Your editorial “Our View: Cold-storage building will keep the ‘port’ in Portland” (May 18) said: “No company has proposed building a smaller facility at this site.” That is false.

Two years ago, a local consortium proposed a warehouse that met the waterfront site’s zoning restrictions, together with a larger warehouse off site. However, Americold Logistics won the Maine Port Authority’s request for proposals with a vastly oversized warehouse. In the Another View guest editorial a day earlier, John Henshaw of the Port Authority wrote: If we don’t approve Americold’s behemoth, we will “stifle the potential of homegrown Portland businesses.”

If the Port Authority’s goal is indeed to support homegrown businesses, it should have encouraged the Portland consortium, Eastern Marine, to link with an experienced cold-storage manager.

Instead, it selected Americold – based in Atlanta and controlled by a California billionaire – without asking questions about the facility’s maritime volume, and without an agreement to keep Americold’s Read Street warehouse open for non-maritime freight. One company that declined to bid on the request for proposal told Maine Public Radio’s Fred Bever that the RFP should be reissued if the city intends to allow a 66 percent height bonus. Otherwise, “the process is favoritism … and it becomes a corrupt process,” said Anthony Cerone, CEO of Philadelphia-based XTL Inc.

The speed at which the Portland Planning Department is willing to raise zoning heights and redefine the vision of our western waterfront to accommodate this out-of-scale cold-storage facility is appalling.

Despite the hype, it does not appear that this project is really about exporting Maine blueberries, seafood and potatoes. As I understand it, 75 to 80 percent of the product initially projected to be stored in the warehouse will arrive and leave by truck or rail – completely unconnected to our deep-water port. That does not seem right.

 

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