SCARBOROUGH – Scarborough’s potential for development was highlighted last week when the management of Scarborough Downs announced it was selling 400 acres around the 60-year-old harness racing facility. 

The sale of property, which is listed at $12.2 million, opens up for development prime land between Payne Road, Haigis Parkway and Route 1, and comes at a time when the Downs has proposed a move to Biddeford, though the sale of the property is not contingent on that move.

“It is such a great piece of property because of where it is located,” said Harvey Rosenfeld, executive director of the Scarborough Economic Development Corp. The challenge, he noted, is to find the best possible use for the property.

It is just the kind of challenge for Rosenfeld’s group, which this year celebrates a quarter century of working to help both large and small businesses start up, stay and grow in Scarborough. The group’s 25 years, which will be feted at an event Oct. 5 at The Landing at Pine Point, covers a time in which the town has grown immensely, increasing four fold its number of businesses while becoming a hotbed of commercial activity.

Rosenfeld, who has been with the group for 21 years, said SEDCO’s accomplishments over the years have included building and maintaining a viable business community, creating an opportunity for development along the Haigis Parkway and off Exit 42 of the Maine Turnpike, making Route 1 much more of a destination point with the introduction of the Maine Health and Maine Medical Center medical offices and attracting Cabela’s outfitters to set up a location in Scarborough.

Rosenfeld said he regrets how slow the development around Haigis Parkway has grown or how prospective projects around that section of town, such as Fairchild Semiconductor’s East Coast headquarters, never materialized.

While the Fairchild Semiconductor project never happened, Rosenfeld is committed to make sure the Downs’ property development does, indeed, move forward.

Because of the council’s steadfast stance of keeping big box development closer to the Maine Mall section of town, Rosenfeld said, perhaps the most appropriate use of the property could be for high-tech or biotechnology firms, something he said would work well with the development of the Haigis Parkway.

Rosenfeld said it may be the perfect time to develop the land.

“It is not a bad time to do it, if you can. If someone has the wherewithal to wait it out, I am very encouraging about Scarborough. We don’t want people to fail,” he said.

Looking back

SEDCO, Town Manager Tom Hall said, has helped Scarborough strike a balance between being a bedroom community and encouraging a mix of residential, commercial and industrial development.

Hall said if a town relies too heavily on any one particular development type. it can be “disastrous.”

“Spreading it out,” he said, “make you much more immune to market changes. A mixture of developments is important to survive a tough economy.”

Town Councilor Mike Wood said SEDCO has served the town well over the years.

“The folks in place back then had great foresight and vision because over the course of the last 25 years, SEDCO has done great work and been a exceptional ambassador to help us encourage businesses to consider Scarborough or chose Scarborough over other nearby communities,” he said. “I’ve found them to be extremely beneficial to the town.”

“They have helped Scarborough to reach a very healthy mix between commercial growth and residential growth. That has played a huge part in reducing the tax rate, that I would consider to be the envy of other communities in Maine,” Wood added.

SEDCO’s objective in marketing Scarborough as a great place to live and work helped Stuart Axelrod, owner of Pine Tree Waste and chairman of SEDCO’s board of directors, choose Scarborough as a place to raise his family.

“I think SEDCO has provided support to businesses and has continued to have a fairly consistent view of what new growth is appropriate in town,” Axelrod said. “Elected officials come and go. Managers come and go. Planners and council members come and go. But because of SEDCO, the town has been able to guide new businesses and support old businesses to help them get better. SEDCO’s hard work has made it a community to be proud of.”

“In terms of economic development, they certainly have marketed the town well,” said Town Planner Dan Bacon. “When businesses are looking to move into town, SEDCO has really facilitated finding the right space for the business in Scarborough.”

“SEDCO has also been pretty instrumental in working with developers that may need to go before the Town Council for a zone change. Often times a great development plan is not possible because of a property’s zoning and needs to go through a zone change in order to come fruition. SECDO has helped with that,” he added.

Rosenfeld said the founding of the group came at a turning point in terms of development in the area. Portland and South Portland, he said, were starting to see a boom in development. Scarborough, which shares a border with South Portland and is mere miles from Portland, however, was not seeing the same level of development.

In fact, Rosenfeld said, it was becoming a bedroom community to Portland and South Portland and soon became one of the fastest-growing residential communities in the state, which in turn means a higher demand for town services.

