NORTHEAST HARBOR, March 11, 2023 - The Wednesday night “sketch plan review” of proposed “workforce” housing here morphed into an unvarnished, communal inquisition by summer residents into the kind of person who might occupy those units, their character, ability to pay their mortgage and whether they can be trusted to keep trash from burdening our Pleasantville.
About 100 persons attended, including 77 on Zoom at one time, with many summer residents dialing in from their winter abodes. Some asked the usual NIMBY-esque questions about traffic, density and safety. Some year-round residents read statements in support.
Then about 90 minutes into the meeting, loaded words like “profiles” began to seep into the discussion, which veered sharply from the normal review of a subdivision application.
One speaker asked the director of MDI 365, the non-profit which is building six housing units on Neighborhood and Manchester roads, how it would monitor the units to prevent the project from becoming “low income.”
She said she wanted to “understand the structure of how people own a ranch or what they'll do and how that will be protected because I know there have been some places that were willed to be housing for low income and then how do you monitor that?”
Another asked how the candidates would be vetted.
Another said, “I'm actually more interested in the profile of the person who actually buys this home or these homes. Who are buying homes that don't really increase in value?
“I'm curious to know what we would expect of the people that actually move in, how long are they actually moving in for?
“My sense is people tend to take less pride in places where they think that they're going to be leaving soon.”
Anticipating questions having more to do with social makeup of the residents than details of a sketch plan, MDI 365 director Kathy Miller trotted out a human example, Steve Anastasia, who works for the National Park Service.
“To answer some of your questions I am what a (workforce housing) resident looks like,” Anastasia said, standing at the podium.
Anastasia’s wife is a former member of the Planning Board who, along with her husband, purchased a house in the Island Housing Trust subdivision in Somesville.
“I go to work in the morning. I come home at night. I have two kids that go to school who have come up through the elementary school and now are in high school.
“The benefits of the house when I bought it to me was that I could afford to live on this island and I could be part of this community.
“What I had no idea about was how much that year-round residence and a year-round community would bring everybody together and create something that was not measurable by dollars, but was measurable by a quality of life that really is very hard to find in other locations related to what happens with the cost of housing.
“When I purchased my house in 2013 in that neighborhood. It was valued at $210,000. With inflation, changes in median income, changes in costs of building, changes in improvements that have been done by me as a homeowner, that house is now worth $330,000. So if you're not stagnant in its value, you're not losing money.
“What you're not creating is an investment that you're going to retire from. But you're creating a home that people can live in, that they can raise their kids in and they can contribute to the town beyond being a resident, beyond being an employee of the National Park Service. I'm also a board member of the Somesville Library. These are the thing that exist because I live in this town.”
Anastasia’s comments did not move Joseph Ryerson, a summer resident who abuts the proposed housing on Manchester Road. Ryerson drew a bead on Anastasia’s not working in Northeast Harbor.
“These houses, are they are going to be limited to people who are going to be working in Northeast Harbor so as to revitalize Main Street so that they're buying their lunch, their coffee, their snacks, their groceries, etc. or is there going to be just for anybody that works on the island anywhere?”
Miller responded, “The goal is to bring back a more robust year-round population. We would not have a requirement that people work in Northeast Harbor in order to be able to live here.”
“What happens if a person who has moved in here loses their job? Is he thrown out?”
Miller answered, “That homeowner is like any other homeowner. If they have a mortgage, they'll working it out with their bank. We're not throwing somebody out. The homeowner can stay there as long as they wish to and can afford to.”
Ryerson then asked what happens if they retire.
Miller responded, “We would not be throwing anyone out if they retire.”
Ryerson said, “So you build six for 12 family workforce, family units, whatever. And somewhere down the road, these become retirement homes. They're not workforce anymore. What's the point?”
Miller responded, “They maintain their affordability for people who have worked until they retired and now those people can continue to live in the house they've owned for however long.”
