2025 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Tuesday, JUne 3
12:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Wednesday, JUNE 4
8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Please note, the main program
is happening on Wednesday, June 4th.
See Full Program for complete schedule, coming soon.
Tuesday, JUne 3
12:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Tour: Spinning Mill Development
Tour departs at 12:30 pm from the side lobby entrance of The Skowhegan, 7 Island Avenue.
Join us for a tour of the Spinning Mill, which was the vacant undeveloped site of the 2022 Build Maine conference. Work being completed to transform the mill into apartments and a hotel, which is the venue of this year’s Build Maine! Learn about the financing assembled to pull off this project and generate significant value for downtown Skowhegan.
Tour: Maine Grains Gristmill Tour
Tour departs at 1:00 pm from Miller’s Table at Maine Grains, 42 Court Street. Pay your own lunch in advance, available at the Miller’s Table Cafe.
Maine Grains is housed in the historic former Somerset County Jail building, which is also the home of the Miller’s Table Café, Crooked Face Creamery, Happyknits yarn shop, WXNZ community radio & the weekly Skowhegan Farmer’s Market. The mill has been an engine of entrepreneurship and resides in the heart of historic downtown Skowhegan. The tour will share the unique history of Maine Grains, the process of transforming a jail into a mill, how stone milled flour is made, and what they are hoping to accomplish in the years to come.
Bus / Walking Tour: Industry + Housing in Madison
Tour departs at 12:30 pm from the front entrance of The Skowhegan, 7 Island Avenue.
Participants will be taken via bus to Madison. A moderated walking tour of Timber HP will showcase wood fiber insulation products in production at the re-purposed downtown mill. The bus will then take participants to 55 Weston, the site of a MaineHousing Affordable Rural Rental housing project.
Zoning Made Easier with the PlaceCode Library
Vanessa Farr, Haley Ward
Ivy Vann, Ivy Vann Town Planning
Ben Frey, Town of Newcastle Selectboard
A community’s zoning is critical to enabling housing for existing and new residents and the local workforce, supporting quality of life, bolstering property values, and protecting open spaces from fragmented development. Most communities in Maine still have zoning based on 1960s suburban dreams, with standards that make our existing downtowns and neighborhoods nomconforming and unable to be replicated. These codes also promote 1-acre rural residential sprawl across farms and forest land. Updating zoning is expensive and politically challenging, a main reason why so many outdated codes persist today. A new tool, called the Placecode Library, provides a zoning kit of parts and a playbook for making regualtory changes that work from a baseline of Maine-based patterns and preferences. Join this workshop to learn more.
Spinning Mill Beer Garden
Join Build Maine for socializing and fun!
Join us for a beer garden and networking, hosted by Main Street Skowhegan! The outdoor beer garden will be held at the new riverfront beer garden at the back of the Spinning Mill, overlooking the Kennebec River. Enjoy food and drink (pay your own), and see old and new friends.
Wednesday, JUNE 4
8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Allison Thurmond Quinlan
Director | Flintlock LAB
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Quinlan seeks out design opportunities that can be lovable, sustainable, and walkable places so that we can save our productive and sensitive ecosystems from sprawl. Quinlan believes that “there is a real beauty that comes out of context” and that there are ways to find macro-level infrastructure and design solutions that can blend seamlessly from neighborhood to the next while still honoring each community’s unique characteristics and identity. Quinlan will also explore biases that are embedded in local property assessments and why so many communities are seeing property tax hikes to homeowners.
Highlights from Policy Action 2025
Nancy Smith, GrowSmart Maine | Zoe Miller, Moving Maine Network | Josh Caldwell, Natural Resources Council of Maine | Tara Kelly, Maine Preservation | Representative Traci Gere | Representative Melanie Sachs
Build Maine and GrowSmart Maine innovated a new process for engaging a broad statewide conversation, best described as public policy crowdsourcing. Learn about work that started in 2019, involving hundreds of people across the state, and the big policy moves from the 2025 session to improve built outcomes while reducing demand for development on rural lands.
Rebuilding Suburban Parking Lots into Neighborhoods
Monty Anderson | Developer
Duncanville, Texas
Monte Anderson’s heart beats for towns and neighborhoods across the nation that are underserved, impoverished, and forgotten, and he feels he has the solution for them. With other like-minded colleagues he met through the Congress for New Urbanism, Monte co-founded the Incremental Development Alliance, a teaching organization focused on small-scale development, local ownership, and enduring places. IncDev has seen interest from local people across the country who want to see something better than the next shopping center or the next big, 200-unit apartment complex. Anderson believes increasing local ownership can help reverse the erosion of the middle class and drive reinvestment into our communities.
The Big Impacts of Building Small
Jim Heid | Owner
Healdsburg, California
The time for Building Small has come. Join this session and gain real world knowledge, inspiration, and valuable insights to the power of incremental, and more organic community building approaches. Jim will share his book, Building Small, an inspiring and educational call-to-action. This 250-page toolkit champions fine grained, evolutionary development as a way to support more resilient local economies, foster more authentic places, heal and grow disinvested neighborhoods, and provide a democratic form of community building that spans age, economic means, and the rural to urban transect. Building Small presents an insightful view at what is possible along with the tools needed to make it happen. Copies of Building Small will be available for purchase and signing by the author during the conference.
