‘Environmental' non-profits called out for endorsement of Belfast salmon farm

Other news: DEP down to one enforcement officer; MDI school 'ed techs' seek to unionize; MRC's latest gambit; Mount Desert's special meeting; whither cruise ships

BELFAST, Maine, Feb. 19, 2022 - The Conservation Law Foundation and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute have come under fire for their support of the Nordic Aquafarms from another environmental group questioning their connection to Central Maine Power, which stands to benefit from the project.

Amy Grant, president of Upstream Watch, accused Maine CLF Director Sean Mahoney of an ethics breach after he rejected her request for legal assistance in 2018, as she was gathering information on the proposed salmon farm here, and then turned around six weeks later to publicly support Nordic.

Amy Grant

Mahoney’s younger brother is the general counsel of Avangrid, parent company of CMP.

The matter is getting sharp focus now because CMP wants approval for a $63 million upgrade of the region’s power grid to fire up Nordic’s massive land-based salmon plant and to pass the cost to ratepayers. Nordic promises to be a huge customer of CMP, estimating its usage at 28 megawatts.

Sean Mahoney

In a brief interview this week, Mahoney said his brother’s role at Avangrid got no consideration in his decision to write the DEP to endorse Nordic. “I’m not interested in conspiracy theories,” he said.

He then volunteered that he had recused himself on matters concerning CMP and saw no connection between Nordic and CMP when he wrote the letter. Mahoney did not return calls for follow-up questions. QSJ would have asked him what he meant by recusal?

As recently as February 2019, Mahoney penned this endorsement of the CMP corridor, saying it would benefit Mainers. https://www.clf.org/blog/clean-energy-connect-cutting-carbon-pollution/

The Portland Press Herald reported that in May 2018 CLF staff attorney Phelps Turner wrote the PUC that the foundation had established a “conflict/ethical wall” to prevent Sean Mahoney from accessing “any Designated Confidential Information.” But Turner also noted that Sean Mahoney “is otherwise actively participating in the case.”

Mahoney to Grant: ‘Not something we do”

Grant said she reached out to Mahoney in late September 2018 to seek CLF legal assistance and was told “that’s not something we do.” She said she was shocked when he wrote his endorsement letter on Nov. 15, 2018 which, she said, contained incorrect information about the ecology of Penobscot Bay.

“Specifically, Nordic’s discharge is projected to include total suspended solids (TSS), biological oxygen demand (BOD), nitrogen and phosphorous,” Mahoney wrote. “TSS would be discharged at levels below background levels for the receiving waters of Penobscot Bay.”

Grant stated, “They make a comment about the TSS being lower than what is in the bay presently,” as if TSS is necessarily bad for the environment. “TSS are what is alive in the water. It’s the tiny bits of plankton, silt, sand and other positive things that mean the ecosystem is healthy.

“The idea that perfectly clear water is better is just moronic and shows they have no idea what they are talking about.”

CLF spokesman Jake O’Neill, stated that the foundation “always performs its due diligence before deciding to support or oppose any project, and the Nordic Aquafarms case is no different. We base all of our decisions on the best available facts and science, and outside politics or donations do not play a factor.”

Reporter Ethan Andrews of the Free Press in Camden broke the story in December 2020 on CMP’s request to use a cost-sharing formula among New England states to pay for the $63 million upgrade of Section 80, one of three transmission corridors in the Midcoast which had been under consideration since 2007.

Nordic is expected to pay only for the cost of its infrastructure, and that is under negotiations, he reported.

GMRI took over $100,000 in donations from Scott Mahoney, Avangrid

The second non-profit in the cross hairs of environmentalists is Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which claims to have been the first to detect the rapid warming of the gulf.

GMRI director Don Perkins, said its endorsement of Nordic was not influenced by donations from Avangrid, whose foundation was among the largest contributors in its 2020 annual report.

Scott R. Mahoney, Avangrid’s general counsel, also sits on the GMRI board. He and his wife gave more than $25,000 to GMRI in 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to its annual reports.

CFL and GMRI were the only Maine environmental groups to publicly support Nordic, which was not shy about peddling those endorsements to gain political advantage in the heat of its battle against opposing activists.

