Van Buren, Maine, had a problem no town wants: it owned more than half of its downtown buildings through tax acquisition. When Luke Dyer became town manager after a long career in law enforcement, he was facing vacant storefronts, deteriorating buildings, flood-damaged land, and a downtown that had lost traffic after the port of entry moved away from Main Street. In this episode, Dyer shares how Van Buren began putting buildings back into productive use, turning an underused ice rink into pickleball courts, growing trees for Main Street in a community greenhouse, and converting its old town office into a business incubator.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. If you know anything about the Strong Towns process, you know that it starts with a very simple step: taking the time to notice your town, notice its challenges, notice opportunities for making it a more resilient place, and then there's three other steps to the official Strong Towns process, but I think there's one part of that process that's not formalized in writing, and it's more of an internal process, it's more a process of seeing yourself as someone who can contribute to those solutions, even if it means stepping into a role you've never had before. It's a step where you say, not only do I see my town and I see these challenges, but I also see in myself that perhaps I have the capacity to do something about it.
It's a willingness to apply your strengths and talents to tackle the challenges you see. this is the story we're going to be hearing today. We're going to be hearing a story from an individual who saw an opportunity and stepped into a role, even though he had no formal training for it. Today, I'm joined by Luke Dyer, the town manager in Van Buren, Maine. Mr. Dyer is a graduate of the University of Maine at Fort Kent and dedicated over 30 years to a career in law enforcement before retiring as Van Buren's interim chief in 2021 transitioning into municipal leadership, which he will tell us the story behind that. He became the town's manager in 2022 where he has focused on revitalizing the community through innovative projects, focusing really on incremental development and human-centered design.
2024 he was honored as a recipient of the Maine Downtown Center's William F. King Downtown Champion Award, which I think is just a fantastic name for an award, and in 2025 he received the annual Rising Star Award by the Maine Town and City Managers Association that recognizes leadership as a manager with less than five years of experience. So I'm really excited to bring you this conversation. I've had a chance to speak with Mr. Dyer outside of recording, and I know that he has so many interesting insights to share with us. Mr. Dyer, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Thank you.
as I've already mentioned in your introduction, you did not start off in public administration as a career. You told me you didn't even set, you hadn't studied economic development or real estate or anything like that, but yet here you are as a town manager, and you've been tackling some challenges in those domains, so it's quite a journey, and I would love it if you could tell us some of that story.
Sure, so I actually went to college for business and was studying business development and accounting, and after three years at university, I experienced a tragedy in my neighborhood from my hometown, and decided to change careers. I thought I could offer more to the world as a police officer, and so I became a police officer, and was hired in a small town called Madawaska, which is north of us here, still in Maine, still on the Canadian border.
after 15 years in Madawaska, I ended up moving to Van Buren and took on the role as a patrol sergeant here, and then retired as the interim chief back in 2021 and at that time was offered a position as the deputy town manager, which I did for about a year, just learning the accounting and the books of the town, and where the money came and went, and then transitioned into the manager's role in 2022 where I still am the manager.
I suspect not everybody experiencing a similar trajectory would respond in the same way, so I want to slow down and go back through the story, and I want to understand a little bit more about your thought process as you especially the transition from your service as a law enforcement and law enforcement to public administration. Can you pause, frame a little bit, and tell me, what was going through your mind when these conversations start coming up, when you've been approached to serve in this way, how did you frame it in such a way that it was something you could see yourself doing, even though this was technically not the, your career, your professional space?
Yeah, so I honestly went into it a little bit blind, because I didn't realize how much economic development was going to be involved with being the manager for the town in a small town of 2,200 people, though you wear a lot of hats when you're the manager and economic development is one of them, and I had been patrolling the streets of the town for so long and I was personally watching it decline and I saw, a period where there was a business open in every storefront to a period where there were hardly any businesses open in any storefronts, and I felt like I had something to offer that I might be able to help put that back together, Several times I walked out onto Main Street and stood on the sidewalk and looked up and down and said, How do you fix this mess? can I fix this mess? Do I have what it takes to fix this?
I just decided to approach it, one bite out of the apple at a time, like not get overwhelmed, just like start working on one thing at a time, something that has great value with a great cost benefit ratio that had more benefit than cost, so it did, doesn't not a lot of the skills from law enforcement transition over to economic development or being a town manager, but I think part of part of the transition, though, was that I had worked successfully in the town and the people had a level of trust for me that they may not have had in anybody else, and it made it easier to transition over into this role.
How did you think about the knowledge gap? what was your mind? Because I feel like that would be something that wouldn't.. I definitely would be intimidated, but I'd be "Oh, whoa, let me go to school first, I can learn everything I need to know to do this. That did not stop you. Can you explain why?
Yeah, I think I've been a lifelong learner, and one thing I do know about myself is that if I want to learn something I can learn it, and I think everybody has that skill, but I don't think everybody is capable of identifying that or accepting that in themselves, but I knew that if I set my mind to learning something, I could learn it, and learning how to navigate, the difficulties of the hand that I was, being presented with to redevelop the town and try to bring the town back to life. I felt like studying and researching and learning whatever I could would be valuable. The one thing I knew is that, and I know about myself, I don't have all the answers, but a quality that I do have is that I'm not afraid to pick up the phone and call the people that do have the answers. I knew that other communities had done this type of revitalization.