The QSJ wrote in December that the protest against the project came mostly from summer residents and that they were facing a backlash after several letters in the Islander. More than 200 mostly summer residents signed a petition last September opposing the project. In January a counter petition received 246 signatures in support of the project.
Select member Martha Dudman, College of the Atlantic President Darron Collins and Friends of Acadia President Eric Stiles, who recently was able to purchase a home on the island, spoke in support of MDI 365.
One speaker lamented that this has turned into a summer residents versus year-round residents imbroglio.
Tracey Aberman said:
“I feel like there's a lot of hot button sort of terms that gets thrown around to make summer residents whose town this is also seem like if you don't support this project, you don't support workforce housing.
Aberman said some folks are “spinning” the idea that Northeast Harbor “was dying” in the winter.
“I don't think that's the case anymore,” she said on Zoom from her winter residence not in Maine. She runs a restaurant on Main Street which is open only in the summer.
What’s the path to settlement of cruise ship lawsuit?
BAR HARBOR - Ocean Properties, the Walsh family enterprise, may feel the largest sting from the granting of “discovery rights” to Charles Sidman and his Portland lawyers by U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker.
Unlike the local plaintiffs trying to stop the 1,000 daily cruise-ship-visitors limit, OP has a geographically diverse empire.
It is politically active as the largest hotel operator in Florida, and as Ron DeSantis moves into national prominence, the timing is propitious to peek into the inner workings of OP.
Founded by Thomas Walsh in Brewer in 1969, The Walsh family business is the biggest hotel operator in Bar Harbor and runs the pier and tenders which ferry passengers ashore.
Entities owned by Mark Walsh, vice president of Ocean Properties, gave $995,000 to Friends of Ron DeSantis, the political committee operated by the governor, according to data collected by the Florida Division of Elections and analyzed by the Miami Herald.
In 2021, a Republican-controlled Florida legislature overturned Key West’s local referendums severely limiting cruise ships which was passed by 60 percent of the voters. (Bar Harbor’s citizens’ cap of visitors Nov. 8, 2022 also was passed by 60 percent).
On July 1, 2021 Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation which threw out the three voter-approved referendums passed in November 2020 that banned ships with 1,300 or more passengers from docking in Key West and limiting visitors from ships to 1,500 passengers per day.
Walsh’s company helped finance the opposition to the three referendums in Key West. The Herald reported the effort involved a disinformation campaign, funded in party by a “dark money” scheme that included contributions from the cruise industry, which publicly stayed out of the campaign.
Sidman’s discovery of all that political activity would force-open the family’s black box and harness much information about its operations which would be made public unless the judge seals them. How far Judge Walker is willing to let Sidman pursue discovery is unknown. This Trump appointee already has surprised many, especilly his recent ruling giving Sidman intervenor status in the suit against the town.
Sidman has leverage and will be reluctant to give up too much.
But he’s going to have to give up something if a settlement is in the cards. All three parties must be able to claim victory. For the plaintiffs it will be only about the numbers - somewhere north of 1,000 visitors allowed to disembark.
At what point in the discovery process will the pain be too much for OP? After all, the tendering business here is a very small chunk of its revenue.
There will be plenty of horse trading as judges often apply pressure on parties to settle and avert a trial. Walker may disallow Sidman’s motions if he doesn’t sense cooperation. Any settlement would require an amendment to the town Land Use Ordinance which established the visitor cap.
The plaintiffs call themselves Association to Protect and Preserve Local Livelihoods.
Webster’s Dictionary identified “livelihood” as “the condition of remaining in existence; an essential characteristic quality of something that exists; the character possessed by whatever is logically conceivable; means of subsisting, such as the minimum (as of food and shelter) necessary to support life and a source or means of obtaining the necessities of life.”
Would the the plaintiffs have to show their human existence was threatened by the loss of seasonal cruise ship revenue?
I have a fond memory of watching France win the World Cup at Geddy’s in 1998.