In an email obtained by journalist Lawrence Reichard of Belfast through a Freedom of Information Access request, it was disclosed that Janet Mills’s Republican brother Peter wrote the following to her and senior staff members in January 2019:

”From: Peter Mills <pmills@mainelegal.net>
To: Janet Mills <janet.t.mills@gmail.com>; Kennedy, Jeremy <Jeremy.Kennedy@maine.gov>
Cc: Ogden, Scott <Scott.Ogden@maine.gov>; Reid, Jerry <Jerry.Reid@maine.gov>; Johnson, Heather <Heather.Johnson@maine.gov>
Subject: Aquafarm in Belfast

It now seems likely that the investors in Nordic Aquafarms will pull their Belfast project after investing millions in development costs. The public fallout will be disastrous for this burgeoning industry that has been endorsed by environmental groups like CLF and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

I have not heard about any responsible opposition. Kim Tucker seems to have paralyzed the DEP—singlehandedly. Or at the very least cut them off from communications and courtesies usually extended to an applicant.”

Kim Ervin Tucker is the lawyer representing the Maine Lobster Union. She is appealing a court decision last October allowing Nordic to proceed with project planning. The Mills administration has been a loud and consistent supporter of CMP and its corridor through Maine which was soundly rejected by voters last November.

In December, Maine Judge Michael Duddy denied the motion by Scott Mahoney for a preliminary injunction to delay implementation of the new law passed overwhelmingly by Maine voters to terminate the CMP corridor.

DEP down to one enforcement officer; former staffer: state has ‘anti enforcement mindset’

SOMESVILLE - The state Department of Environmental Protection has only one full-time waste-water enforcement officer, down from a high of four, because the Mills and LePage administrations have refused to fund staff vacancies, according to emails obtained by QSJ and interviews with former and current DEP employees.

DEP now has one vacancy which has not been funded, in addition to its single full-time enforcement officer.

John Glowa, who retired as an enforcement officer in 2017 after 29 years at the DEP, said the agency has an “anti-enforcement mindset.”

“It’s basically don't do enforcement if you don't have to … the only time they really have to is when you know the press or public pressure is high enough to force them to do,” said Glowa, who faces an uphill climb to try to get 2,000 signatures so he may get on the ballot for the June Democratic primary to run for governor.

Glowa said Maine’s aquaculture licenses “are often written to contain as little monitoring as possible.”

“There's no requirement that any violations be reported. The entire system is self reporting,” Glowa said.

He cited the die-off of 116,000 salmon in pens last August at the Cooke Seafood farms off Black Island south of MDI. QSJ previously reported in emails obtained through the Freedom of Access Act that state officials were hesitant to pursue a full investigation of the incident.

“The funny thing about it is the spin that was put on that issue - well, they probably didn't violate the license,” Glowa added. “But they did violate a 38 MRSA section 413 which says ‘You shall not discharge pollutants without a license.’ They violated the Clean Water Act because they discharged pollutants. Dead Fish are pollutants. Scales are pollutants, chemicals and wastes from rotting carcasses are pollutants. Those are violations of federal and state law.

“DEP has what's called administrative discretion to choose whether or not they will actually enforce the law. And in that case, the department said we're not going to take enforcement action. The department did not acknowledge that they violated state and federal law.”

“That was basically the case back then. And there was absolutely no, to my understanding, to my knowledge, any consideration for ever doing any enforcement action against the aquaculture industry.

“Maine's statutes dealing with environmental enforcement were written to benefit the violators. They're written to benefit the polluter. They are so cumbersome, and so time consuming and so difficult to navigate and so complex as to make enforcement actions almost impossible to do that.”

Glowa retired before the DEP fined Cooke $157,000 on various violations in 2019.

The DEP enforcement division is separate from its licensing division which is separate from the Department of Marine Resources, which grants licenses for fisheries. Last week, a senior DMR official testified at the legislature that her agency did not have the resources to evaluate large projects such as American Aquafarms’s 120-acre salmon farm proposal in Frenchman Bay. Deirdre Gilbert, DMR policy director, seeks to create a “special fee” of $250,000 to enable DMR to staff for such project evaluations.

She would not comment when QSJ reached her on Friday to ask whether she felt the DMR had the necessary expertise and resources to properly evaluate the AA application.

Glowa said the entire time of the LePage administration until his retirement in 2016, he was not given any enforcement work.

Former colleagues painted Glowa as a strict constructionist of enforcement language “who saw things as black and white.”

“He probably made some enemies. He was a bit dogmatic about things and that kind of turned off people, in an organization that has gone through periods of politicization.

“But what he told you is accurate.”

Bar Harbor citizens group finalizing draft of cruise ship petition

BAR HARBOR - “Russia will invade Ukraine 10 times” before the cruise ship industry will negotiate in good faith, said the man behind the citizens petition to curb visiting ships, as he mocked the Town Council’s Tuesday night vote giving up the fight in 2022.