I just had to find those communities where we're not going to reinvent the wheel here, but if I could take a spoke from other wheels and build our own new wheel, that we would be successful, so I think just recognizing that.
Do you have a story that encapsulates that are like a memory? I'm just curious if there's a moment that, like a good example of that, just reaching out to another town and saying, "Hey, this is what we're dealing with, and being able to learn from what they had done.
Yeah, so Ann Ball, who is the head of the Maine Downtown Center, I kept being given her name as a person to reach out to, like everybody I talked to said, "You got to talk to Ann Ball, you got to talk to Ann Ball. This is what Anne Ball does, and I finally got a chance to talk to Ann, and in my discussion with her, she offered to come up to Van Buren and sit down with me and bring a couple other state officials to just sit down and chat about, what circumstance we were in and how we could remedy it.
The town of Van Buren owned over half of its downtown buildings because they were tax acquired, and that's pretty scary, like it's a scary thing to enter into, and that was one of those situations where I knew that I didn't have all the answers, but somebody did, somebody in rural America had the answers, and using some of the skills and processes of the Main Street America dialogue, I think, helped me move some of that forward, and then also, other incremental things that come from Strong Towns.
Yeah, so tell us a little bit about Van Buren. I've had the privilege of visiting Maine. I've never been to your specific towns. I'd love to hear a little bit more about it, and maybe if you can share some of the economic context, like what was going on when you were stepping into this role, maybe you can tell us the story of that a bit.
Yeah, so Van Buren, in the 50s, was a very vibrant town. We had every storefront was full, it was very active, there was an Air Force base, not far from us, and so there were a lot of downtown bars, so there was a lot of nightlife on the weekends. We're right on the Canadian border. I actually can look out the window right now and see Canada off outside of my window, and so a lot of Canadians were coming here as well to either shop, buy gasoline, because it's cheaper here, just the shopping and the bar experience, so there was a lot of activity happening here in the 80s, Loring Air Force Base left here, and that left a pretty severe population decline all across our county, and it really. Hindered us here in Van Buren. However, we stayed pretty alive.
We still had pretty good amount of business in 2008 We had a major flood that happened as a result of the ice jams that jammed the Saint John River, which is the international boundary between the US and Canada, and it ended up flooding out parts of our town. One of the victims of that flood was the Customs and Immigration building that you have to check in at the port of entry when you come back and forth from Canada, and so in the rebuild of that building, when they navigated rebuilding it, they moved the entrance of the International Bridge from our main street, about an eighth of a mile, and it literally killed the downtown. The traffic that typically comes to or from Canada no longer had to come through downtown Van Buren, even though it only moved about an eighth of a mile, it had a significant impact.
on the downtown, and so little by little, businesses were closing, another business would close, another business would close, and it pretty much left the downtown pretty desolate.
So that kick started this real estate problem you hinted at this earlier, I can't remember the exact phrase you used, but basically these property owners are not able to keep their property, or they fall behind on taxes, so the town has to come in, and how do you explain the process? Maybe you should do it instead of me, because I clearly can't articulate it very well, but set the stage for us a little bit on the real estate side, as a result of this economic decline.
Yep, so in 2022 the town of Van Buren owned over half its downtown buildings due to tax acquisition, which means they didn't pay their taxes for three years, and after three years of liens, then the properties become foreclosed on by the town, because the taxes were not paid, and so a lot of these buildings are left unheated, which in Northern Maine is a disaster.
you can't, our buildings need to be heated, they need to have heat in the winter, it gets to be 20 degrees below zero here, and you absolutely have to have heat and inactivity in these buildings to keep them alive, and after three years, many of these buildings suffered severe deterioration, and we had to do some demo on some of them, maybe to take them down, others through other processes, we were able to save the buildings and get them in the hands of other people that are redeveloping them, and that's that's major, like you can't demo every building in town, you can't create more missing teeth in your downtown, and our town is not unlike other rural communities that the buildings are pressed right up against each other, one after the other, and so it shows when you lose a building, it shows it hurts.
having tax acquired all these buildings, and then starting to navigate getting them back into usable life, definitely is.. it was a challenge. It scared me right from the get-go. how do you do this?
let's talk about that. As you're stepping into this role, looking at this situation, can you map out for us some of the steps you took? Or maybe before we do steps, let's talk about frameworks. how did you learn to frame? How did you frame the problem? then we can maybe talk about some specific steps you took.
in 2022 when I became the manager, I kept standing out on Main Street, looking up and down Main Street, and there was a building, or is a building, across the street from the Old Town office that is a theater called the Gaiety Theater, and it is a monster of a building. It is huge, and I kept thinking, if we tax acquire that building, how are we going to navigate that building, it is a monster, and little by little, as I spent time going out and just looking up and down on Main Street, I noticed that the building was starting to get revitalized.
There were two brothers, very ambitious, that started, doing a new facade on the building and trying to bring the building back to life as a movie theater, and I thought, if two people, if two ambitious people could do that in that building, what if I had 50 people, what if I could build an army of people that were interested in revitalizing, and that gave me the inspiration to start working on other projects, not that big, obviously, but other projects, like two people could do this. What could I do with more?
