BANGOR DAILY NEWS • June 15, 2023
Two Schoodic-area businessmen with a background in the building trades were the winning bidders Thursday morning in an auction of a defunct seafood processing plant in Gouldsboro. Tim Ring, founder of Ring Paving, and Kevin Barbee of Barbee Construction won the auction for the sprawling former sardine cannery with a bid of $975,000, but don’t yet know how it will be used. The building was the last sardine cannery in the United States when Bumblebee shut it down 13 years ago. It was revived as a lobster processing plant, first by Live Lobster and then by Maine Fair Trade Lobster. The latest owner, before Thursday’s auction, was American Aquafarms, which said it wanted to use the plant to process salmon that it planned to farm in Frenchman Bay. That proposal met stiff opposition from residents on both sides of the bay.