Did Geddy’s make much money in 1998? If so, how much? Only a legal discovery will settle the question. That will certainly be relevant to the current owners’ claim that their “livelihood” is threatened by the cap of cruise ships. Geddy’s is one of the businesses suing the town, along with Testa’s, Jalapeno’s, Cherrystone’s, as I reported last week.
During the pandemic ban on cruise ships in 2021, when only ships with 100 or fewer were permitted, some businesses actually benefitted from the influx of consumers with deeper pockets on smaller ships and yachts which would not have come here in most years because of congestion in the harbor.
A local florist said those customers ordered cut flowers to be delivered, a sudden opportunity which did not exist with large cruise ships.
So how truly devastating would a 1,000 daily cap be?
The citizens ban allows 61,000 visitors in September and October, whereas the town plan with cruise ships at 4,000 passengers a day imposed “days without ships” and put out a 65,000 monthly limit.
The limit is not nearly as bad as some businesses say, according to Julie Veilleux, owner of Window Panes on Main Street.
“We’ve always preferred to have quality over quantity. I'm selling more quality, useful functional household items and gift items compared to t-shirts and magnets and little trinkets.”
Other like-minded businesses? Veilleux called out Spruce and Gussy, Island Artisans and My Darling Maine.
“It's getting harder and harder to find employees. And so you bring all these ships in and and especially in September and October. Suddenly, half your workforce is gone. And you're like, well, now what do we do?
“You're trying to find people because potentially we have to be armed and ready for these numbers of ships that are coming in whether we see the impact or not.”
“We've been here for 29 years. When we first started in ‘94 there were about 45 ships that came. We were seeing a lot more smaller ships back then. We were seeing more adventure ships. The National Geographic actually came several times. That brings more of that quality customer in my mind.
“So to go from 45 ships in 29 years later pushing the scales at 200. And they're much larger.
“So I feel like for the large masses of people that that are coming off these ships, we’re also losing a large number of residents who typically would come into town.
“I can't tell you how many times I hear from my customers. And that saddens me and there's nothing more than I like to see a local familiar face that I know that's coming in and supporting the small business that I've worked hard at and I'm sticking it out through the, you know, the lean months and to be here for the locals.
Advice to the t-shirt shops? Learn to sell high quality goods that even the locals will buy.
It’s not an existential crisis.
Postscript:
Last week’s column https://theqsjournal.substack.com/p/federal-judge-cruise-ship-industry was read 8,870 times, breaking the QSJ’s previous record by almost 3,000 views.
Mount Desert select board takes long route to solve short-term rentals problem
NORTHEAST HARBOR - Select member Martha Dudman said Monday it was a “small step.”
She did not say whether it was a step forward or backward in recommending that voters at the May town meeting create a mechanism to license short-term vacation rentals.
She, chair John Macauley and member Geoff Wood voted for a new ordinance without knowing how much it would cost to create this layer of bureaucracy. Members Rick Mooers and Wendy Littlefield opposed.
There is also no clear roadmap of what the town would do after licensing such units.
The QSJ reported previously that since Bar Harbor implemented such a registration starting in 2021 there have been no meaningful reduction of short-term vacation rentals. There has been only cost associated with licensing, and now the code officer in Bar Harbor wants $43,000 more to monitor compliance.
The select board can’t even agree on what problem it’s trying to solve.
Select member Rick Mooers said:
“I've been on both sides of this issue, both as a board member a member of the LUZO (Land Use Zoning Ordinance) advisory board and an owner of an LLC has rentals and it's my considered opinion that this ordinance proposed ordinance is not ready.
“It is in my estimation a solution to a problem that is yet to be clearly defined. I've asked this at several of our LUZO advisory board meetings. One clearly is the problem that we are looking to resolve by creating yet another ordinance.
“Our land use zoning ordinance gets thicker and thicker and thicker every year. And when we first formed the LUZO Advisory Board, the sole purpose was to review the entire LUZO and eliminate what was passe, what was in conflict with other issues.