That's a really great way to put it, because I think so often it's really hard to peel your eyes away from the big problem that needs a big solution, and you can get stuck. It's almost like problem paralle. Says where it's too big, your mind actually can't articulate to itself the step you should take. if you can shrink the problem until your mind can start making connections, then that's that's where you should start.
I actually read an old article from Sean Cowan's old one last night, actually, I was, doing what I do in my free time sometimes, and looking at articles from Strong Towns, and there is this article about something similar, where if you feel like you're getting stuck, he had these four rocks stacked on each other, and it was talking about when you're trying to create change in your community, oftentimes when you're getting stuck, it's because you're focusing on the top rock, which is the city level, and so each of those stones is labeled differently. There's city level, then there's neighborhood level, then there's street level, then there's the U level at the bottom, and they're all stuck on top of the other.
Basically, the point of the article was, if you're getting stuck, it's probably because you're at the wrong level, so you need to go down one and just keep going down until your energy comes back, even if that means going all the way back down to yourself, and like focusing on education, and getting inspired, and sorting out your strengths, whatever that looks and then from there climb back up, start at your street level, and then start at the neighborhood, and then as you're rebuilding your energy, move back up to the bigger problems you're trying to challenge. So it sounds like you had a similar epiphany of, well, if we maybe we can't fix everything, but why don't we find what we could fix with a small group of people, and then maybe start building a fly ball from there. What did that look like?
Maybe you can you tell us some stories about how did you start putting together this incremental energy in your town?
So I had gotten a grant through the Citizens Institute on Rural Design, which was part of the National Endowment for the Arts, and it was a cohort program about human-centered design, something I had never known anything about before, but the focus of that cohort was to learn how to do, how to identify your assets, and then improve those assets with a low cost, and something that centered around people. I started looking around at all the assets we had in the town. One of the assets that we had was an ice rink that is used as a, as a hockey rink in the winter, well, some winters we get three months out of use out of it, and other winters we only get two months of use out of it, but it sits vacant nine or 10 months out of the year.
So I had been learning about pickleball, and that it being the fastest growing sport in the country, and so I thought, what we could build pickleball courts in that ice rink, and then get use out of it for the other months that it's not being used. I approached our town council and started talking to them about that process. I actually reached out to a tennis court company to get us a quote to do the painting and the creation of the pickleball courts, that quotation was over $100,000 so I knew that was out of the question. But while I was looking at it, I thought, what, we don't need $100,000 pickleball court, we can do this ourselves. so I contacted a paint company, and that does this type of sells this type of paint.
I ended up somehow talking to the owner, and the owner said, "Yes, Luke, you guys can do this yourselves, like this is not miracle work, you can do this. so I put out a message in town, said, "I need some volunteers to help me paint these pickleball courts. I went to our recreation director, I said, "We're going to paint pickleball courts at the wreck in the ice rink. He says, "Who's we? I said, "Me and you and anybody else that I can find that's willing to help us. But we're going to do this. One of our, one of the guys who works for Public Works for us on the weekends, does foundation work with his dad. Foundation people do perfect lines, like they know how to do perfect lines, so I knew I had somebody to help us courts, so I had somebody to help line out the court.
then we got a bunch of volunteers, we got some squeegees, and we got some rollers, and we made two pickleball courts. then we took a couple people from town that had been playing pickleball in other towns, and we asked them to give lessons to our citizens about how to play pickleball, and that court and that space today has about 40 different players. At this point, is one of the most active spaces in our town. It cost us just over $5,000 to make those courts, and that was one of those low-cost improvements that had huge value, and after I learned the secret sauce of redevelopment after that, which is when you connect people together that don't normally connect with each other, they're either from different social circles or just have. Of jobs that don't ever cross paths, or they just never cross each other's paths.
Suddenly, I had a bunch of people, up to 40 people that were in that situation, but together they started making magic playing pickleball together, and some of them wanted to help with the redevelopment of that recreation department area, and some of them were business owners, so they made contributions as a business, but we raised $18,000 to do other development at the rec department.
So this is sparking a bunch of questions and observations in my head. So first I want to ask you were the, you were the town manager at this position at this point, so you were able to come at these challenges from a place of influence, and to use the word lightly, like power, rather than being, just like a normal citizen who's I really would love pickleball, so very different process, but still, I would love to know any thoughts you can share about how did you generate buy-in for an incremental improvement like that costs $5,000 We're able to get the volunteers together. How are you able to generate buy-in from, the council or from, the other city departments to be open to, oh, sure, it's $5,000 we can do this ourselves, and we can activate this asset in a new way.
I would love to hear any thoughts you have on that, because I know that sometimes people get stuck with loving incrementalism and loving tactical interventions and loving like small things, but they often feel stuck because they're well, I don't know how to convince our city to try this approach to try doing just a small improvement, and then let's do another small improvement. I would just.. I would love to hear how you.. what thoughts you have on that.
Yeah, so one of the first conversations I had with our town council after I was appointed the manager was that I'm not a mathematician, but I know that if you take left-hand turns for 20 years, you're eventually going to keep ending up in the same place, and that's what was happening with us. They kept doing the same things over and over and over again, and the town was ending up right in the same place, and so I suggested we need to start taking some right-hand turns. We have to start trying other things. We are not going to be the same town we were in the 1950s or the 1970s or the 1980s We have to re-envision what our town can be, and we have to try different things, and this is an opportunity to try something different.
