The Gorham Town Council on Tuesday approved the sale of this 94-acre parcel, left, along Route 25 in the Gorham Industrial Park to megaretailer Amazon. (Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer)
When Gorham councilors voted this week to sell land to Amazon for $4 million, some challenged whether it was a fair price to charge one of the biggest companies in the world to set up shop in a sought-after Greater Portland community.
And was the agreement, negotiated behind closed doors for months, made with enough public input?
The Town Council voted 5-2 to greenlight the sale at a special meeting Tuesday evening. Both parties can still back out, and the price is not set in stone, according to the agreement — though any adjustments would be relatively small, to cover unexpected changes to taxes and fees.
Amazon has not announced how it plans to use the 94-acre plot, which would be the megaretailer’s first foothold in southern Maine.
The sale is set to net Gorham a slight profit on its land, but the project’s full economic impact on the town is not yet clear. The company’s plan for the site will be key to determining how much tax revenue the town stands to gain.
“It’s hard to know without seeing what’s going to be generated on it,” Thomas Poirier, Gorham’s director of community development, said on a Wednesday afternoon phone call.
Kevin Jensen, Gorham’s economic development director, said Tuesday that the town expects Amazon to propose building a warehouse or a distribution center, but that isn’t official until Amazon submits a plan.
Selling the land to a private company will likely lower taxes for residents, who have absorbed an increasing proportion of the property tax burden compared to businesses in recent years, according to Gorham real estate agent Aaron Chadbourne.
“When the town owns it, nobody’s paying taxes on it,” said Chadbourne, who is also president of the Greater Portland Board of Realtors. “If you’re increasing the tax base, it should be great for Gorham taxpayers as long as there aren’t other costs.”
ARRIVING AT $4 MILLION
Gorham, like other Greater Portland communities, has had one of the hottest real estate markets in the state in recent years — though industrial property values in the town have not shot up as dramatically as residential ones.
The town bought the land being eyed by Amazon as part of a deal approved by voters in 2019. That sale included another parcel to the south, costing $4 million for a total of 141 acres.
Factoring in nearly $2 million in infrastructure upgrades the town funded to turn the former cow pasture into an industrial park, Gorham spent about $41,844 per acre.
Amazon’s offer equates to about $42,553 per acre, meaning the sale alone could net the town about $70,000.
Gorham’s real estate agent, Mike Anderson of Malone Commercial Brokers, said the city had attempted for years to sell the parcel for $4.5 million but was never able to close a sale. In an email Wednesday, he noted that wetlands and a Portland Water District main that runs through the parcel both limit the amount of developable space, which is a more useful lens than raw acreage.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of comments about the price per acre being low, but what might be overlooked is that the entire 94 acres is not developable, so to break it down to a price per acre metric is a bit misleading,” Anderson wrote. Plus, “there is a lot of costly infrastructure that will be required to develop this lot and that needs to be taken into consideration with the asking price.”
Anderson noted that the parcel is zoned for industrial uses, so while it might have fetched a higher price if developers could build housing or retail, that was not an option here.
The 2019 purchase price had been set by the parcels’ previous owner, Poirier said. He added that Anderson determined the Amazon sale price based on a larger analysis of industrial land sales throughout greater Portland.
From 2019 to 2025, the overall assessed values of land and buildings on industrial parcels increased about 30% in Gorham, while residential values went up roughly 73%, said Robert Sutherland, the regional assessor for Cumberland County.
The land’s assessed value was $685,000 in 2024, the latest valuation year, according to the town assessor’s database.
“Raw land is generally a good, stable investment, but doesn’t tend to increase in value as dramatically,” said Chadbourne, the real estate agent.
CLOSED-DOOR DISCUSSIONS
Amazon’s plan to buy the land was not made public until Monday, when the town announced a special meeting to approve a sale agreement the next day.
At Tuesday’s meeting, councilors acknowledged the sale was quick from the public’s point of view, but said they had deliberated about the project for months during executive sessions, which are not public.
Poirier, the community development director, said the council followed its typical procedures in using executive sessions and making its announcement.
“Whether it’s a startup, or whether its a Fortune 500 company, everybody gets treated the same,” Poirier said. “I think that this potential purchaser, there’s a lot of sense of strong feelings one way or the other when an entity like this comes into town. All I can say is we followed the process that we did for every other one.”
He added that residents will have multiple opportunities to give feedback once Amazon proposes a site plan.
Kate Dufour, spokesperson for the Maine Municipal Association, said state law requires the council to announce it would be conducting real estate business in private, but that it did not need to provide details about the site or parties involved.
“The law understands that there are conversations that have to take place in private just so that all the information can get out there (between parties),” Dufour said. “Normally the requirement is just to simply state ‘We’re going into executive session, and here’s the reason why.’ ”
But Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, said that while the town may have fulfilled its legal burden, it may not have provided everything it could have to the public. Though he could not speak to the Gorham case specifically, Silverman said he has seen a “concerning” increase in local governments leaning on executive sessions “more out of convenience than necessity.”
“When we get into these types of situations, I think it’s really important for us to ask, is the town giving as much information as they possibly can?” Silverman said.
Otherwise, residents can feel blindsided or unprepared to respond when town officials announce a vote with limited notice, he said.
“What that does is it increases the likelihood that the deal being made is not a good one — or isn’t the best one that could have been made,” Silverman said. “By the time the deal is made … it’s often too late to go back to the table and renegotiate.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