That would be Charles L. Sidman, MBA, PhD, angel investor and managing partner of ECS Capital Partners, an early-stage venture fund based in Bar Harbor.

Sidman has negotiated more deals than all of the council members and town manager combined.

And there was this quip from activist attorney Arthur Greif:

“Expecting the cruise ship industry to negotiate in good faith is like expecting Bernie Madoff to give you good investment advice.”

Greif is a successful civil rights and employment attorney who performs free “pro bono” work in Bar Harbor and has sued the town at least once and jousted with hotelier Ocean Properties several times.

”The Town Council has known since January of 2021 that it had good legal authority to ban or limit the disembarking of cruise ship passengers. Despite this knowledge, it took no concrete action,” he stated, referring to the opinion by town counsel Rudman Winchell in January 2021.

The council hired maritime lawyer William Welte and after a secret meeting in January voted Tuesday night 6-1 against limiting cruise ship visits in 2022.

“It is telling that Attorney Welte's advice to the Town is shrouded in secrecy and that the meetings with C.L.I.A. (Cruise Lines International Association) involving two Councilors and others will be similarly secret.  Financial info disclosed by the cruise industry is not subject to a FOAA request, so there is no reason why actual bargaining and discussion should not occur in public.”

Greif also said limiting cruise ship visits is not a maritime issue.

Tuesday night’s meeting included the usual chicanery from pro cruise ship member Matt Hochman. After Town Manager Kevin Sutherland recommended members Val Peacock and Jill Goldthwait join him to negotiate with the industry for 2023, Hochman attempted to undermine Sutherland by awkwardly trying to put Erin Cough, another pro cruise ship stalwart, on the negotiations team.

The reaction was total silence. His motion did not even get a second to open discussion.

Then just as quickly, Hochman revised his motion to name Peacock and Goldthwait as negotiators which was passed unanimously.

Hochman‘s feign came after council chair Jeff Dobbs, another pro cruise ship member, acknowledged he would not be a good choice to be on the negotiating team because, “I just have too much baggage.”

None of this matters because Charles Sidman and his citizens group are close to finalizing its petition which will likely be on the November ballot and call for Bar Harbor to curtail cruise ship visits in 2023. Sidman’s group has no reservation about the town’s legal rights.

So why do we need a Town Council committee?

Or was this just a ploy by Sutherland to off load the responsibility to the petitioners?

In an informal survey by QSJ, advance bookings for lodging in 2022 is ahead of the record 2021 season. The 290,000 forecasted passengers will add more than 20 percent more tourists to that mix.

School ‘ed tech’ staff wants ‘equity,’ forms collective bargaining effort

BAR HARBOR - The Town Council should hire Carrie Joyce to help it negotiate with the cruise ship industry. She could certainly use the extra money, and the council certainly could use her talent.

Joyce, a surprise speaker at the regional school board meeting Monday night, stole the show with a brilliantly effective plea, laced with imprecations, for a more “equitable” work life as a part-time education technician at the high school.

“I've gone home with bruises from being kicked and punched. I’ve been urinated on and vomited on. And I've been in some scary situations where the police had to be called. And if you want to ask, in light of all that, why I still keep coming every day it’s because it was my job.”

Many “ed techs” are assigned to help with special education and some care for students one-on-one.

She was followed by several parents and teachers who used the public comment period of the meeting to raise awareness for a collective bargaining effort on behalf of ed tech staff at the high school, Trenton, Tremont and Southwest Harbor, where custodians and other support staff have joined the talks.

(GLOSSARY: MDI schools have an org chart more complicated than the U.N. There are school boards for every town and one for the regional MDI school board which also includes Trenton.)

Interim superintendent Michael Zboray said the school system has about 90 ed techs. Bar Harbor has its own collective bargaining effort and Mount Desert has decided not to participate, he said. The new union is seeking a contract starting the summer of 2022. Most contracts are for three years.

No doubt both sides are hoping for a less contentious negotiations than the teachers contract which was ratified in December after the union filed an unfair labor practice complaint and several school board negotiating team members resigned.

The new contract provides teachers with a 3.77 percent salary increase this year, a 5.85 percent raise next year and a 6.39 percent raise the following year. That is an aggregate salary increase of 16.01 percent over the three years of the contract. It represents a compromise between the union’s most recent proposed increase of 17 percent and the school board’s offer of 15 percent. 

The surprise comments Monday night do not bode well for the negotiations.

In her speech, Carrie Joyce said, “I make $19.93 an hour. And I've been doing this for six and a half years … now those don’t sound like the end of the world but you have to consider that we don't get 40 hours a week.

