BRUNSWICK — The gatehouse is still in place, but these days, no one in uniform stops you from driving down the broad, tree-lined road that leads to the 3,200-acre campus.

But it’s not “the former Brunswick Naval Air Station,” Ben Sturtevant stresses. In fact, if you call it that around the offices of the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority (MRRA), you’ll get fined $5.

Sturtevant is communications coordinator for the MRRA, its moniker a mouthful in itself. No, forget “former base” and “redevelopment authorities;” from here on out, it’s known as Brunswick Landing.

A name is important, Sturtevant and Steve Levesque, the redevelopment authority’s executive director, believe. Levesque was commissioner of the state Economic and Community Development Department (DECD) under Gov. Angus King.

If the men’s vision is realized, Brunswick Landing will be known as a business hub at the intersection of Midcoast and Southern Maine, a place where corporate jets and cargo planes can land and leave, and where emerging industries such as biomedical and renewable energy can draw on the region’s labor pool. In fact, the men say 70 percent of the state’s population is within a 30-minute drive—that includes Portland, Lewiston-Auburn and Augusta.

Already, the former base’s—whoops, make that Brunswick Landing’s—200 buildings are more than half full. More than 50 businesses are operating on site, providing 450 jobs, with the 600-job threshold expected to reached by the end of the year.

The story has emerged in bits and pieces, but when viewed over the last several years, the transformation is dramatic.

BASE TO BUSINESS

The base officially closed May 31, 2011, but its fate was sealed in 2005 as part of the federal effort to downsize military installations after the end of the Cold War. The process of transforming from base to business hub hasn’t come cheap.

“Property comes to us once it’s clean, and certified clean,” said Levesque. Military installations are notorious for having contaminated soils, often from improperly disposed fuels and chemicals. To date, the U.S. Navy has spent about $100 million cleaning the site, with another $10 million to $20 million to go.

Once the decision was made to close the base—which was not greeted as good economic news in the region—the MRRA was formed as a “public municipal corporation,” Levesque said, to oversee the transfer. MRRA has a board whose 11 members are nominated by the governor and the commissioner of DECD and approved by the Legislature.

“It’s essentially a planning board for the federal government,” he said, developing an approach and then implementing it. The Department of Defense has given MRRA an annual appropriation of $8 million, “but that’s starting to phase out this year,” Levesque said, and ends in 2018.

The facility includes 3,200 acres—that’s 5 square miles, and almost five times the size of the University of Maine’s Orono campus. The feds transferred about 900 acres initially, most of which included the airport. The two 8,000-foot-long runways are large enough for a 747 to land, and make the facility the third largest in the state.

A modest airfield was built in the 1940s in response to World War II, where British and Canadian fliers trained, then abandoned after the war. But as the Cold War geared up in the 1950s, the airfield was greatly expanded. Aircraft based there were part of the submarine surveillance effort.

But in 2005, the Brunswick facility was deemed non-essential by the Base Re-Alignment Commission, or BRAC.

Transforming a military base to a business park isn’t as easy as putting up a few “for rent” signs. Some serious rebranding work needed to be done. Levesque said “visioning” sessions were held at various locations and on site, bringing in the general public, civilians who had worked at the base and even local high school students. The last group made a big contribution.

“We thought the high school kids would suggest a skate park or arcade,” he said, but instead, they proposed making the site a home for “tech jobs of the future.” The students were invited to present their vision to MRRA’s board, Levesque said, and the name “Brunswick Landing—the Maine Center for Innovation” was born.

Further rebranding relied on the phrase “from a Navy base to a great new place,” he said. 

LANDINGS

To ensure that Brunswick Landing would not be seen as yet another business park, MRRA targeted a few key industries: 

Already—and despite the weak economy of the last six years—there have been big scores. Among those are:

“We have a business in every one of our target sectors now,” Levesque said. Brunswick Landing has a “non-piracy” policy, he said, meaning that businesses looking to relocate there must demonstrate that they cannot expand at their current site.

“We spend a lot of our time [recruiting] out of state,” he said.

Also on site are the Midcoast campus of Southern Maine Community College and the University of Maine, which offers pre-engineering classes there.

Though the pitch is targeted, Brunswick Landing accepts other businesses, such as Frosty’s Donuts, which will make the product it sells at its Maine locations and area Hannaford stores at Brunswick Landing.

Part of its legacy as a former military base, the facility has its own electric grid—electricity is distributed throughout the campus by the facility, not by Central Maine Power. That status offers options, one of which is building an anaerobic digester, a wastewater treatment plant that processes food waste to produce gas that can be burned to run turbines.

It also purchases only power from renewable sources.

“We want to be a kind of living laboratory,” Levesque said.

The airfield remains a draw. During a tour of the facility on a hot, sunny day in July, an eight-seat, two-engine pontoon plane landed to refuel. Its pilot, a retired military flier who had been based in Bangor, works for a wealthy Floridian who owns several properties in the Boothbay Harbor area.

The airfield has been rebranded as an “executive airport,” Levesque said, with about 10,000 flights annually.

The existing buildings are at about 65 percent capacity, though new construction is possible, as was the case for Mölnlcyke.

To date, about 1,700 acres have been transferred from the military to MRRA, with another 300 or so to come. MRRA has sold about 300 acres and 26 buildings to private businesses.

“We’re doing better than most of the 2005 BRAC bases,” said Sturtevant.

“It’s becoming what we envisioned,” Levesque said.