“And here we're going to create an ordinance that doesn't have a clearly defined problem to address. So painting with a broad brush it needs a lot more work in my estimation before it is ever put to the floor of town meeting for a vote.”
Was LUZO even the right committee for the task?
Was there a single renter’s view represented, as the town struggles with fast declining year-round inventory for such renters?
If Airbnb and VRBO short term rentals are the problem, how will a licensing program solve that?
Select member Geoff Wood said he voted for the measure because he was tired of “kicking the can down the road.”
But he may have just done that. By May it will have been almost a year since the select board assigned the LUZO group to make recommendations. It will take another year for full implementation of a licensing protocol.
By then it will be more difficult to enact any meaningful measure to curb such rentals.
At an earlier board meeting Mooers floated the idea of requiring proof of residency for all residential short-term rentals. He said many rentals were essentially small businesses run by out-of-town investors who should be treated as such.
Many municipalities have already implemented such ordinances.
Some are extreme.
The city of Santa Monica has effectively wiped out 80 percent of its Airbnb listings by instituting the toughest regulations on short-term rentals in the United States. The Southern California city said it was spurred by overall increases in housing prices and dwindling housing supply, the same conditions as on MDI.
The new regulations, which have been in effect since June 2015, require anyone putting a listing on Airbnb in Santa Monica to live on the property during the renter’s stay, register for a business license, and collect a 14% occupancy tax from users that will be payable to the city.
In 2019, Santa Monica reached an agreement with Airbnb in which the company agreed to remove illegal short-term listings from its website. As of 2019, the city has only 351 short-term rental properties, or .7 percent of its total homes.
(Last summer, there were 197 Mount Desert listings for short-term rentals on Airbnb and VRBO, or about 20 percent of the town’s housing stock.)
New York has passed laws making it illegal to rent in New York City for less than 30 days without the host present. What this means for Airbnbs is that home shares, apartment shares, or room shares are still allowed, but anyone looking to follow the law and book and entire unit would have to stay for more than 30 days.
San Francisco adopted a similar policy as New York: Airbnb rentals are allowed only if hosts are full-time residents, rentals are capped at 90 days, and all hosts must register with the city. Violators are subject to a fine of $484 a day for first-time offenders and $968 a day for repeat offenders. However, despite these stipulations, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that only a fraction of Airbnb hosts have actually complied with the new law.
Instead of learning from these practices, the select board is running away from taking any serious steps and only creating more paperwork in Article 25.
Mount Desert select members challenge historic village improvement society
MOUNT DESERT - Larry Taylor is a bit of a local hero, so it was surprising to see his work selectively amplified by two select members Monday as an example of questionable town spending.
Taylor is on his 39th year as the caretaker of the trees, lawn, beach and comfort stations for the Seal Harbor Village Improvement Society. He is serving his third generation of summer residents and Acadia National Park visitors. (Is there another human on this island who has performed the same service for four decades going on five?)
Monday night was the final vote on town support for non profits to meet the deadline for the town meeting vote May 2. The $55,000 request from the Sear Harbor VIS was the largest as noted by select member Rick Mooers.
“Obviously, Seal Harbor VIS is quite an outlier amongst the group of improvement societies. Back in, I think 2010, they were asking for 25,000. It's gone up like 30 grand in 13 years, that level of funding for an employee to mow the lawn, to take care of the comfort station and trails, whatever all the different responsibilities with that person has … it certainly doesn't keep pace with the raises that have been given to our own buildings and grounds people are employed by the town.”
Workers with Taylor’s range of skills and reliability are exceedingly rare on MDI, especially those willing to drive here. Taylor lives in Trenton. The VIS started a retirement account for Taylor to ensure his continued service, VIS President Alex Stephens told me two years ago.
In a recent letter to the select board, Stephens stated that the season now extends well into the fall and that the VIS continues to maintain the park at a high standard.
“With costs continuing to rise in everything from essential supplies to insurance, we have had to increase our fund-raising goal each year. Moreover, we have additional expenses for our equipment such as replacing our mower which has been long overdue. While we have sought to meet the rising costs with more aggressive fund raising, it is simply not enough and we are deeply grateful for the support of the town and its generous grant.”
