Message from the Commissioner at the Municipal Investment Trust Fund announcement ceremony in Brunswick

Today the City of Bath, and Rockland and the Town of Brunswick were here to celebrate with the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development the award of $500,000 from the Municipal Investment Trust Fund. We're excited about the award and about giving out that money to three fantastic projects. That first project in Brunswick will translate into a new railroad station for Amtrak or whoever decides to service this area by rail and it's going to open up an opportunity for office space, shops and also a hotel that will be the anchor to this development. We're very excited to be involved in this Maine Street project; it adds an anchor to the end of town. It's community building; Bowdoin College, I think will be involved as well, and so we're very pleased that as the community comes together and many hands have made this a success and that we can partner and share in this success as well.

As far as the City of bath is concerned, we're very excited about our investment in parking, our investment in the overall downtown community, which I think is going to be very helpful to Bath who has a great head start because of award-winning Maine Street Maine Program and also because the extra monies will allow them to do things that had been put on the shelf because of cuts both from the federal government and from the state.

We couldn't be more pleased that in a time when the federal government has deep cuts, and the state has been challenged by those deep cuts, that we can invest because of the bond monies that the people in November 2007 decided to support. We can invest many of those dollars into projects like Bath, like Biddeford, like Brunswick or Rockland. It's about community building, it's about economic development and it's about partnering in tough times with limited resources to make most of the projects possible.