2025 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Tuesday, JUne 3
12:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Wednesday, JUNE 4
8:00 am - 3:30 pm
Tuesday, JUne 3
12:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Bus / Walking Tour: Industry + Housing Breathe New Life Into Madison
Tour departs at 12:30 pm from the front entrance of The Skowhegan, 7 Island Avenue.
Participants will be taken via bus to Madison. A moderated walking tour of Timber HP will showcase wood fiber insulation products in production at the re-purposed downtown mill. The bus will then take participants to 55 Weston, the site of a MaineHousing Affordable Rural Rental housing project.
Tour: Spinning Mill Development
Tour departs at 12:30 pm from the side lobby entrance of The Skowhegan, 7 Island Avenue.
Join us for a tour of the Spinning Mill, which was the vacant undeveloped site of the 2022 Build Maine conference. Work is almost completed to transform the mill into apartments and lodging. Learn about the financing assembled to pull off this project and generate significant value for downtown Skowhegan.
Tour: Maine Grains Gristmill Tour
Tour departs at 1:00 pm from Miller’s Table at Maine Grains, 42 Court Street. Pay your own lunch in advance, available at the Miller’s Table Cafe.
Maine Grains is housed in the historic former Somerset County Jail building, which is also the home of the Miller’s Table Café, Crooked Face Creamery, and other local businesses. The mill has been an engine of entrepreneurship and resides in the heart of historic downtown Skowhegan. The tour will share the unique history of Maine Grains, the process of transforming a jail into a mill, how stone milled flour is made, and what’s next!
State Policy + Funding Updates
Steve Landry, MaineDOT
Learn about the process for quickly and inexpensively improving street safety through a new DOT process centered around quick build projects. Also hear updates to the speed setting policy to help reduce dangerous vehicle speeds on local roads.
Hilary Gove + Benjamin Averill, Housing Opportunity Program Coordinators, DECD
Learn about funding available to service providers and municipalities to assist with ordinance development and public engagement to increase housing opportunities in Maine communities.
Mark Wiesendanger, MaineHousing
Hear from MaineHousing About housing programs and the statewide effort to close the gap on the 84,000 new homes required to meet current and future demand. These homes are across all income levels and reflect local need and demand from people who want to move to Maine.
Zoning Made Easier with the PlaceCode Library
Vanessa Farr, Haley Ward
Ivy Vann, Ivy Vann Town Planning
Ben Frey, Town of Newcastle Selectboard
A community’s zoning is critical to enabling housing development, supporting quality of life, bolstering property values, and protecting open spaces from fragmented development. Most communities in Maine still have zoning based on 1960s suburban dreams, with standards that make our existing downtowns and neighborhoods illegal and that also promote 1-acre rural residential sprawl across farms and forest land. Updating zoning is expensive and politically challenging, a main reason why so many outdated codes persist today. A new tool, called the Placecode Library, provides a zoning kit of parts and a playbook for making regulatory changes that work from a baseline of Maine-based patterns and preferences. Join this workshop to learn more.
The Local Property Tax Struggle: Why Bad Land Use Policy Equals Bad Municipal Financial Policy
Jim Tischler | State of Michigan
Kevin Sutherland | Town Manager, Town of Newcastle
Crumbling infrastructure, budget deficits, deferred maintenance, strained budget negotiations… These are symptoms of a chronic lack of funding that comes to a head annually during the municipal budget process. Breaking the cycle requires a fundamental rethink of the relationship between infrastructure, finance, and land use. Join this session and learn about the ‘whole-life’ cycle municipal budgeting model. When applied systemically, this alternative approach provides a platform for municipal budgeting that is based on a land use pattern that strengthens rather than erodes the tax base, positioning Maine communities for greater financial and land use security.
Spinning Mill Beer Garden
Join Build Maine for socializing and fun!
Join us for a beer garden and networking, hosted by Main Street Skowhegan! The outdoor beer garden will be held at the new riverfront beer garden at the back of the Spinning Mill, overlooking the Kennebec River. Enjoy food and drink (pay your own), and see old and new friends.
