State says no to small oyster, sea urchin farm; does that mean proposed salmon farm in trouble?
SOMESVILLE, April 17, 2021 - The state on Friday denied an application from an organic seaweed farmer who wanted to raise oysters and sea urchins in Frenchman Bay, raising the question of whether it set a precedent for another application for a much larger farming proposal from American Aquafarms.
Patrick C. Keliher, commissioner of the Department of Marine Fisheries, denied the application from Springtide Seaweed LLC stating that the fishing gear would interfere with existing lobster fisheries in July and August. His decision may be read here. https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MEDMR/2021/04/16/file_attachments/1757257/EXECUTED_AMENDMENTDECISION_FREN%20STA2_SpringtideSeaweed.pdf
Springtide founder Sarah Redmond has been an outspoken critic of a proposal by a Norwegian investor with a criminal record who wants to build two 30-acre salmon farms in the middle of Frenchman Bay.
“It’s the same water that my crop is in that they would be putting their intensive animal farm in,” said Redmond, whose Springtide Seaweed is the nation’s first organically certified kelp farm.
Redmond said Maine’s rising number of small-scale aquaculture farms holds promise for substantial economic growth that doesn’t overextend ocean ecosystems. Industrial-scale farms, she says, threaten that future.
“We have an incredible place here, and it’s a national treasure. And it’s not an appropriate place to site industrial fish farms, especially as a speculative effort for people from other countries,” she was quoted by Maine Public.
It is unclear what impact the denial will have on Redmond’s other application to be added to a lease in Frenchman Bay of James West, who has had an experimental and commercial horizontal longline culture of marine algae at the 35-acre parcel since 2013.
West, who has been fishing since he was 16, is also an opponent of the Norwegian proposal, saying it would wreak havoc in existing fisheries. He took a video of the proposed sites for QSJ which may be viewed here.
The state’s management of aquafarming is getting intense interest from state lawmakers. Several pieces of legislation have been filed to enable stricter enforcement.
QSJ confirmed this week, for instance, that the state’s largest aquaculture company, Cooke, has not had its environmental discharge permit renewed since 2014.
David R. Madore, deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, replied to a QSJ question by email, stating he was too busy to take a call.
“The Net Pen Aquaculture General Permit (GP) for Cooke Industries was issued on April 10, 2014. Cooke maintains coverage under this GP for multiple net pen sites. The 2014 GP has not yet been renewed by the DEP, however, the Department has made the determination to renew the GP. Therefore, the 2014 GP continues in force until a new GP is finalized. The Department has not issued an interim permit for this General Permit.”
Why would the state allow a company to continue operations on a 7-year-old expired permit? Could it be that it only has to enforce 7-year-old outdated standards?
Hearings are scheduled starting Tuesday in Augusta for legislation sponsored by Rep. Lynn Williams of Bar Harbor, Rep. Robert Alley of Jonesport and Sen. Troy Jackson of Aroostook County.
The bill, LD1146, requires “all rights conveyed to a lessee under an aquaculture lease revert back to the State at the expiration of the lease term and that transfers or renewals of aquaculture leases must demonstrate compliance with all currently applicable standards at the time of transfer or renewal.
“Further, for leases greater than 5 acres in size, the bill removes the current exemption from compliance with Title 38, chapter 3, including the Natural Resources Protection Act and the site location of development laws. The bill amends the laws governing the lease size requirements to provide that each lease may not exceed 50 acres in area and that a person may not have an ownership interest in more than 10 leases nor total lease areas in excess of 100 acres.”
There is also pressure to toughen monitoring of waste disposed into the water surrounding aqua farms.
You may access the bill here: http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/bills/getPDF.asp?paper=HP0824&item=1&snum=130
Cruise ship survey leading to confusion, mistrust, suspicion
BAR HARBOR- It was suggested by Town Council member Gary Friedmann with all good intentions, but Bar Harbor has a knack for complicating things.