During the season, Taylor rakes the beach every morning and rids the washed up sea weed and trash left by tourists.
That apparently did not convince Mooers.
“We're funding a position over which we have no supervisory responsibility or authority. I had mentioned earlier that I felt that it could be a matter of contracting out for services, and Durlin (town manager) explained that since we've been doing it for so many years that it would be like imposing an ipso facto in funding, and I respectfully disagree with that and given the fact that it is reviewed annually and because you've been doing it for a long time, doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurate and right.”
It was an unusually desultory select board meeting Monday, perhaps because the members faced a deadline for the May 2 town meeting to approve a long list of items for the warrant.
There were errors of fact. There were wide ranging opinions on numerous issues, reflecting the challenges on a small town doing its best with volunteer boards and committees.
It was the same pressure I felt as an executive from aggressive sales manager who wanted to “close out a quarter.”
That pressure “always hits us right about this time,” Select Chair John Macauley said. “We consider it and it's always a little bit late in the game.”
Larry Taylor’s work is noted and supported by village residents, scions of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Charles Eliot and various Pierces, Dunhams and Willises.
“Rockefeller saw the need to have a public park, a place for visitors and residents alike to congregate for celebrations and informal picnics,” according to the VIS history on its website.
“He purchased the five acres of land including an old hotel and several business buildings, and donated it to the town. The Society worked with Beatrix Farrand to design a broad lawn framed by trees with benches where people could meet and enjoy the harbor view. Rockefeller added the small terrace across the street to the park as a memorial to Dr. Edward Dunham, a founding member of the VIS, who died in 1922.”
But perhaps that’s the real grievance - the reflexive pushback against the assumptive privilege of a certain class.
“Something about this just is sticking in my craw that leaves me with questions that have not been answered since 2007,” Mooers said Monday.
“If we approve this, we need to be approving that amount for all the village improvement societies based on some yet undiscovered or explained need or we need to adjust that amount of money in my opinion.”
Jerome Suminsby, president of Northeast Harbor VIS and a former select member, said it was “unfair” to compare Seal Cove with NEH. “They do a colossal amount of work with a paid staff,” he said of Seal Harbor.
“It’s comparing apples and oranges,” he said. Seal Harbor’s is a public park and beach with significant maintenance overhead, while the NEH VIS consists of volunteers who help clean and clear trails in the hills north of the village.
On Tuesday Town Manager Durlin Lunt relayed Mooers’s concerns to the town attorney and was told there were no legal issues in the continuing funding of the VIS.
SH VIS spends about $165,000 to maintain the park, with most it coming from private donations. Another way to view this arrangement is that the town owns a park which gets private donations to pay for most of its maintenance, allowing taxpayers’ money to support other parks and recreational services.
The mother of all such private-public partnerships is the Central Park Conservancy, which pays for most of the cost of maintaining Central Park and allows the City of New York to redirect its funds to other needs.
Support for NEH Chamber cut
NORTHEAST HARBOR - At the same meeting Monday night, the select board reduced the amount for the Mount Desert Chamber of Commerce, which already gets free rent from the town for its visitors center at the marina.
The reduction was made after select member Martha Dudman mistakenly assumed, “The chamber is mostly supported by businesses in town.”
In fact taxpayers are its biggest supporters at $27,000 a year. The chamber collects only about $23,000 in dues from its member businesses.
According to the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, most chambers are “ardent proponents of the free market system, resisting attempts to overly burden private sector enterprise and investment.”
So it is with great irony that the local chamber comes to taxpayers every year with its tin cup while its own membership - many of whom are not even local businesses - pays less.
Also the Mount Desert Chamber of Commerce is only a “Northeast Harbor Chamber of Commerce” as reflect by its signage.
