Three new proposals have been submitted for the Hutchinson Center in Belfast.

The University of Maine System has received three second-round bids for its Belfast building for sale.

The state’s public university system first accepted bids for the Hutchinson Center earlier this year and announced in August that it would be taken over by an evangelical church. Then the system canceled the offer in September, citing shortcomings in the criteria for evaluating bidders. System reopened process in Octoberand new proposals were due Friday at 5 p.m.

Samantha Warren, the system’s director of external affairs, said Friday afternoon that they had received three applications – the same number as last time – although she said she would not be able to identify the applicants until the university announced the top-scoring respondent number of points. should happen later this month.

Jason State, who represented Calvary Chapel Belfast in the bidding process, confirmed Thursday that the church was one of the groups submitting a second bid.

Representatives for the Hutchinson Future Center Steering Committee and Waldo Community Action Partners, two other bidders during the initial round of bids, could not be reached by phone and did not respond to written questions about whether they had submitted a second bid. In September, a representative of the steering committee said it intended to submit a second application.

The Hutchinson Center has served as a local hub for university classes and community events for decades. But the university system stopped holding classes there in 2020, and private rentals have never recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The center was given to the university system by Bank of America in 2007 as a gift with no strings attached. The public university system has sold or plans to sell several buildings in Maine, a response to high deferred building maintenance costs as well as the growth of online learning accelerated by the pandemic, which has made some infrastructure unnecessary.

“The decision to sell the Hutchinson Center follows two decades of providing education at the University of Maine and then two years of stakeholder engagement when declining student enrollment and rising operating costs made it clear that the public university would no longer be viable. maintain the facility,” Warren said. “Since 2020, no degree-seeking students have attended full-time classes at the center.”

The announcement of Calvary Chapel’s success in the first round of bidding was met with backlash from community members and two other bidders. filed complaints.

The university system initially stood by its decision to sell the property to the church, arguing that failure to do so could amount to religious discrimination.

“The university cannot discriminate, including on the basis of religion,” the university said in a statement at the time. “Doing so would be against the law and contrary to the university’s commitment to inclusivity.”

But system officials later said the original selection criteria did not take into account the potentially significant cost savings associated with retaining the network node currently in the building. Networkmaine is used by the university system, public schools and libraries and will need to remain even after the building is sold.

The new request requires bidders to lease Networkmaine’s infrastructure back to the university system for a minimum of five years.

Warren said the university will use an objective scoring system that takes into account the value of the proposal, contingencies for real estate and the cost of space for networking equipment to evaluate proposals and determine the best one.

“Benefit to society is subjective and therefore cannot be explicitly factored into the evaluation criteria,” she said.