“My gross income for this job in 2020 was just over $20,000 And there's just no way to get by on that, especially around here. I worked part time as a custodian here at MDI to help make ends meet. If I switched to the custodian crew full time, I would actually make more money. I would get 40 hours a week and at work during vacations and I'd have more opportunities for overtime.

“The theme in this district this year has been equity. We hear that word all the time … how can we possibly have equity when there are employees in this district who have to work multiple jobs and still struggling to pay for basic necessities. After school vacations, I get my groceries at the Bar Harbor food pantry. If the teachers are worried about being able to afford to live here, just imagine what kind of situations we find ourselves in? We are not asking for a luxurious lifestyle. I just want a stable place to live and I want to be able to do important things like go to the dentist.

“People have often asked me why don't you just get another job. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that is what about the students? The kids that I work with need consistency, stability and people who know their individual needs.

“And we lose good people, really good people, because we just don't get paid enough. At some point over the next couple years I will probably be one of them.”

You may watch her speech 10 minutes into this video:

Vote yes at March 8 special Mount Desert town meeting! Protect our town!

Northeast Harbor's first ambulance, purchased in 1937, in front of the Fire Station and Municipal Offices. The ambulance was a Packard and cost $4000. From left to right, Fred Kimball, Larry Wass, Elliot Kimball.

NORTHEAST HARBOR - The wealth of summer residents have made Mount Desert the envy of Downeast. From Charles Eliot to the various Rockefellers, this town, more than any other, has benefitted from a $2 billion tax base made possible by summer folk and which is bigger than that of the entire county of Piscataquis.

Moreover, the summer people do not strain the schools, the most expensive cost center. They do not chew up our roads in winter. They pour money into the library, historical societies, garden clubs and the like which make everyone’s summers memorable.

The town office building was a gift from the founder of the Friendly’s restaurants. Billionaires like Mitchell Rales and Charles Butt make it possible for the under-served to receive housing and other services.

Since 1938, the town’s ambulance service was just such a entity, a private non-profit supported by grants and donations. It stayed private while the fire department became municipally supported in 2011.

Now comes time for another change as circumstances have made it impossible for it to continue as a small, private ambulance service, given the national crisis of declining volunteerism and frontline workers.

The town needs the scale of a bigger operation to be competitive and the synergy of responders with both fire fighting and EMT skills. Fire fighters who are in huge demand are moving to cities and towns with more favorable working schedules. To be competitive, Mount Desert needs to add another shift.

And the need is exploding. The fire department responded to 310 calls in 2021, 100 more than 2020. And 2022 is expected to be another record year.

“For the past five years I've been telling the (select) board, I've been telling the warrant committee that our on-call (volunteers) firefighters are steadily declining,” said fire chief Mike Bender at a recent public forum. “This is not just in Mount Desert. This is in eastern Maine. This is in the whole state of Maine. This is in the whole country. It's a trend that's been happening for years and years and red flags have been popping up everywhere.

“My concern is that at some point, you're going to have a major incident on a weekend or at night when I have no full-time people here. And somebody is going to have to answer that individual why we didn't have sufficient response due to that fire or EMS call.”

Hear chief Bender explain the benefits of combining fire and EMT personnel and 24/7 service in this video:

Year-round residents have an opportunity on March 8 to ensure that all citizens are protected, including summer people who contribute an outsized percentage of economic support while using services - firefighting, police and ambulance - for only a few months.

A special town meeting in March can be unpredictable given the paucity of winter people and because it has to be in-person.

For all our collective benefit, please vote yes March 8 at 6 p.m. at the elementary school on Articles 5 through 9!

MRC wants taxpayers to fund takeover of defunct Hampden waste plant

SOMESVILLE - Would you double down on the Municipal Review Committee?

Would you write a check to support its latest gambit?

This is not a trick question.

According to the Bangor Daily News, MRC now wants taxpayers’ support to claw back the rights it gave to the bondholders who spent $70-$90 million to build the colossally failed enterprise known as Fiberight in Hampden on the promise that it would be the most advanced waste disposal plant on the planet.

That experiment lasted nine months. Fiberight closed its operation in May 2020.

Proving its susceptibility to sidewalk pitchmen, the MRC signed up another questionable operator a year later despite investigative articles by QSJ and the BDN about failed promises of Delta Thermo Energy.

Tony Smith, the public works director of my town, Mount Desert, was ecstatic when DTE first emerged as a replacement for Fiberight. He told me at the time that DTE was far superior than the other candidates. Perhaps that was because DTE made promises it couldn’t keep?