Most taxpayers of Hall Quarry, Somesville, Pretty Marsh, Otter Cove and Seal Harbor get little or no benefit from the local chamber. In fact, you could argue that this tourism-centric organization has actually made it harder for us to enjoy Northeast Harbor by over-flooding it with tourists.
The select board cut the town’s funding to $23,000. It held the line for non-profit grants to $180,000, same as last year, from a total request of $210,000.
In another discussion, questions were raise about funding for the nurses association when it was observed it now provides services beyond Mount Desert.
The select board has no written guideline for the funding non-profits, Town Manager Durlin Lunt said.
Council member votes on library funding after getting paid by library
BAR HARBOR - Elected or appointed official are just as likely to be tripped up by the town’s ethics code working for a non-profit as by a business or industry.
Town Council member Gary Friedmann confirmed this week he recently was engaged to raise money for Jesup Memorial Library.
On Feb. 28 Friedmann played a crucial part in getting the library extra money beyond its normal request for taxpayer support. He arranged for the library director to appear before the council asking for an extra $119,320 on top of its regular request of $160,690 as a “service enhancement.” The Warrant Committee had recommended only the $160,690 amount.
The council voted 5-1, including Friedmann’s yes vote, to grant the extra money using one-time funds from the American Recovery Plan granted to the town.
Member Erin Cough voted no. She and others voiced concern that it would set a precedent for the library coming back each year seeking the higher payout.
Friedmann said his contract with Jesup ended Dec. 31, 2022, but the ethics code makes no mention of the timing of a potential conflict. The QSJ asked him for the length of the contract and is waiting for a reply on whether it involved previous council actions.
The ethics code allows for someone to declare an “appearance” of a conflict of interest and have the council vote on whether the member needed to recuse himself.
In August 2021, Ruth Eveland, former director of the Jesup, also did not declare any appearance of a conflict when she voted in her first action as a new Planning Board member approval of 16 units of staff housing for Ocean Properties. Approval was held up by a lawsuit which the company eventually won after it evicted low-income and elderly dwellers from the apartments.
Mark Walsh of the Walsh family enterprise which owns Ocean Properties, was the largest donor to the library’s Next Chapter capital campaign in 2018 with a gift of $500,000.
Eveland wrote in an email on Aug. 24, 2021, “My judgement and vote at the Planning Board meeting were based solely on the information made available to everyone through the public records. The Jesup is supported widely by many members of the community. I am participating in a few active solicitations, but am not now involved in seeking funds from Ocean Properties.”
Full disclosure: I am also a supporter of the library as well as several non-profits introduced to me by Gary Friedmann.
Hearings next week on legislative bills limiting industrial aquaculture
BAR HARBOR - Two bills restricting the use of coastal waters for industrial aquaculture, including one sponsored by Lynne Williams of Bar Harbor, are winding their way through the legislature’s Marine Resource Committee.
They are scheduled for a public hearing Thursday March 16 at 1 p.m. at the Cross Building, Room 206 in Augusta.
LD 487 establishes regional planning commissions to develop long-term water use plans and ordinances for areas surrounding large bays and other coastal regions.
If passed, Frenchman Bay would be the first region to seek consideration to form a planning group to give the area municipalities some input into in-water development of any submerged land, Williams said.
The bill is bound to be opposed by the state Department of Marine Resources which is loathe to give up control of any coastal waters.
LD 586 would curtail potential pollutants and carbon emission, restrict feed ingredients and prevent “adverse impacts” on native fisheries and seafood production. It is aimed at stopping land-based aquaculture operations in the state.
“An Act to Protect Maine Fisheries from the Effects of Industrial Recirculating Aquaculture Operations” proposed by Sen. Pinny Beebe-Center, calls on the Department of Marine Resources to “ensure that industrial recirculating aquaculture operations do not adversely impact native lobster, shellfish, seaweed or finfish operations.”
In January the QSJ published this article about how the state is promoting Maine’s coastal waters to foreign companies without the knowledge of affected towns.
Lincoln - I'd second Holly's comments regarding LD586. The land-based aquaculture projects in Maine have inappropriately co-opted the term "Recirculating Aquaculture Systems" (RAS) in a way that's very similar to the way American Aquaculture claimed their ocean-based systems were "closed" despite discharging 4.1 billion gallons of untreated, nitrogen-rich effluent each day. This deceptive PR blitz by the industrial scale aquaculture players in Maine is so unfortunate. Why? Because the technology that's being deployed in Maine does indeed require (as you say) that huge volumes of clean water be pumped from our bays that are subsequently discharged dirtier than before. Fish farms require enormous volumes of pumped water for several reasons. First, the water is heavily oxygenated to support fish respiration. Just like an aquarium, if the pumping stops, the fish die. With the scale of farms increasing exponentially, this requirement for pumped water, and the electricity that pumping requires poses huge risks upon failure. After all, what do you do with 70 million pounds of decaying fish?
Delivering all this power to the pseudo RAS facilities now proposed for Maine has a huge carbon footprint, and along with it, the degradation of both air and water quality. Clearly, the permits to burn fossil-based fuels needed for the required water pumping are simply licenses to pollute our air and water. Next, Maine's current, inappropriately labeled RAS systems require huge intakes and discharges of sea water, to the tune of millions of gallons per day. They also consume, each day, huge volumes of groundwater from local aquifers.
Let's look at the saltwater discharges to our bays first. The second reason these systems pump lots of water (after providing for fish respiration) is to remove waste. Waste comes in many forms. Discharges are dirtier in terms of nutrient load (nitrogen) than the intakes. The nutrient load pollutes our bays and often, it's proven not to flush. And, because the concentrated feeding operations that constitute industrial-scale fish farms are nearly ideal sites for disease propagation, the effluent also contains viral and bacterial loads that are proven to have adverse impact on many wild populations. Add to that the well-documented negative impacts from the discharge of chemicals and veterinary pharmaceuticals that are required to keep farmed fish healthy and you can begin to understand why many people feel the supposedly (but false) "RAS" systems operating or currently planned for in Maine are bad for marine environments and the economies that depend on them. These RAS systems also produce vast amounts of solid waste. Some projects suggest that they'll produce fertilizer from the feces and gutted fish waste. However, in addition to being infused with salt, the feces and guts are considered hazardous waste due to the pathogen loads in farmed fish. Bottom line, these facilities are far from zero-discharge. They degrade our environments and the abundance we rely on in all kinds of ways.
Of course to discharge lots of salt water you need to suck it in first. In addition to water, these enormous intakes also suck up and destroy innumerable quantities of larval-stage organisms that are essential to the healthy ecosystems in our coastal ecosystems.
And then of course, despite the claim of being recirculating RAS systems, the systems proposed for Maine also continually draw incredible amounts of groundwater to support the initial stages of salmon life. That perpetual demand depletes aquifers that would otherwise be available to serve other community needs and a growing population.
It doesn't need to be that way. In contrast to the systems proposed in Maine, there are "true" RAS systems. They are tested and proven. They are in commercial operation now. These are the systems LD586 anticipates. They require no saltwater inputs or discharges. They draw groundwater once and split it into the fresh and saltwater pools required to grow salmon. The only additional water these systems ever require is periodic fresh water to replace the water that was in the tissue of harvested fish. These systems produce zero-effluent in terms of nutrients, viral, bacterial, and pharmaceutical loads (in compliance with LD 586). There are no escapes to dumb-down the fitness of wild populations. They biogas digest the fish feces and guts to produce methane that in turn is burned to produce part of the power for the water pumping required to support fish respiration. The rest of the power to pump water is produced renewably by wind or solar. Most importantly, these systems can be built far from the ocean. That means no diesel fuel is burned by trucks to transport farmed fish to consumer markets. And, in fact, these facilities are designed to meet the consumer demand of a particular locale specifically to eliminate long-distance transportation costs.