One thing we were looking for a festival or some an event that would draw people to town, and so when I was talking about the pickleball courts, that was one of the conversations, like we could have pickleball tournament, we could start drawing people in to the town for this tournament, and one of the selectmen said, "Oh my god, look, do you really want people to go to the wreck building? It's, it's really bad, it's in bad shape. I said, "That's why we need to bring people to that building, because the people of our community need to see how bad it is. They've been driving past it for 50 years. We need to get people to come in and see how embarrassing it is. I have a really good town council, like I'm really lucky. These are people that have a vision.
Every project that we're doing is a long game, we're playing the long game, and we're not trying to do a quick fix to something that won't last, quick fixes don't last. We wanted to do something that was a long-term solution, and so this was one of the first projects. Interestingly enough, it brought in a lot of volunteers, so we ended up with about eight to 10 people that helped us develop these courts, and then suddenly, because of my theory, everybody wants to be on a winning team. These people started helping with other volunteers and things in our community, so it pulled together a little pool of volunteers and started building up that pool of people that I said, "What could I do if I had 50 people when I saw what two people could do?
that's the other thing I was thinking about, when you bring people together to solve one small thing, you just never know how that's going to spark more ideas or more conversations or more observations, so then you then the people start to notice the rec center, and they have all that momentum and energy and positive vibes from solving one problem, and they're just amped up to start solving another problem, because they're look what I can do, which is great, and I think it's also really helpful to hear the reminder of focusing on assets rather than problems first, because I think I'm definitely guilty of this while I like drive around my town, and I can keep a running list of all the things that are annoying me at any given minute, and even I think there's even an art to looking at something like a strode and being able to talk about it like an asset that just needs to be like fully brought online, it's like instead of being like this strode is terrible and ugly and dangerous, it's more like hey, this is a high traffic area with lots of popular bits.
says, How about we make it safer, just like a little thought experiment for myself. Okay, so you start off with the pickleball, and then you start working on the rec center. If you have to map out what the next, what would you say, like the next process, or how did you, how did you invest that momentum next from there,
so grant funding is funny, like you don't always get the grants in the order of which you want things to happen, as best I can explain it, but I really set on a mission to apply for every grant I possibly could to try to make some changes, and one of the programs we got involved with was Maine Department of Transportation's Village Partnership Initiative, which is to redevelop our entire downtown with new sidewalks, new streetscapes, new lights, and then through that process we were flying a drone, and I, and there was a small cul-de-sac neighborhood in our central downtown, right in the central downtown village that got washed out in that flood in 2008 It had three homes and two garages down there, and the property was completely lost to the flood, so all the houses were removed, and the land was eventually deeded back to the town of Van Buren as a FEMA deed with conditions, and while the DOT was here, and we were talking about the Village Partnership Initiative, one of the landscape architects said, "Hey, Luke, what is this big open space?
What is it? What's it going to be used for? I said, 'I really have no idea. I know it was lost in the flood, and I know there's a FEMA deed, but I was previously told we could do nothing with it, but I ended up going back and looking at the deed myself, and discovered, you can make a park there's a lot of different things we could do there, and so I started looking to redevelop it as a park, and then I had visited my daughter, my daughter lives in Putney, Vermont, it's a little artsy town in Vermont. It's just amazing, about 800 people. my daughter introduced me to the community garden idea.
She had a community garden in downtown Putney, and while I was there, looking at her garden, and I was looking around at the other gardeners there, I recognized that my 32 year old daughter was about half the age of everybody else in the garden, and I said, Christine, are you the youngest person in this garden? she's oh God, yes, Dad, by half for sure. I thought, that space would make a beautiful community garden, I could apply for a grant for that, and it helps solve several issues in our community, which some aged loneliness. Maine is the oldest state in the country. Aroostook County that I live in has an older population than the average of the state of Maine, and Van Buren is even older than that.
we have an aged population here, so I thought it would, this garden project might help with aged loneliness, I'll be obviously help with food security, it would also help with some storm water runoff that we were having issues with from the flood, so I thought, this might be a great project, and so I applied for a grant through the Maine Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. It has a program called the Community Action Grant, which is part of the Community Resilience Project. I was able to apply for a grant and got $47,000 to build the community garden, and we were able to allow 15 different families to have garden spaces in the garden.
We have two beautiful greenhouses, so part of the part of the village partnership initiative had a lot of tree canopy that would be planted on our main street, so we decided to use one of those greenhouses to grow our own canopy, so the community is part of the redevelopment of that canopy, we're growing the trees to go there, and then the community garden space has now expanded to, we have over 20 gardeners in there now, and it is doing exactly what I hoped it's doing, would do. It's bringing different generations of people together to enjoy gardening, and I heard a joke in a, in a webinar one time that gardening is the slowest form of performance art.
Okay, that's true. It is. Yeah,
so I thought it, I thought it'd be a great, and we really have focused a lot on some art projects in our town too, for beautification, and so. So it just seemed like a great project.