The Town Council decided that it was time to look at the possibilities of attracting commercial and economic development to Scarborough, particularly along Route 1, and hired a consultant to do so.

“The consultant,” Rosenfeld said, “recommended beginning an economic development corporation, not just to attract residents to the town, but to begin attracting businesses to town to, in part, offset services the town was providing to its residents.”

Heeding the advice of the consultant, the Town Council set up the corporation as a not-for-profit vehicle to push economic growth.

Rosenfeld said that business model has allowed the group to remain flexible in looking at development projects or possibilities from the perspective of both the town and individual developers.

“Because of our setup, we are in a position to work between the town and developers to find the best solution for both parties,” he said. “I believe that is something that has proven valuable to the town.”

Rosenfeld said since Day 1, SEDCO’s goal has always been to try to encourage partnerships between the town and private developers and businesses.

Rosenfeld said because SEDCO is interested in encouraging both large and small business opportunities, it has been successful in helping to create a wide range of businesses in Scarborough. When he first started at SEDCO, Rosenfeld said there were 400 businesses in town. Now there are 1,500. He noted that of the 10,000 new jobs created in Cumberland County between 2000 and 2008, 4,000 were created in Scarborough.

Looking ahead

That kind of growth has to continue, Rosenfeld said.

“We have to continue to bring new jobs and businesses into town because that is the only way to improve the economy in town,” he said.

To help in that regard, Rosenfeld said he has begun advertising Scarborough nationally, including in the alumni magazines of Bowdoin College, the University of Maine and Maine Maritime Academy, to find Maine natives who moved away and started a successful business elsewhere, in the hopes those businesses could relocate to Maine.

Rosenfeld said that while the group’s focus is attracting businesses to Scarborough, marketing the area for economic development opportunities is also important.

“You have to think of economic development from a regional perspective,” he said. “What happens around us is very important because residents of Scarborough work there. I really want the region to continue to grow as well.”

To help sell this area as a desirable place to do business, the group has teamed up with its counterparts in South Portland and Portland to jointly market business opportunities in the Greater Portland area.

Although he didn’t expect to still be with SEDCO more than 20 years after he started with the organization, Rosenfeld said he has stayed because of what Scarborough has to offer in terms of economic development.

He said even without SEDCO, Scarborough would have attracted some commercial development, but it would be a much different looking town.

“I am convinced, because of its location, Scarborough would still have attracted businesses and continued to grow as a residential community,” Rosenfeld said. “Businesses would have been more geared toward servicing the residents, but the businesses that are more regional wouldn’t have come.”

Without SEDCO, Bacon said, the town’s vision for economic development would be much different.

“SEDCO has really helped establish a common vision for economic development in town that I don’t think would have been as prominent as it is today,” he said.

Town Councilor Judy Roy agrees that Scarborough would be different without SEDCO and the work it has done to make Scarborough a more economically competitive town.

“[SEDCO] has been a blessing for Scarborough. Certainly, even in these hard economic times, we still have had some business development going on,” Roy said. “Without the hard work of SEDCO, Scarborough wouldn’t have as good a business base as we do. I think it has been an important asset to the community and an envy of many other communities.”

“Harvey’s been a good leader in that he has been a negotiator between businesses and the town, which I think is very beneficial,” she added. “He is a listening ear and does a lot of work for the town to bring businesses in.”

Hall said SEDCO has had a strong role in the economic growth of the town over the last 25 years and will in the future, but because approaches to economic development have changed over the years, he said, the anniversary gives both he and SEDCO leadership an opportunity to examine how the group will operate in the future.

“The notion I have is things are different now,” Hall said. “A lot has happened over the last 25 years and undoubtedly a lot will happen in the next 25 years. The trick and the key is to plan ahead and organize ourselves to be ready to maximize on what the future holds,” Hall said.

Rosenfeld also said the milestone anniversary is a time for reflection.

“We’ve been successful, but everything can get better. I think we really have to look at what’s been accomplished, what we can do better and if there are better ways to fund SEDCO,” he said. “We are largely funded through the town’s general fund. Right now we don’t charge for services and I hope we never do. I really hope the [SEDCO] board will take an objective look at where we are, what we’ve done and where things are going.”

Despite what is in store for SEDCO’s future, Wood is sure the organization will continue to benefit the town as it has for the last 25 years.

“I fully expect in the next 25 years they will be thought of as highly then as they are now,” Wood said.