To wit, the survey of residents on the cruise ship industry.
Which apparently is also a survey of non-residents.
The firm managing the survey, Pan Atlantic Research, was hand picked by Town Manager Cornell Knight and will sort and “weigh” the returns.
“If you are not a Bar Harbor resident, taxpayer, or non-resident business owner, you can complete the survey without the personalized code but your input may be weighted differently within the overall results.”
The survey to each household required a code for each member to enter.
As for non-residents, employees of the cruise ship industry apparently are free to pile on their views, leaving the politically charged council and town manager to decide whose opinion to count the most.
A member of another town board, said, “Uncoded responses, they say, ‘may be weighted differently.’ Does this make sense? I don't think it does. Do we want all our friends & neighbors in the surrounding community & beyond to weigh in? We have to -- though it feels illogical, bizarre, & underhanded--because we can't help wondering who else might be filling out surveys.”
Road to proposed quarry not wide enough, says lawyer for planning board in 7-year battle
HALL QUARRY, April 17, 2021 - The attorney for the Mount Desert Planning Board recently informed Chairman William Hanley that the road access to the proposed quarry here “may not be wide enough,” a finding that the lawyers for the neighbors say is a “potential fatal flaw” in the application for a permit to re-open the quarry.
“Now that the hearing(s) for this matter are getting back on track, it seems like a good time to let you know about a potential issue that has come up in regard to the road access to the MacQuinn site; that is, that Crane Road may not be wide enough per LUO s. 6B.11(2),” wrote James Collier in a March 24 email to Hanley.
In his email, Collier also said the applicant has had a year and a half to resolve the issue and, “So far, they have been unable to do so.”
That touched off an exchange between Collier and Roger J. Katz, who is representing members of the Hall Quarry Neighborhood Group, and Daniel A. Pileggi, who is representing the abutters.
Katz said the fact that the applicant had this information “for up to two years” and neither the Planning Board nor interested parties was informed, “and the fact that it is only now, in the bottom of the ninth inning, that you are letting us know, is unsettling to say the least.” The epic fight against the quarry application, and the potential noise from the operation, is entering its eighth year. Residents from across Somes Sound joined the opposition last year.
Collier, who called Katz and Pileggi “whiners” in a telephone conversation with QSJ, replied to them in an email, “You guys make it sound like there is some sort of conspiracy going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the normal process of working on a minor technical issue with an applicant … Simply put, per LUO s. 6B.11(2) when there are more than two lots on a road the road must be brought up to a higher standard - better built and 50' wide, etc.
“What would you have us do whenever there is a potential problem with an application, immediately raise it for all concerned to fight over? “ Collier asked. “As you know, the CEO (chief enforcement officer), the Planning Board and I are neither for, nor against the application, and we all endeavour to treat everybody fairly, including the Applicant.
“With COVID concerns, it seemed like we were on a slow boat toward getting this thing wrapped up. The CEO wanted to raise the issue much earlier on, but I wanted to hold off until we fully explored all possible solutions.
The planning board will discuss the matter at its May 3 meeting, which will be conducted at the high school parking lot. Many Hall Quarry residents do not have internet access to enable a Zoom call.
Here is the public notice of the meeting:
TOWN OF MOUNT DESERT SPECIAL PLANNING BOARD DRIVE-IN PUBLIC MEETING MOUNT DESERT ISLAND HIGH SCHOOL PARKING LOT (FIRST PARKING LOT ON LEFT JUST PAST THE ATHLETIC FIELD) 1081 EAGLE LAKE ROAD, BAR HARBOR, ME 04609 MAY 3, 2021
I. Call to order 6:00 p.m.
II. Quarrying License Application: Public Hearing: A. Quarrying License Permit: #001-2014. OWNER(S): Harold MacQuinn, Inc. OPERATOR(S): Fresh Water Stone & Brickwork, Inc. AGENT(S): Steven Salsbury, Herrick & Salsbury, Inc. LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Edmond J. Bearor, Rudman Winchell LOCATION: Off Crane Road, Hall Quarry TAX MAP: 007 LOT: 075 ZONE(S): Residential 1 (R1) PURPOSE: Review Quarry License Application.
