The Presque Isle Rotary Club’s 70th annual auction is off and running with a twist on tradition, a television homecoming and the aim of funding a new playground in downtown Presque Isle.
The Rotary Auction Store opened on Saturday, Nov. 18, at the Aroostook Centre Mall with $40,000 in donated merchandise up for sale or silent auction, ahead of the televised auction on Dec. 16.
Shortly after the store opened at 10 a.m. Saturday, a small stream of shoppers trickled in to peruse the items.
“We just had our first ‘buy it now’ and it was a fellow Rotarian from Grand Falls, New Brunswick,” purchasing a commemorative Canadian silver dollar donated by Eagle Hill Stamps & Coins, said Jason Parent, co-chair of this year’s Rotary Auction and executive director of the Aroostook County Action Program.
With the aim of raising funds for a new playground and other community projects, the Rotary Club is holding its annual television auction while also selling donated items in a retail store through a silent auction, where people can bid on items, or purchase them on the spot for a set price.
“We’re really pushing the donate now. This is a great way to give back to your community and help raise funds,” said Clint Deschene, auction co-chair and assistant superintendent at Maine School Administrative District 1.
“There’s an ice scraper over there. It’s worth $17, but if you make a $19 donation, you get it and the $2 donation goes straight to the project. But if you don’t want to do that, throw down a bid and we’ll call you December 17.”
The Rotary’s auction usually raises around $30,000 with proceeds funding the civic club’s ongoing projects — such as giving free thesauruses to Presque Isle students and sponsoring scholarships — and a special community project.
This year, that project is a new community playground at Presque Isle’s Riverside Park. The Rotary is collaborating with the United Way of Aroostook, the Presque Isle Kiwanis Club, and the city of Presque Isle to make it happen.
Between the auction, ongoing fundraising with both big and small donors, and possible grants, the groups are hoping to raise at least $100,000 and as much as $250,000 by next summer. Depending on how much is raised, there are different playground models with a range of structures and accessories the groups could choose for the park, Parent said.
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- Jason Parent, executive director of the Aroostook County Action Program and co-chair of the Presque Isle Rotary Club’s 70th annual auction, assists an early shopper at the Rotary Auction Store in the Aroostook Centre Mall on Saturday, Nov. 18. (Anthony Brino)
The former playground at Riverside Park was removed to make way for a new $600,000 summer splash pad that will open next summer. The playground equipment there was “well over 40 years old and had to be removed both for safety concerns and to make way for the new splash pad,” Parent said.
So far, the United Way and Kiwanis have raised around $4,000 and several donors have pledged between $15,000 and $20,000 to the playground, Parent said. The city of Presque Isle also has several grant applications pending for funds that would support the new playground, and the grant results will be announced in the first quarter of next year, Parent said.
“By September or October, there will be a new playground,” he said.
The Presque Isle Rotary Club was founded in 1923 and started its annual auction in 1947 — the same year that other community and civic events in the region took off, Parent noted.
“It’s kind of the year for 70th anniversaries,” Parent said. “This was the 70th anniversary of the Potato Blossom Festival in Fort Fairfield.”
While the club is making its first foray into a silent auction store, it’s also bringing its television auction back to WAGM-TV after some 20 years, Parent said.
“We wanted to do something special for the 70th annual auction. The opportunity to go back to WAGM presented itself,” he said.
“The way we’re doing the auction this year reopens it to our friends across the border in New Brunswick. The cable system we were previously using would broadcast downstate but not into New Brunswick. So between WAGM reaching into New Brunswick and the store, we’re hoping to expand our customer base.”
The auction and store features hundreds of different items from local businesses, from snowblowers to dinners to Guatemalan coffee and crafts from the Presque Isle Rotary Club’s recent service trip to the central American country, where they helped bring clean-burning wood stoves. A list of the items is available on the Rotary web site at www.presqueislerotary.org/page/auction.
The auction store also is hosting Wintergreen Art Center’s annual CHAIR-ity fundraiser sale of creatively-made and repurposed chairs, with 100 percent of those proceeds going to the nonprofit art group.
The Rotary Auction store is open Black Friday and Saturdays 10-3 and Sundays 11-3 through Dec. 16.
