Portland council OKs Quimby's project

The Portland City Council early this morning voted 6-3 to allow Roxanne Quimby to renovate a run-down apartment building on Congress Street into studios for an artist-in-residence program without having to pay more than $400,000 in city fees earmarked for affordable housing.

The vote at approximately 12:30 a.m. followed the “heart-wrenching” testimony of roughly  50 people divided equally between housing advocates who opposed the exemption and supporters of the arts who favored it, according to City Councilor David Marshall,  chair of the council’s Housing Committee.

Councilors John Anton, Kevin Donoghue and Nicholas Mavodones Jr. voted against allowing the exemption.

Supporters, who also include owners of property near the building at 660 Congress St., said the proposal deserves the designation of a "project of special merit," thus entitling it to a fee waiver.

The city’s housing displacement fee is intended to maintain the city’s housing stock. Developers pay a fee of $58,000 for each lost dwelling unit, or they can build new housing to replace lost units and avoid the fee.

Initially, the city’s planning staff had ruled that the fee would be about $116,000 because the building was originally constructed as a two-family house. But planners later concluded that the building most recently had seven units and therefore Quimby would be liable for a fee of $406,000. Marshall said there was confusion about interpreting the housing displacement ordinance.

Quimby, who founded Burt’s Bees, plans to spend about $1 million renovating the property, a Queen Anne Victorian built in the late 1800s. The Portland project would support an artist-in-residence program, through which four to six accomplished artists would be given studio and gallery space, meals, a stipend, and housing at a separate location.