With a workforce that once peaked at more than 500, the Maine Military Authority at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone was nationally known for its ability to retrofit thousands of Humvee vehicles for the National Guard.
That work has since ended. And now that another Department of Defense contract has ended, the authority could become a casualty of war if the governor’s office and Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority are unable to resolve a $19 million contract dispute over the refurbishment of 32 buses.
At a press conference this week, Commissioner Douglas Farnham of the Department of Defense, Veterans and Emergency Management said that after the MMA’s loss of the Humvee contract in 2012, the pressure was on to find a new revenue stream. More than 140 jobs had gone with it.
So, the following year a decision was made to put in a bid to retrofit 32 mechanically complicated diesel-electric buses for Massachusetts. The buses were originally built by Neoplan, a German company that Gen. Farnham says had already gone out of business when the bid was made.
“There’s no question that it was a little bit of risk,” he says. “When you take risks, sometimes you’re not always on the right side of it.”
Farnham says Maine put in a $19 million bid to complete the work for the MBTA by next summer. It was a change in direction for the MMA, which had refurbished school buses, but not the kind of articulated, diesel-electric Silverline buses used by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.
Although there are other companies in the United States that retrofit commuter buses, Maine was the sole bidder.
“I think it is probably true that there was a little bit of urgency to get a contract to prove that they could do that kind of work,” Farnham says.
Workers at the MMA are wrapping up work on 11 buses, and the state has received about a third of the money owed under the MBTA contract. With 21 buses to go, Gov. Paul LePage halted the remainder of the work last Friday, citing the project’s excessive costs and concern for taxpayers.
The governor’s announcement stunned workers at the MMA, and Farnham came to Limestone to offer what reassurances he could.
“As you might imagine, the news was a little bit shocking to them, and I think there was no surprise that they were struggling with the contract and getting parts and some of that was not a surprise, the press release was a little bit,” he says.
Farnham did not go into details about the specifics of why the refurbishment costs were spiraling beyond the terms of the contract. But he did acknowledge that the bid reflected a failure to recognize the complexity of the project and problems with finding replacement parts or fabricating new ones.
None of the workers approached by Maine Public Radio would comment on the situation at MMA. As for whether the MMA ever sought any third-party review of its contract bid, a source who asked not to be identified says the request for proposals and the resulting bid were vetted exclusively within the MMA.
Now Farnham has the unenviable task of consulting with MBTA officials to try to renegotiate the contract or face a potential breach-of-contract lawsuit. The general says he hopes it doesn’t come to that.
“I am still hopeful that something can be worked out. I think it’s in our interest to continue obviously, and it’s also in MBTA’s interest to get the finished product that they admit is a quality product,” he says.
It’s also in the interest of the Loring Development Authority, which is tasked with finding new business tenants for the sprawling 9,000-acre Air Force base where B-52 bombers with nuclear payloads once patrolled the skies during the height of the Cold War.
Carl Flora, president of the Loring Development Authority, says that of the 20 businesses at what is now called the Loring Commerce Centre, the MMA — at 500,000 square feet — is his third largest tenant. He says its survival is linked to the economic growth of the region, and he doesn’t like the idea of selling the commerce center without the MMA.
“It would be a very significant setback.” Flora says. “Maine Military I believe is at its low point. If you look at them historically, they’ve occupied more than twice as much space as they currently do — so it’s important to our bottom line.”
State Sen. Peter Edgecomb of Caribou says he did not know what kind of arrangement the state and the MBTA might reach. But he says he would support any effort to take money from the state’s rainy day fund to subsidize the MMA, much in the same way the Legislature did for the biomass industry earlier this year.