It's funny you mentioned that, because I'm going to be honest, I've always been like a little squinty eyed when people talk about art as like a form of revitalization, but I've been driving around where I live in Waco, Texas, and I don't know what happened, but our utility boxes are starting to be painted. I keep, they keep popping up. Maybe I'm just been so immersed in mom life that I haven't seen them, and I'm noticing it for the first time, but it's, it's convinced me. Because when you're at a stoplight and you turn over and there's butterflies on a utility box, it makes a world of a difference when you're sitting there for 38 seconds waiting for the light to turn green, so I am, I'm using.. I've never been like anti art, I just have always been a little suspicious when it's a use of public money, but I.. I'm starting to..
I'm starting to understand like the impact that can have.
Those some of the research that I did before we started a lot of our revitalization was about, what other communities used for steps to do the revitalization, and every community that revitalized from the same state that we were in, art was some element of that revitalization, so it may not be the gigantic thing that creates all the revitalization, but it is an element of a revitalization that can't be ignored. It creates, it just makes people happy, like people love it. It gives people, it creates well-being, and people enjoy art. Well, I think it
inspires people to want to be part of something, because it just makes the place feel, I think it can just be like it can kickstart a different energy, right, and can inspire people in a way, so I don't know that it would be let's rely on murals to fix, truly systemic bad money management problems. Maybe that's why I have a hesitation for it, because I've seen cities gravitate so much to the arts that they don't want to deal with actual problems, oh, the way you're spending your money, or you're overspending on infrastructure, or, it's well, you can't use art as a band aid for those things, but you can definitely use public art as a way to spark more participation, I think, and more buy-in, and maybe more hope about the town or your city in general.
I want to ask you, so we had talked about this real estate challenge at the beginning, can you close that loop for us? what were some of the strategies you took to get those, some of those buildings back online, as yet mentioned, they have been tax acquisition, I think, is the phrase. Can you, can you explain that for people who why is that a liability for a town to have that much real estate, like the town owning that much real estate? then can you share about some of the steps you've taken to turn the tide, if you'll excuse my pun.
Yep, the last thing a town wants is to own downtown real estate. That's the last thing we want, because we're not collecting any tax dollars off of it, so it has, essentially zero value. So you want to make sure that you're getting these tax-acquired properties back into the public for use, especially in a downtown in your downtown business district, and many of these, Van Buren is no different than other places across the country, rural America. A lot of these, a lot of our business district also has buildings, have apartments upstairs, and so once you tax acquire these buildings, those apartments are vacant, everything in them is vacant, and if they sit too long, then they require hundreds of thousands of dollars of renovation.
if you want to bring in a new business, let's say somebody wants to start a new business, it's a, it's a breakout business, they don't have a lot of money. They most certainly don't have $250,000 to do a building renovation before they even start expending money on the development of their business. So we wanted to make sure that we were getting these properties back out into public use. So obviously some of them we did have to demo. It's unfortunate, but we had no choice. One of those buildings was called Forever The Yacht Club, and it was a, it was a motel hotel dance club bar that was famous and popular here for years. We ended up having to demo that building, it was just too far gone to save, but now we are redeveloping that space with a new building.
It'll be a coffee shop that it's going to go there, and so sometimes the community has to make an investment to bring people back into the community. We will end up selling that building to the new establishment that's going there, but so.
Sometimes it's, on the back of the municipality to make the investment to make, to make that happen, and then we had another building that, although not, did not qualify for the National Historic Registry, was a building built in 1901 that had been tax acquired, and the people had no family, the lady that owned it and passed away had no family, and after three years we acquired that building and wanted to do something with it, and it needed immediate remediation, because again, northern Maine, lots of snow, lots of melt, lots of cold, and so I got the first lightning grant that was issued by an organization in Maine called the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank, which is a new entity, only a couple of years old, and they were able to help us remediate the building, put a new roof on it, secure the building, so that we could, redevelop it, when they do something like that, they want you eventually to turn that building over to a nonprofit organization.
So we had already started testing the waters in the art world to see if people would be interested in learning art and culture in our community, and we're holding some art classes through a grant that I've gotten through the AARP, and we decided to redevelop that building into the Acadian Arts Center, so our population of people here that are of French descent are Acadians from Canadian culture, our cousins are Cajuns from Louisiana, but we are, we are the Acadians here, and so redeveloping that building, I got several funding sources to redevelop that building. It's, it's underway now, and it'll become the Acadian Arts Center. So that made a new use for that building.
We also had some private investments, so when you start investing in your infrastructure, it starts to, spread, and we had a young couple that came in and bought a building and started to renovate the building, but realized it was way too much, too far gone to renovate.
They ended up tearing the building down and built a brand new building on Main Street, and they opened it into a kolache shop called Northern Maine Kolache Company, which is a real popular coffee and Kolache destination in our town, and just, step by step, going through these properties and trying to get them back into public sector and out of the hands of the community. We no longer own any of the buildings on Main Street. We've been able to get them into the hands of private owners that are innovating them now,
can you tell me worth it? Was there a strategy to finding the right owners and working with them on tackling the cost of getting them back online? what were some of the ways that you were able to attract that investment, but at the same time, not attract like the bad investment, if when you have buildings that are in that bad repair and you need to offload that liability, you can also attract individuals who are in it for other motivations and reasons, and you don't want a lot of your town real estate to be being used more opportunist, or what's the word, we're both just forgetting words today, scammers,
scammers,
but also it'll come to me in a minute, but yeah, I just, how did you navigate that? How did you find the right partners, and what were some of the ways that you were able to strategically navigate the cost of bringing those buildings back online,
so that is exactly one of the left-hand turns the town kept taking, so they would tax acquire a building and then sell it for what it was owed in taxes and sewer, or they wouldn't even sell it for that value, they'd sell it for 100 bucks, and I can tell you what you get when you sell a building for 100 bucks, you get a building owner that can afford 100 bucks, and so we ended up reacquiring, and so I ended up going to the council after we tax acquired a 23-apartment building, my first week as the manager, that was occupied, and I went back to the town and said, we can't do this anymore, we have to stop selling these for 100 bucks, or what's owed in taxes and sewer, and through the pandemic, we had tax acquired a house, like a residential house off of Main Street that we sold to an owner for 4000 something dollars, he had it under contract the next week for $99,000 So I'm why are we doing this?
What on earth are we doing? We got to stop doing this. We need to sell these buildings for value. Because if you sell them for value, you're going to have a better quality investor, somebody that wants to do something with these buildings, they're not going to cough up 25, 30 or 40 $50,000 for something they're not going to put investment into, it's not going to happen, and so that's what we started doing, we started parting with these buildings for their value, and then we had investors that were taking control of these buildings and redeveloping them for other business, or to get more to get the apartments filled up with people, so they can get a return on their investment,
so there must have been market appetite for, because I'm just thinking through, like what was the story that inspired them to buy in to the town, and that to, invest in the town in that way, because, as you mentioned, the town is aging, you have a large aging population, you do have a liability with the proximity to the river, you've had this, the customs building moved out of downtown, so how did you, can you tell me a little bit about what was the value proposition, is the way that they would put it in the business world that inspired this type of investment at a level that you knew was more trustworthy than I think the word I was looking for earlier was speculative behaviors, people buying and sitting and hoping to flip, to flip that behavior. What was standing out to you
well. During COVID, Maine was considered one of the safest states in the country, with one of the lowest volumes of COVID 19, and a lot of people were moving to our area because of that, and so we had a one developer that bought that 23-apartment complex, and then he came to Van Buren, and was interested in some of the other buildings that he started buying them up and started renovating them, and getting them back into public use, like he saw value in these buildings where no one else did, and he was buying them for value, and has been renovating them. He owns a lot of them. I think he's 34 years old.
Oh, wow, which is
amazing. It's fantastic. Yeah, so he has bought up a lot of apartments and done a lot of, reinvestment in our community, which is excellent. And, again, other people see that and they start looking at some of these properties and they think, what, I can do that too. he did it. I can do this too. so we had more tax transfer documents, which is what happens when you buy a house. There's a tax transfer from one owner to another.
We had more tax transfer documents done in a three year period of time than had been done in all 15 years previously combined, so people were buying our houses left and right, and they were buying them, the values of our houses are much different here than they are in other parts of the country, some of our homes in another community not far from us would probably be worth $600,000 in our town values would be 150 to 200,000 so people were selling their homes during the COVID pandemic in, let's say, Connecticut or Massachusetts for $600,000 or $800,000 and then coming to Van Buren with that money in their pocket and buying these houses for 150
Interesting. Okay, this is when they say location, but I would add to that, just coming full circle to what you said earlier, because I think it makes a big difference when you're investing in a town where you can see evidence that the town is investing in itself in a sustainable way, not in a Taco John's way, if Strong Towns, right, in a Amazon warehouse way, like a, like a pickleball way, like saying, hey, let's start with the assets, let's start generating local energy and local investment, and then just start chipping away one at a time, and I think that's what sparks those bigger jumps, without it necessarily being like step 32 in our mat, and our secret magical playbook. It has this - you can't really capture it and put it in a bottle quality to it.
All you can do is start with what you have, find your assets, start investing in those, and this energy will take over. Let's talk about the economic side of the town. Can you share about what you all have been working on there with, the incubator that you mentioned, and what you're hoping the future of the town is from, an economic standpoint? Because, you said, the base left, what are you hoping emerges as, a strong economic base for the town? Because I've been hearing you tell these stories, I know a lot of them, they get that initial push from grant funding, but that's not necessarily a long-term strategy for really, securing the economic strength and resilience for our community. there's a lot packed in there.
Maybe, if you want to speak a little bit to grants and how they can be leveraged well, and then maybe you can share a little bit about what you're hoping, like how you. Been working to set the town up for long-term economic stability.
Yeah, I think they'll always be funding sources out there for different projects. I don't believe that's going to go away, that the sources of them will be different, and what they're funding for projects will be different, but I think those funding sources help do jump start projects, but whenever we've created a project here, we've made sure that we've done so with some revenue stream that will follow behind, like even the community garden.
The people in the community garden pay a small fee, which offsets the cost of any of the seeds and any of the development down there, so there's really no cost, so it's, it's basically, and we actually produced so much food in there last year that we were having to throw food away, which I hated it, but we couldn't give it all away, like everybody, every family had their own plot, but they couldn't eat all the food they were producing.
I ended up getting a $5,000 grant through an organization called Grow Smart Maine to build a farm stand, and it's being built right now for us by the Amish, and we'll be able to put our excess food in that farm stand and offer it up for donation, or for a small donation, or just for free if people need it, if people need the food, so there's always a little bit of a revenue stream there, and ironically, a generous person came into the town office about two or three months ago and said, "Hey, Luke, I want to make a donation to the community garden, and I'm "Do you want to have a garden space? They said, "No, I just want to pay for everybody that's going to have a garden space this year.
so they paid for everyone's garden this year, they didn't have to pay, it was paid, people did anyway, because some of the people in the garden can afford the $30 a year, but we have a little bit of pot of money there that will keep growing and growing to, just keep the garden going forever, and then even our fire station project, we got $2.2 million in federal funding to build a new fire station, and we're building a fire station and training center, so there's no training center within 200 miles of the town of Van Buren for firefighters. even that project will be developing revenue, because we will be offering training at the fire station that other communities will pay for and create a small revenue stream to keep that going, and then, when I became the manager, we moved out of our old municipal building into a new building.
We had a vacant building that had become vacant during COVID in our town. It had over $400,000 worth of renovations done to it, and it looked like a great place to reinvent our town office. Our old municipal building was starting to get dilapidated, so we moved into a new building, and then we were trying to figure out what to do with that old municipal building. Well, ironically, it was an also a movie theater. It was built back in the 1940s and is somewhat of a historic building, and so we realized we couldn't just tear that down either, and one of the things that wasn't happening in Aroostook County, which we have a very large county here in Northern Maine, we realized there was not a lot of business development activities going on that if you wanted to open a small business, let's say you were a small manufacturer, you made bracelets.
We wanted people to have a place that they could walk into and say, I'd like to start a business in Maine. I don't know where to start. How can I start? then be able to provide education for them to start a business, provide mentorship through an organizational organization called Score to work with other entities in Maine that help develop entrepreneurship, like New Ventures Maine, which is another great organization, and so I applied for another large grant to redevelop that building into a community connectivity hub, which will be the education side of that space, and then a small business incubator space to develop a tech economy infrastructure in the town of Van Buren.
So we will have eight places for people interested in tech economy to develop an innovative tech business in our community. We're working with another organization called CORI, the Center on Rural Innovation, and we'll be part of their network and working with them to try to bring in some of these innovative entrepreneurs. We are a very strong agriculture community, very strong forestry, and the space industry is moving into Northern Maine, because we have so much open skies. we're hoping that our entrepreneurs focus on those three key innovation areas, because we think there's a lot to offer, they. Burin in our area had a lot of innovators, like we have a strong innovation spirit.
The friend, the frozen French fry that is enjoyed around the world, the process by which that French fry is frozen was invented by a guy from Caribou, Maine, that is 20 miles from here. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper to him, which is interesting, but there was in there is innovation spirit here, and we want to try to bring that back to life. We think that if we provide again, if you provide an environment for it'll thrive, and it is being done around the country. These innovation technology businesses don't all want to exist in the Silicon Valley or New York City, they want to enjoy rural America, rural life, rural outdoor recreation, things that we have a lot of here. Van Buren is unique in Maine, it's unique in New England, actually.
We have, we own our own power utility, and so we have the second cheapest electricity in New England, which is half of the cost of our neighbors throughout the state of Maine, and that is an asset, another asset that we identified that we are trying to use to strengthen our downtown economy, to strengthen the area economy.
Have you been able to troubleshoot trying to restore the connection of the downtown to the customs building, because I feel like that tourism can be a part of maybe not the entire pie, but maybe a piece of that economic pie, so to speak, and just curious if you, if you've thought about that, or what that might look like.
Yep, so we became part of a cohort that is called the Reconnecting Communities Institute, and that's what they work with communities on, reconnection projects where some an infrastructure change had a detriment to either a city or a community, or when I attended my first cohort, there were 30 groups in there, 30 different cities, Dallas, Texas, Chinatown, San Francisco, Fayetteville, Arkansas. I could go on and on.
then Van Buren,
Maine, population 2,200 So there were Most of the cities that were involved with that program had more people in one building than I had in the entire community, so one of the things that learned from that experience is that they weren't focusing on the whole city, they were focusing on one small infrastructure project to correct that maybe the population wasn't the population of the whole city, so it gave us an opportunity to really look at our downtown and say, what, again, we don't have to reinvent the wheel, we're not, they're not going to move that bridge, they're not going to move that access to that bridge, we have to create a draw that brings people back to our downtown, and that essentially is on us, we have to create new business and new activities in our central downtown that draw people to our downtown, and it's, it's a project, and it's a learning process, but I do think developing this hub is going to bring in eight new small businesses to our community, that's a start, and I think that others will follow the new coffee shop that's developing, like you said, it's not a franchise, it's a homegrown coffee business.
They've been, they've been brewing their own beans, and it's a bakery, and so they're not going to be paying franchise fees to any of the big names. They're actually going to be doing their own thing, which I love. That's what I want here. I want, I want like ground up business to start, like from the like grassroots businesses. I think that's really better for our community and better for the economy here.
I want to ask you, I know we're almost, we're definitely hitting, about to hit an hour long, but if you'll bear with me, I want to ask you, Van Buren is, most people, when they encounter the Strong Towns world, it has.. we're doing a lot of work with, wrestling with the impact of sprawl, of suburban sprawl. Van Buren is not a suburban place. How do you think that.. but you're familiar with the Strong Towns, message and the content, think you've currently are or recently were a part of the recent cohort. How does Strong Towns principles are how do you, how do you apply them? How is it a little bit different for a place like Van Buren, when you're thinking about things like resilience or being people-centered and stuff like that?
