Business View Magazine | February 2020

188 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 the riverbanks, including the Laconia Company in 1845, and the Pepperell Company in 1850. The mills attracted waves of immigrants, including the Irish, Albanians, and French-Canadians from the province of Quebec, and Biddeford was incorporated as a city in 1855. At one time, the textile mills in Biddeford employed as many as 12,000 people, but as happened elsewhere, the industry entered a long period of decline. As of 2009, the last remaining textile company in the city, WestPoint Home, closed. In that same year, the city administration in Biddeford created a task force to discuss the future of the Maine Energy Recovery Co. (MERC), a waste-to-energy plant that was built in the mid 1980s in order to deal with the growing landfills in Biddeford, Saco, and other surrounding towns. According to Mathew Eddy, Biddeford’s Planning & Development Director, the plant never operated the way in which it was intended and was repeatedly fined for ash and toxic emissions. “It ended up creating quite a bit of smell; it ended up burning a lot more than they had planned on; and it became a detractor to anybody looking at redeveloping the mills,” he reports. After years of contentious discussions between MERC’s owners and the city, Biddeford finally purchased the plant in 2012 for $6.65 million and tore it down. The removal of the MERC facility helped spur a wave of redevelopment of several of the defunct mills into the city’s new Mill District, bounded by AT A GLANCE BIDDEFORD, MAINE WHAT: A city of 22,000 WHERE: On the Saco River in York County WEBSITE: www.biddefordmaine.org