Caribou - A mail-order pharmacy will bring 40 new jobs and a $9 million investment to Aroostook County according to an announcement officials made Tuesday that the company will open a packing and distribution center in Fort Fairfield.

I Care Pharmacy, which fills mail-order prescriptions, began providing services this week to MaineCare clients previously served by PIN Rx, the Penobscot Indian Nation’s mail-order pharmacy. Ten I Care employees started up operations Monday out of the former PIN Rx facility at Indian Island near Old Town. Company officials plan to relocate operations to Fort Fairfield by mid-April.

PIN Rx is under state investigation for allegedly dispensing $3 million in drugs on the Internet without verifying prescriptions. The Governor’s Office of Health Policy and Finance helped the Penobscot Indian Nation develop the pharmacy, which opened in October 2005. Officials said the pharmacy would provide economic development to the tribe as well as fill MaineCare prescriptions for less cost than a retail pharmacy. The program for low-income Mainers was expected to save an estimated $5 million a year. Fewer than 1 percent of MaineCare participants, about 3,000 people, however, switched from local pharmacies to PIN Rx.

I Care Pharmacy now will serve those Mainers and has long-term plans of serving clients throughout Maine and in other states.

"An opportunity arose," Jerry Tanner, president and co-owner of I Care Pharmacy, said Tuesday. "We’re trying to keep this in Maine so it employs Maine people and Maine gets to keep the revenue. ... When you start pulling resources out of the state, it affects your economy. Once those dollars leave, you know as well as I do that they don’t come back. And since I’m living here, I’m going to do as much as possible to prevent that."

Tanner has lived in Fort Fairfield for about two years. He and business partner Terry Greenier, originally from Fort Fairfield, have home health care and pharmacy businesses in Alaska that employ about 700 people and are worth about $20 million. They also own the Irish Setter Pub on Main Street in Presque Isle.

They co-own I Care Pharmacy, a branch of T&G LLC, with local pharmacists Heather Cassidy and Alan Wiseman.

Local economic development officials said the company’s creation and decision to locate in Aroostook County was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

Walt Elish, president and CEO of the Aroostook Partnership for Progress, said Tuesday that he approached Tanner about a month ago after APP officials learned that he was considering starting a business in Maine similar to those he maintains in Alaska. Soon after that, the news broke about PIN Rx, and in the past week, the sale of PIN Rx to I Care has been completed.