In May 2021 the MRC gave DTE the keys to the kingdom, including exclusive contracts to 115 towns.

Only DTE could not, as promised, get financing to begin operations.

Investors don’t like to be burned twice. They learn lessons better than politically charged organizations like MRC or the Town of Mount Desert.

The bondholders of the Fiberight detritus have been busy cleaning up the mess and restructuring. The bondholders are in receivership. They are hoping to the best deal on their decaying asset.

Along comes a hungry MRC, signaling its desperation for a deal, about the worst thing you can do in negotiations.

BDN reported MRC now wants to apply for federal and state grants to try and acquire the Fiberight assets.

Already proven vulnerable to all manner of “Magic Trash Tech” pitchmen, MRC is beginning to negotiate against itself.

Embarrassed, self-preserving and defensive, the MRC continues to conduct all its business in secret, talking among itself.

“They seemed to be in kind of a bunker mentality, us against the world, and that can cloud one’s judgement,” said Ed Spencer, who lives less than two miles from the Juniper Ridge landfill and has seen it become a mountain over the last two years when most of our trash went there. Spencer is also leader of Don’t Waste ME, a coalition of communities most at risk from landfill pollution. https://dontwasteme.wordpress.com/

Spencer recalled that Fiberight was able to gain a short-term DEP permit only because it counted the recycled material used as cover at the landfill, fulfilling the 50 percent recycling threshold, “which is really fake recycling.”

If the MRC took on anything more than a small fraction of the Hampden facility, “they'd be overpaying for a plant that never really worked and had end products that were without much value (plastic briquettes or a low grade pulp).”

“It is almost comical to hear them talking about being a partial owner of a plant when they actually DID OWN about 25 percent of the PERC plant. They couldn't get along with the PERC owners,” said Spencer.

Penobscot Energy Recovery Company is the incinerator in Orrington which has been handling much of the waste coming from MRC towns the last two years. Four years ago the MRC severed its ties with PERC to pursue Fiberight.

Spencer said MRC should work with PERC and give up on the idea of restarting the Hampden plant.

“If that were coupled with some of the sorting machinery from Hampden there could be a chance for really improved outcomes. I could see a two-tiered tip fee system where towns with a more robust recycling effort and outcomes would pay at a lower rate than those who can't be bothered. This incentivizes good behavior. There needs to be some continuity and I don't see any evidence that the MRC is capable of running a plant successfully that really never worked. I know incineration sucks, but landfilling is worse.

“At the very least the MRC should let the bondholders sweat it out and try to beat them down on a price. The problem is that the towns are tied to a defunct plant by contracts they never should have signed. It seems that if the towns have to share in some legal expenses, it would be better spent doing whatever it takes to disentangle from their Fiberight contractual obligations.”

Tony Smith, nor any MR member, has never offered insights such as that of Spencer’s.

It’s time for the MRC to exercise a moral and ethical duty and unlock the grip it holds on 115 towns so we as citizens of the planet may seek a solution for the continuing damage we inflict on the environment.

A summer enclave in search of year-round businesses

NORTHEAST HARBOR - Wanted: An affordable grocery store to serve a year-round community. See above video.

With a not-so-subtle knock on the town’s only grocery store on Main Street, the consensus of those participating in two “community listening sessions” was that the village badly needs a store with prices catering to working folks.

Kathy Miller, director of MDI 365 who hosted the sessions, said part of the problem may be solved by the College of the Atlantic, which is building four apartments at 141 Main Street. COA plans to open a food retail business, consisting of produce from Beech Hill Farm and meat and dairy from the Peggy Rockefeller Farm, and takeout food from a sole proprietor.

The organic offerings will not be cheap. But the takeout will need to consider the 15 students who will be occupying the apartments, Miller said.

At the second session this week, a used-clothing center was discussed.

QSJ noted that such a retail operation is a major draw of shoppers to Old Greenwich, Conn., where I purchased a Zegna sports jacket for $35 about 15 years ago.

It started as an extremely popular annual rummage sale at a church and opened as a store in 1964.

https://www.fccog.org/about-us/the-rummage-room/

Northeast Harbor has all the right ingredients for such an enterprise. It has rich people who possess lots of quality stuff. I know because I have picked at some of this stuff during the town’s annual spring clean-up week.

And it would fulfill the primary goal of bringing people into the village year-round.

The two listenings sessions exhibited a strong esprit and shared interest among the participants. You may register for future sessions here:

https://mountdesert365.org/