Small Developer Meet Up
Small developers, big ideas. Join us at the Build Maine beer garden to talk shop about small-scale development in Maine. Meet other like-minded individuals. Bring your ideas & enthusiasm. Hosted by the Genesis Fund.
Wednesday, JUNE 4
8:00 am - 3:30 pm
Welcome to Build Maine
Kristina Cannon | President + CEO Main Street Skowhegan
Updates on Skowhegan!
Parking Might Be Killing Your Town
Henry Grabar | Journalist, Author, and Researcher
Boston, Massachusetts
Parking is essential, but excess parking can swallow a town. This session explores how the pursuit of the perfect parking space has forced us to sacrifice affordable housing, attractive architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and lively town centers in favor of congestion, sprawl, and waste. Henry, the author of the book Paved Paradise, will discuss how communities worldwide are shifting toward smarter parking policies that support economic vitality, sustainability, and a more pedestrian-friendly walking experience. Join us to learn how solving the parking problem can make your community more livable, accessible, and prosperous.
The Value of Building As Much Housing As Possible Within Our Existing Neighborhoods
Allison Thurmond Quinlan, Director | Flintlock LAB
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Quinlan seeks out design opportunities that can be lovable, sustainable, and walkable places so that we can save our productive and sensitive ecosystems from sprawl. Quinlan believes that “there is a real beauty that comes out of context” and that there are ways to find macro-level infrastructure and design solutions that can blend seamlessly from neighborhood to the next while still honoring each community’s unique characteristics and identity. Quinlan will also explore biases that are embedded in local property assessments and why so many communities are seeing property tax hikes to homeowners.
Highlights from Policy Action 2025
Nancy Smith, GrowSmart Maine; Josh Caldwell, Natural Resources Council of Maine; Tara Kelly, Maine Preservation; Myles Smith, Mainers for Smarter Transportation
Build Maine and GrowSmart Maine innovated a new process for engaging a broad statewide conversation, best described as public policy crowdsourcing. Learn about work that started in 2019, involving hundreds of people across the state, and the big policy moves from the 2025 session to improve built outcomes while reducing demand for development on rural lands.
Lunch and Learn: Unlocking Housing and the Financial Case for Putting it in the Right Place
Chris Allen | Strong Towns
Nancy Smith | GrowSmart Maine
Housing cannot be both a basic human need and right as well as a financial instrument on which the entire economy is built. Chris will unpack what communities can do to combat the downsides of market based housing and how to create truly affordable options. He will also explore the financial argument for locating housing near service centers rather than on rural lands far from jobs centers. This presentation will be followed by an interactive session lead by GrowSmart Maine to explore policy ideas that promote housing in locations that work for Maine communities.
No One is Coming to Save You…Build Your Community One Step at a Time
Monte Anderson | Options Real Estate
Dallas, Texas
Monte Anderson, president of Options Real Estate Investments, Inc., is a practicing real estate developer in the community where he grew up. He also teaches and coaches communities and neighborhoods across the nation that are underserved, impoverished, and forgotten, and feels he has a solution for them. His answer is encouraging and empowering local ownership of real estate to help reverse the erosion of the middle class and to drive reinvestment into our communities. Join Monte to learn about The 12 Steps of Town Making, a book he co-authored with his partners at Neighborhood Evolution, on how small-scale development and local ownership can help revitalize neighborhoods. He will also share his work in transforming obsolete properties into vibrant gathering places for local residents. His work has proven that people across the country want something better than the next big apartment complex or strip mall.
The Big Impacts of Building Small
Jim Heid | Owner
Healdsburg, California
The time for Building Small has come. Join this session and gain real world knowledge, inspiration, and valuable insights to the power of incremental, and more organic community building approaches. Jim will share his book, Building Small, an inspiring and educational call-to-action. This 250-page toolkit champions fine grained, evolutionary development as a way to support more resilient local economies, foster more authentic places, heal and grow disinvested neighborhoods, and provide a democratic form of community building that spans age, economic means, and the rural to urban transect. Building Small presents an insightful view at what is possible along with the tools needed to make it happen. Copies of Building Small will be available for purchase and signing by the author during the conference.