Talk of a new CCC invokes memories of its namesake’s impact on Acadia
SOMESVILLE, April 17, 2021 - Lester Hartford figures big in Jack Russell’s recounting of the Civilian Conservation Corps’s enduring contribution to the modern Acadia National Park.
“He was the paradigm of CCC’ers from Maine who came here and stayed and did good works,” said Russell, the living authority of the CCC on MDI. “I was able to get good stories of Lester and wonderful photographs from the granite museum.”
The most compelling archive was in the form of an interview Lester Hartford gave to the Maine Folklife Center in 2000. It is not be missed by anyone who is a serious devotee of local lore. https://library.umaine.edu/content/NAFOH/audio/mfc_na2640_c1923_01.mp3
Hartford, who lived on Beech Hill Cross Road, died in 2008 at Age 90. His Obituary https://www.jordanfernald.com/memorials/Hartford-Lester/2334512/obituary.php tells of a Mainer who came here without having any idea where MDI was and left behind a remarkable legacy.
The Folklife Center conducted more than 40 interviews with CCC workers who were then in their 80s at the turn of the millenium. Click here https://archives.library.umaine.edu/repositories/5/archival_objects/347561 and see the interviews in the right-side box under “collection organization.”
Russell took his “show” on the road - a talk with a 134-slide presentation - to help celebrate Acadia’s centennial in 2016 of which Russell was co-chair. He had an SRO crowd at the Claremont Hotel and at libraries in SWH, NEH and Bar Harbor. QSJ is trying to get Russell to present again this summer.
The presentation A New Deal for Acadia:
The Civilian Conservation Corps
1933-1942 has been uploaded onto Google Drive where it may be viewed.
Russell was inspired by a painting of “Trail Workers” from the renowned Quietside Artist Judy Taylor.
Taylor wasn’t searching for a muse when she went for a hike on Beech Mountain in 2008 and met a team of trail workers from Acadia National Park. The youthful innocence of the faces, the tanned arms and legs, the sound of the shovels and picks all made for a perfect tableau in her head which transferred to canvas over the period of a year.
A few years later, a visitor to her Seal Cove studio, summer resident Dr. Bert Zbar saw the painting and said, ”That painting belongs to the Friends of Acadia.” Zbar donated it for FOA’s annual auction which was was won by Russell, who in turn donated it to the George Dorr museum at the College of the Atlantic.
The CCC is back in the news these days - as the Civilian Climate Corps, proposed by Joe Biden and modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s “tree army” of the years 1933 to 1942, when 3,000 young men built some of the most enduring aspects of the park, including Ocean Drive, Perpendicular Trail and the Beech Mountain Loop trail.
Then Park Superintendent Dorr recognized that Roosevelt’s CCC was a game-changing opportunity that could catapult Acadia into a new realm. So he petitioned Roosevelt.
“His wish became reality when one of the program’s earliest camps was established at Eagle Lake, the current site of park headquarters,” according to NPS historians. “Soon a second camp was established near Southwest Harbor, the Great Pond Camp. Out of more than 4,000 camps that would eventually be created, only 100 would run the entire span of the program, including the two on Mount Desert Island.”
During the nine years the CCC was stationed at Acadia, they completed hundreds of projects. The majority of these were in forestry, such as fire fighting, fuel reduction, and disease control. The “boys” also performed most of the work in constructing the park’s two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall.
“Eighty percent of those boys joined the military in 1942 and hundreds were killed,” Russell said in a voice resonant with both affection and admiration for a time when the country could rally around a common cause.
The new, proposed CCC - still in a gestation stage - is stirring excitement, said David MacDonald, FOA president. Some Acadia supporters are in the early stages of plotting grant strategies. