By the early spring of 2024, Pam Wilcox and Gary Gagnon had been working for more than a year with a company that wanted to lease their warehouse in the Caribou Light Industrial Park.
They didn’t initially know what operation they were dealing with. But its representatives asked questions about square footage and heating sources and negotiated on cost, just like “any other person that we would be looking to rent commercial space to,” Wilcox, the general manager of Gagnon Rental Properties, said.
Then the non-disclosure agreement came.
“I told Gary, ‘You need to come up here. This is Amazon we’re dealing with,’” Wilcox said. “He’s like, ‘What? Amazon coming to Caribou?’”
Speaking now, after Amazon confirmed to the Bangor Daily News on June 25 that it was “close to completing construction work” on a small delivery station in Caribou, Wilcox and Gagnon detailed the process of working with the world’s largest online retailer as it got ready to open its first facility in Maine.
The station is part of a $4 billion investment Amazon announced in April to expand its rural delivery network and replace other carriers such as UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service that currently serve as the company’s “last mile” deliverers in many rural areas.
When Wilcox and Gagnon received the non-disclosure agreement, Amazon told them that they were among several finalists for the station. Others reportedly included a site in Presque Isle and one on the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, they recalled.
In mid-spring, the company sent a team to survey the building and conduct environmental studies.
“It was amazing,” Gagnon said. “They came in with about 10 of them. They had suits on and drones and just started taking pictures of everything in the building. They’d find a spider in a corner … They spent a ton of money with no commitment.”
A group from the company’s corporate headquarters in Seattle followed that summer. Out of convenience, the officials flew into Portland and made the 4 ½ hour drive north to Caribou.
“They were not only impressed with the facility, but they were impressed with Maine as a whole,” Wilcox said. “They were like, ‘This place is gorgeous.’”
The group toured the facility and met with Caribou City Manager Penny Thompson and others from the city, as well as local business officials.
Those meetings were facilitated by Maine & Co., a nonprofit founded in 1996 under then-Gov. Angus King. The organization looks to bring new business investment and job creation into the state by connecting companies with a network of resources, including civic and business leaders, in communities they’re evaluating for investment.
“I can’t say enough about what a great job Penny and her team did and how professional they were and the way they presented the community,” Maine & Co. CEO Peter DelGreco said.
“It wasn’t flashy, but you sat down with them and you’re like ‘Oh my God, they know exactly what they’re doing. They know what they’re ready to say yes to. They know how to get things done.’”
Amazon was convinced. It signed a 10-year lease on Gagnon’s property at 33 Aldrich Drive in October. In the end, negotiations came down to 10 cents per square foot.
“We were like, ‘Are we really fighting over 10 cents?’ Wilcox said. “[But] when you think about Amazon as a corporation, how much property they have, 10 cents per square foot adds up to millions of dollars.”
The company began renovations on the building in January, a project estimated to cost more than $4.4 million, according to the building permit. It has almost completely gutted the warehouse, added a new dock with a self-leveling ramp and completely remade the parking lot to accommodate both semi-trucks and delivery vehicles.
And crucial to Gagnon in negotiations with Amazon, a majority of the work was done by local contractors.
“We were like, ‘OK, if we sign this, we don’t want you guys rolling in here with tractor-trailer trucks full of people from outside,’” Wilcox said. “‘We have some great people … We would like to see if at least you offer work to them first.’ And they actually used work from those companies.”
Soderberg Construction, County Electric and plumbing, heating and cooling contractor Patrick St. Peter & Sons — among others — worked on the project. Gagnon estimates 80 to 90 percent of the renovations done thus far have been by local companies.
“It was huge,” Gagnon said. “[Amazon] stood behind what they said.”
Maine & Co. worked with health care giant athenahealth in the late 2000s as it opened a campus in Belfast, which has now grown to one of the largest employers on the midcoast and encouraged new business investment. DelGreco is hoping Amazon’s expansion to northern Maine could have a similar impact.
“When a company invests, and especially when they do well when they invest, people within their networks, their business sectors, will begin to take notice,” DelGreco said. “Business leaders are always looking for good ideas, and they’ll say ‘Oh, look at what they did. Let’s see how it goes and maybe we should do that.”
Amazon declined to answer questions about when the delivery station will open or how many people it will employ.
