FREEPORT

The Maine Innkeepers Association plans to relocate to Augusta next year, where it will operate under the same roof — and the same umbrella company — as the Maine Restaurant Association.

A separate company, called Hospitality Association Management Services, will be formed to provide concurrent management services of the two groups.

Although the two associations will exist under the same roof, they are not being joined together.

“Don’t use the ‘M’-word,” cautions Greg Dugal, MEIA’s current executive director, who will become the chief executive officer of the new company.

“It’s going to be owned jointly by the MEIA and MRA,” Dugal said told The Times Record on Tuesday. “There’ll be an agreement drawn up between the associations and management group to start,” he said. “But each of the associations will remain the same.”

They will maintain their own independent boards of directors, budgets, staffs and identities, he added.

Three officers from each of the respective boards will make up the directorial board of the new management company.

Both the MEIA and the new company will be located in the MRA’s current storefront at 45 Melville St., barely a half-mile from the State House in Augusta.

In part, the geographic and personnel changes are catalyzed by the impending Dec. 31 retirement of longtime MRA president and chief executive officer Richard “Dick” Grotton.
The two associations will begin the search for Grotton’s replacement on July 8, with the goal of hiring somebody by Oct. 15.

Dugal and MEIA’s two other office staffers will be in the new Augusta office by January 1, 2014.

The current building at 304 U.S. Route 1, which also has a residential tenant in addition to the MEIA, will be put up for sale.

Maine Innkeepers Association bought the space in 2002 for $208,000; it currently is assessed at $263,500.

“There’s enough space in the MRA’s office for everybody, that’s what makes it nice,” Dugal said. “We’ll put up some framing and sheetrock to partition it off, and then everybody will have the space they need.”

The MEIA once was located on Commercial Street in Portland, but has been in Freeport since 2002, when then-director Nancy Gray – who owns the Harraseeket Inn on Maine Street — found the current empty storefront and decided the group should be housed there.

Maine Innkeepers Association has approximately 500 lodging members. However, with allied and associate members, the roster swells to about 650 from Fort Kent to Kittery.