📰BIDDEFORD | Biddeford Needs Leadership That Puts Accountability First

Opinion: Biddeford Needs Leadership That Puts Accountability First

By Loren McCready

November 3, 2025, With Tuesday’s election approaching, the issue on nearly everyone’s mind is the cost of living, especially housing. It’s also the subject most candidates have been pressed to address.

Mayor Marty Grohman’s recent column offered a confident vision of Biddeford’s future: rapid growth, new housing, and economic momentum. But his portrayal of an opponent as anti-development and anti-business is both opportunistic and untrue.

Beneath that optimism lies a pattern of weak oversight and disregard for the law. In recent years, some of Biddeford’s largest projects have advanced through politically driven decisions that ignored environmental safeguards, undermined public trust, and placed growing financial burdens on residents.

A Comprehensive Plan Without Direction

Last month, the State of Maine rejected Biddeford’s Comprehensive Plan for the third time, finding it remains incomplete and missing three required chapters: Natural Resources, Water Resources, and Existing Land Use. Those sections are not optional—they’re fundamental to managing growth responsibly and protecting public resources.

Despite this, the city has continued approving large-scale developments without a valid, state-approved framework to guide them. That failure reflects more than bureaucratic delay. It’s a continuing lack of accountability.

The state’s review primarily raised concerns about areas that Mayor Grohman continues to champion as residential growth zones on the edges of town, even though their environmental sensitivities have been well documented for more than a decade. It’s no longer a matter of choice for Biddeford to ignore these issues. The next mayor and council must confront the reality that the city’s current approach to growth in these areas is both failed and unsustainable.

The Eddy: Luxury Housing at Public Expense

In recent months, Mayor Grohman has repeatedly pointed to The Eddy—a 250-unit complex by developer Mike Eon—as proof that Biddeford is building “workforce housing” for “teachers, nurses, cops, firefighters, and retirees.”

When the project was proposed, Eon told both Saco Bay News and the City Council that the apartments would be affordable. On that claim, the council swiftly approved a 20-year tax-break deal: little property taxes for five years and 35 percent of property-tax revenue rebated to the developer for the next fifteen years.

When The Eddy opened, one-bedroom units started at $2,200 a month. That’s not workforce housing. Yet the project continues to be celebrated while the city plans roughly $1 million in sewer upgrades to serve that property and its future phases. Hundreds of thousands of those infrastructure costs stem directly from The Eddy—public money supporting a luxury

development that priced out the very residents it was supposed to help.

Beyond the affordability issue, the site itself raises serious environmental concerns. The Eddy sits within the Thatcher Brook watershed, an area long identified by the city and state as urban-impaired due to stormwater runoff and water-quality degradation. The Thatcher Brook Management Plan—adopted nearly a decade ago—specifically calls for minimizing additional development in the area. Instead, the city approved one of its largest residential complexes there, setting the stage for further runoff, infrastructure strain, and costly mitigation that taxpayers will ultimately bear.

Future councils should be far more cautious when developers make affordability claims tied to major tax incentives. This model has proven neither sustainable nor scalable and often drives up both housing costs and infrastructure expenses for everyone else.

West Brook: Rules Ignored, Protections Overridden

Mayor Grohman often touts Mike Eon’s West Brook Subdivision as a community win, pointing to Eon’s “donation” of land that expanded Clifford Park. In reality, Eon held onto the prime buildable lots and passed the city steep, wet land that’s both unbuildable and expensive to maintain.

That project should never have been approved in its current form. A contract city planner and multiple environmental experts raised several concerns early in the Planning Board process. The subdivision lies within an ecologically significant region designated as a Statewide Focus Area and violates environmental standards intended to protect wetlands, streams, and critical wildlife habitat. Those protections exist not only to preserve ecosystems but also to prevent future homeowners from ending up on flood-prone, unstable land. Yet the project continues to advance as if those rules simply do not apply.

The city’s misuse of eminent domain in connection with the development further compounded these violations. The Biddeford City Council used that authority to seize a parcel that had not been formally conveyed to the public, as part of an agreement that ultimately enabled a private residential subdivision—a use that falls outside the limits of lawful public purpose. This land taking was approved in a narrow 5–4 Council vote, which current mayoral candidates Grohman and LaFountain opposed. Yet Grohman began touting the land exchange on social media shortly after, framing it as a civic success.

Adding to this, the City Attorney reinterpreted local ordinances to grant a project extension that allowed West Brook to move forward long after its approval should have expired. While other developers are required to follow clear procedures and timelines, this one has been allowed to proceed despite repeated breaches of environmental and procedural law.

Moving Toward Fair, Responsible Growth

These projects aren’t examples of balanced growth—they’re warnings. Biddeford’s development process has been eroded by political favoritism, weak legal oversight, and a willingness to ignore the rules that protect both taxpayers and the environment.

If Biddeford is going to continue growing, that growth must be lawful, transparent, and equitable. Instead of relying on a few large developers, the city should focus on “missing middle housing”—moderate-scale options like ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, and small multifamily homes that fit existing neighborhoods and create true affordability without massive subsidies or environmental harm.

The next mayor and council must restore public confidence, finalize a compliant Comprehensive Plan, and ensure that every developer is held to the same legal standards. Liam LaFountain has shown that kind of steady, fact-driven approach—someone willing to listen, ask hard questions, and put residents’ interests first.

If Biddeford is going to grow, it should grow with integrity through leadership that listens, plans responsibly, and protects the people who call this city home.