I just, I want to capture the uniqueness that you're able to offer us on that question, because it is more of a rural town than necessarily like a suburban community. how would you, how would you describe what it means for a place like Van Buren to be resilient? It as a rural community.
Yeah, I think it's important to use, the concepts of Strong Towns. I learned a lot. I was in the second cohort we just wrapped up, actually a week ago. just getting some of our second story apartments back into use, getting people willing to make the investment into getting them back into use, and getting them filled with people, which makes our community more walkable, and we have a small, like classic downtown, it's all very walkable, and the other parts of our neighborhood redeveloping. Some of the missteps that we've made over the years is that when we've had to do a demolition on a residential building, we've just buried it on site, and that's a bad idea. I don't recommend that you don't want to be burying these properties and turn them into lawns for the neighbors.
You want to clear those properties of the debris and make them available for another developer to go in and build a new home in those developments, and so that was one of the concepts, like really resonated during the Strong Towns cohort, and then the other side of it was just learning about incremental, not incremental development, but how to not create generational debt, so that was one of my biggest fears early on, when I, when I started meeting with council in 2022 at that time, if I just said to the council, let's take a $10 million bond, just fix everything right now, like let's just fix it all, let's take a bond, bad idea, like you create generational debt by taking bonds that don't give any return, and so just doing these projects incrementally, step by step, getting investment from either federal grant investment or state buy-in, state investment, local investment, it just made better sense, like it's still one of my biggest fears.
I don't want, I don't want 20 years from now somebody to open up the annual town report and ask, hey, what is this $70,000 a year payment we're making to the Maine Municipal Bond Bank, and it is probably for an infrastructure project that the town would have done that 20 years later, by the time you paid it off, it would need to be done again. I just don't think that's a good idea. Strong Towns is really, I learned a lot about that through my involvement with the cohort, that you don't want to, you don't want that to happen, that you got to create value in your community without creating that debt,
yeah, that really
resonated with me, and just it's logic, it makes perfect logical sense,
yeah, and not just for the numbers, but just going back to what you've been talking about this entire conversation, not only would you be putting your city in a financially dangerous position by taking those quick fixes, but they mean think about all the magic you'd miss out on when, if you're not taking this more incremental approach, right, which is really what I'm walking away with from this conversation. how you've been building this flywheel in your community, and all the little spontaneous and magical and unplanned encounters and ideas and moments of inspiration that have happened, you circumvent all that when you take the magic, bond solution to just fixing everything really quickly, In addition to making your city more vulnerable, Mr. Dyer, it's been so inspirational to speak with you. Unfortunately, it's time to wrap up.
Although I'm sure there's so much more wisdom you could share with us from your experience. In closing, you've already told us so much about your town, but are there a couple businesses in particular you'd like to recommend for people to visit to check out if they come to Van Buren to visit.
Yeah, so one of the very interesting cultural activities we have here is our Acadian village. We have a, we have a, an Acadian village here that is a live village where people can come, and there's 17 buildings there that are from their actual buildings that were taken from other plots of land and put into the village that are from our ancestors, so it's a walk back in time of how people in the north here lived and survived, and it's really a great, little space to visit. It's such a historic site, and there's nothing like it north of New Orleans, so it's, it's really a special offering. then we have a couple destination businesses that are our tasty food restaurant here is like an old ice cream shop, drive up ice, like drive-in ice cream shop. People come here from all over the county and can't, in places in Canada, just.
To come and get their tasty food at least once in the year. It's a really unique business. Everything is ready in eight minutes, so that's been their thing, like over the years, like ready in eight minutes, and it's true, like it's true to form. so it's a fun stop, and it's only open six months out of the year, but is one of the most revenue driving restaurants in Aroostook County, which is really cool. then the Northern Maine Kolache Company that I mentioned before, they built a brand new business downtown, that's a brand new business and is doing very well, and it's unique. There's not anything like it in the area, and so that's gaining a lot of popularity, and the last will be the redevelopment downtown of the Yorks Coffee and Bakery. Just great people, and again, not a franchise.
They brew their own beans, they make the most unbelievable cinnamon rolls you could ever eat. we're really excited to get that building finished and get them in there. They have a food truck right now that they're operating in the space near the building redevelopment. So they're already building their clientele through their food truck and doing very well. So I would recommend any of those for what was
that? What was that last one called again? Was I couldn't catch the first word.
It's York's,
York's okay. That's what I thought. Okay, great. It's funny, kolaches are a big thing in Texas. I don't know if there's a connection there, but when I heard that, I also thought, interesting, because I think they're German—or Czech. Sorry. That's a big part of Texas history, especially here in Waco. We've got those Czech and German threads, so that's very interesting. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Dyer. I really appreciate it. To our listeners, thank you for joining me for another conversation. We'll be putting notes to this conversation, all those recommendations, and some other things in the show notes. But it's been a pleasure, and especially, I know you're about to go out on vacation, so thanks so much for taking time.
Thank you very much. Been a pleasure. Thank you.
I'll be back soon with another episode. If there's someone who you think we should have on the show, please let me know using the suggested guest form that we always include in our show notes. Until then, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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