shops and a marina. The North Carolina-based developer has other ties to Maine, including partnership in projects to refurbish the Kennebec Aresenal in Augusta and the C.F. Hathaway Company shirt mill in Waterville, another town spotlighted in the Hometown Economies series. And in a timely development that bodes well for the education of its future workforce, undergraduate and graduate programs in biomedical science are being established at the University of Maine.