CAMDEN — Borden Cottage, the alcohol and drug rehabilitation center at Fox Hill Estate, is ready for business. Floors are polished, staff is being trained, and a catering contract with Camden Harbour Inn is all but signed. What’s left for this Maine venture of the Massachusetts-based McLean Hospital is to admit clients seeking separation from drugs and alcohol, and who can pay up to $60,000 for a month of such treatment.

“We are ready to receive them,” said Frederick Goggans, the Camden doctor who is heading up McLean’s Borden Cottage program.

They will come, McLean is convinced, because the 14-acre facility, is secluded, serene and well-appointed, and staff members — counselors, social workers and nurses — are topnotch, they say, in the field of rehabilitative treatment. 

The soft opening of Borden Cottage occurred March 16, when local reporters toured the house, took pictures, and heard more from McLean Hospital’s Philip Levendusky about the business model, and from Goggans, about the care clients — eight at the most — will receive during treatment.

The effort to site a the facility at Fox Hill got off to a rocky start in 2013 when Fox Hill Real Estate LLC, comprising 24 investors, first introduced its fledgling partnership with the Belmont, Mass.-based McLean Hospital to Camden’s Planning Board. The intent was to establish a 12-bed treatment center on outer Bay View Street, in the town’s coastal residential zone. Almost two years later, after 11 public meetings, two municipal board votes, and a lawsuit (the outcome of which resulted in a ruling favorable to Fox Hill), McLean Borden Cottage came to fruition, albeit scaled down to eight beds.  And last November, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services issued McLean a one-year provisional license to operate a behavioral health facility at Borden Cottage.

McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass., is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a member of Partners HealthCare (the umbrella nonprofit that owns a number of Massachusetts hospitals, including Brigham and Women’s, and Mass General). 

This is the first program that nonprofit McLean has established outside of Massachusetts. It is leasing Borden Cottage from Fox Hill LLC, which purchased the land and buildings in 2013 from Ellen Simmons. Fox Hill Real Estate is a for-profit venture and will continue to pay property taxes to Camden on the 16,000-square-foot Borden Cottage, and the six outbuildings that include smaller cottages, office, gym, music studio, recreational center and large garage.

Since acquiring the property, Fox Hill Real Estate has invested close to $2 million in physical plant repairs and improvements, according to Tom Rodman, one of the 24 investors and the primary proponent of the initiative. The cottage and grounds had sat unattended for several years, with sills rotting and stucco falling from outside walls.Currently, the property is assessed at $6.47 million. In 2014, Fox Hill Real Estate payed $93,323 in real estate taxes to Camden.

When Philip Levendusky, senior vice president for business development and marketing, and psychology department director at McLean, stood before the Camden planning and select boards in 2013, he pledged that McLean would also contribute to the community by helping to advance mental health care in the Midcoast.

He reiterated that March 16, in the Borden Cottage kitchen.

“By being here we become part of the dialog,” he said. “It’s our area of expertise.”

McLean, he said, has more than 200 years of experience with substance abuse and mental health issues.

He said the hospital will be a resource for the region, and will bring senior McLean faculty to local healthcare seminars, community education efforts and professional training sessions.

McLean is also banking that its business will generate almost $3 million in local economic activity. Projected revenues from the Borden Cottage program for McLean, he estimated, would be approximately $3.5 million, when operations “ramp up.”

“It is a substantial infusion,” Levendusky said, into the local economy.

He said Borden Cottage is budgeting approximately $1.5 million on salaries and benefits for 20 to 24 fulltime employees, and then another “six figures” on vendors — housekeeping, food, and the 10-12 speciality providers in the community, who offer classes in in subjects such as fitness, smoking cessation, acupuncture, nutrition, yoga, art, meditation and mindfulness training, and massage therapy.

Friends and family visiting patients would be referred to area inns and restaurants, he said.

Besides contracting with the Camden Harbour Inn for catering meals, Borden Cottage is contracting with Jensen Pharmacy, in Rockland.

This week, the operation had 15 to 18 staff members and would hire more, Levendusky said, once it was running at full capacity. He said clients will be arriving in the next week or two.

In July 2013, Levendusky told the Camden Planning Board that the facility would neither be an insurance nor a state-based facility. Clients would not be sent from court or the criminal justice system. Clients would seek treatment voluntarily, and such treatment is not covered by health insurance. 

“This is a self-paid kind of program,” he said. “Unfortunately and fortunately, that will dictate the socio-economic status of the individual,” he said.

He said then the facility’s programs would be directed to a national audience and likened it to McLean’s Fernside center in Princeton, Mass. 

In a March 17 press release, McLean said its Camden initiative is part of a larger effort to expand. 

“McLean recognizes the tremendous need for high-quality mental health and substance abuse care and we are continuing to explore opportunities for expanding our programs to different areas of the country,” said Levendusky, in the release. “We want to broaden our access to people nationally and internationally."

How is the Midcoast to benefit?