Contractor sues over unpaid $255K

A payment fight on a factory job in central Maine has spilled into court. Bangor Daily News reported on April 7 that an electrical contractor sued New Balance, seeking $255,000 it says it is still owed for work tied to the company’s factory expansion in Skowhegan. The dispute sits inside a much larger project: New Balance’s $65 million buildout of its Maine manufacturing footprint, the expansion the company unveiled in September 2025 after more than two years of construction (bangordailynews.com, newscentermaine.com). That scale matters. This was not a small renovation where one owner and one subcontractor can settle up with a few calls and a revised invoice. The Skowhegan project added 120,000 square feet to New Balance’s existing plant and was designed to absorb work from the company’s Norridgewock factory, which New Balance said in July 2024 would close as operations moved six miles away to the expanded site. By the time the new facility opened, more than 400 workers were under one roof, and New Balance said the plant would be able to produce 1 million pairs of shoes a year (mainebiz.biz, centralmaine.com, newscentermaine.com). Big projects like that create the perfect conditions for a payment dispute. Work changes. Schedules slip. Extra tasks show up in the field before the paperwork catches up. By the end, the legal question is often less dramatic than it sounds: what exactly was in scope, who approved additions, and which party is responsible for the final unpaid balance. The public reporting available so far points to a straightforward claim for money allegedly due, not some broader challenge to the factory itself or to New Balance’s Maine strategy (bangordailynews.com). That makes the lawsuit feel ordinary in one sense and revealing in another. New Balance has spent years presenting the Skowhegan expansion as a symbol of American manufacturing, and the facts behind that pitch are real. The company broke ground in June 2023, invested $65 million, folded Norridgewock production into the new “Central Maine” facility, and drew Maine’s congressional delegation to the opening ceremony. But even a flagship manufacturing project still runs on contracts, subcontractors, and invoices. A factory can be shiny and strategic and still leave someone fighting over a quarter-million dollars in court (mainebiz.biz, centralmaine.com, newscentermaine.com). Maine’s court system has been shifting more records into electronic access, but public detail on newly filed civil cases can still be thin at first, especially before motions, responses, or attached filings flesh out the story. So the clearest facts right now are the simplest ones: an electrical contractor says New Balance has not paid $255,000 for factory-expansion work, the claim was reported on April 7, 2026, and the money at issue is tied to the same Skowhegan project that New Balance celebrated just months ago as the future of its Maine shoe production (courts.maine.gov, bangordailynews.com, centralmaine.com).