GARDINER — Three years after a proposal to redevelop the former MaineGeneral hospital facility in Gardiner into apartments and condominiums, a final decision on the project is expected Wednesday.

Over the course of the past three years, developer Paul Boghossian and the Gardiner Planning Board have spent hours in meetings, working through iterations of the application for the proposed adaptive reuse project on Dresden Avenue, while neighbors opposing the project have turned out repeatedly to express their concerns about how this project could change the character of their residential neighborhood.

In an interview Monday with the Kennebec Journal, Boghossian said his project is the right project and it will be a win-win.

“It’s a great project, and I am still extremely bullish on it,” Boghossian said. “Gardiner is definitely on the ascent, and so is Maine. Increasingly, people are seeing they can live in Maine and make a really good living.”

Three years ago this month, Boghossian gave a presentation of his conceptual plan to transform the obsolete hospital buildings at 150-152 Dresden Ave. into a pocket neighborhood, adapting existing buildings into apartments and condominium units and adding several more condo units as part of a three-phase project estimated to cost $6.6 million.

Initially, the plan called for up to 68 units, but that was immediately scaled back.

At that first public meeting, though, residents of Dresden Avenue and several nearby streets, turned out in force to oppose the project. They were concerned that adding that many residential units would change the traffic flows on Dresden Avenue. Some also took issue with the transient nature of apartment residents, who might not stay for more than a year a time.

Dresden Avenue, which runs parallel to the Kennebec River from the Gardiner Common to Cottage Street, is one of the city’s older, established neighborhoods. Its houses — mostly all built between the 1860s and the 1920s — sit on relatively large lots, and most are single-family residences. Even so, it is located in a zone that allows for high-density residential development, such as apartments.

There are multiple vacant buildings on the property once owned by MaineGeneral. At the time of Boghossian’s initial presentation, hospital officials said feasibility studies showed that bringing just one of the structures to current standards would cost millions.

More than a year after the project was announced, city officials and residents expressed frustration at an October 2021 meeting that Boghossian had failed to provide the information required for the project application to be considered complete so the Planning Board could consider whether to approve it.

Since then, the Planning Board has met with Boghossian several times a year to work through the subdivision application and site plan review, including whether the proposal is sympathetic to the appearance of the rest of the neighborhood.

As it now stands, Boghossian said the Planning Board is considering just the rehabilitation of the hospital building into 34 apartments, ranging from about 600 square feet to 2,300 square feet. That is estimated to cost about $3 million.

Boghossian said completing this first phase is the most important because no one will buy a condominium unit next to a vacant hospital building.

At the start of the Planning Board meeting April 12, Debby Willis, chairwoman of the Planning Board, recapped the board’s recent actions.

“This really has been going on a long time,” Willis said.

In 2022, the application was completed in March. In July, the Planning Board decided the subdivision application and in October, the board started the required site plan review. In December, the board voted the project was not sensitive to the character of the neighborhood based on the standards set out in the ordinance.

That prompted Boghossian to bring a new version of exterior design to the April meeting for the Planning Board to consider.

At that meeting, neighbors continued to express their concerns about how the exterior of the building would appear. Among them, Phyllis Gardiner, who lives nearby on Oakland Farms Road, said the proposed changes did not substantially alter the appearance of a highly visible wall.

“It’s still a very commercial, industrial and modernist type of building that doesn’t fit,” Gardiner said. “The mass doesn’t fit, the style doesn’t fit. It doesn’t create any depth of break up the mass of the wall. We don’t see that this improves the situation of fitting into the character of the neighborhood.”

On Wednesday, Boghossian said he has a reputation for turning around derelict buildings and putting them into beneficial use. He was one of the partners to develop the initial phase of the Lockwood Mills complex into apartments and professional space in Waterville, which was later sold.

He also acquired property in Bethel, near The Bethel Inn, to develop into six luxury apartments that won approval of the Bethel Planning Board in 2009 that was expected to get underway in 2014, but did not.

He has also completed renovation projects of historic and mill buildings in Rhode Island.

Boghossian said Wednesday that probably 90% of the people in Gardiner want the project, and it will boost the city’s tax base. Area residents, he said, are very proprietary of their neighborhood and want to make sure it is the right thing.

“Nobody wants a derelict building and the city wants the building back on the tax rolls in a contributing way,” he said. “Once it’s developed, it will be a revenue generator for the city, and we need the housing.”

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