Here's the catch. Fish raised in these true RAS facilities costs more. Why? Because the technology produces zero-effluent. It costs money to remove waste. The falsely-labeled RAS systems Maine's becoming familiar with are far from zero-effluent as detailed above. The only reason to build these false RAS systems is that the producers don't have to pay for the pollution these plants produce: the carbon impact, and the air and water degradation from burning fossil fuels, the nutrient, pharmaceutical and pathogen loads, the pollution from processing feces and guts, the carbon impact of transporting fish to markets thousands of miles away, or, for the degradation to larval organisms that are destroyed in intakes. Groundwater is preserved for communities, not squandered by a few. Because of all this, over the long term, the pseudo-RAS systems now propagating in Maine are not sustainable. Maine learned this lesson long ago with timber. While the timber industry produced jobs, the pollution from clear cutting and pulp mills killed many rivers and watersheds and their biological diversity for generations if not forever. We extracted resources until they were gone and, as we did it, we polluted and destroyed the abundance of our ecosystems in the process. We should take stock of that legacy as we consider how aquaculture might unfold in our future. Do we want the long-term abundance of the marine resources the state holds for all in Public Trust? Or will we forsake those resources for the short-term benefit of a few (often foreign) investors that come here to extract and deplete our resources for their own gain?
When Maine thinks about aquaculture, it thinks about selling fish. While that's OK (assuming the use of the "true" RAS technology LD586 anticipates) we should also be thinking of scaling, developing and further commercializing this proven true RAS technology. The world wants sustainably produced food. There's a demand for it. Just look at the exponential growth of more-expensive, but sustainably produced organic produce. Salmon is no different. If Maine catered to this need by selling this technology worldwide, for once we'd be positioned to develop skilled jobs that depend on an educated workforce rather than placing its bets on another polluting, non-sustainable resource-extraction economy that depletes and degrades the pristine abundance that we all have taken for granted for too long in Maine. Maine has the people, the entrepreneurial spirit, the business development and academic skills needed to make this happen. That's what LD586 is all about. Let's do it.
Lincoln - two corrections regarding your most recent writings on LD 586. March 16th is a Thursday not Friday. Second and most important, LD 586 is NOT a bill that " ..is aimed to stop land-based aquaculture in the state". Quite the opposite!
It is a bill that calls for practical rulemaking in order to SUPPORT and ACCELERATE land-based aquaculture in the State of Maine. Land-based aquaculture can and SHOULD be a boon for the State of Maine...instead of a boondoggle. Because of a lack of simple yet practical rules that are the best practices employed by profitable commercial land-based aquaculture facilities in other states and countries, Maine is losing instead of leading. Maine is so well situated to become a leader in this emerging industry, but it must be an ADDITION to our working waterfront.
To do that some simple rules and guidelines need to be in place. By utilizing zero effluent methods that are already raising and selling as much or more fish than any of the needlessly polluting proposals in Maine to date, this new industry can finally get out from under protest, moratoriums and lawsuits. Make no mistake; those protests, moratoriums and court actions have been and will continue to be necessary until such time as those rules are adopted.
Because; needlessly polluting our coastal waters, risking pandemic levels of viral transmission in circulating tidal bays and rivers, further diminishing eelgrass nurseries needed for all shellfish and finfish which also protect our coastlines from impacts of climate change, and not utilizing renewable energy solutions as primary sources, is needlessly counter-productive.
On one hand Maine has spent millions of dollars and countless hours to bring back sea-run fish that can serve as bait and supports sound recreational fishing. Cities and small towns are working so hard to remove nitrogen and phosphorus from their bays and create natural barriers to shoreland erosion. Yet on the other hand the "gold rush" mentality that is driving the permitting of land-based facilities points squarely at the disconnect that exists.
The way to ensure this new commercial enterprise finally gets off the starting block is to put sensible, practical rules in place as the natural resources that it requires are held in PUBLIC TRUST for ALL to utilize. Maine doesn't need or want 5 facilities that don't utilize these best practices, Maine needs 50 facilities or more that do.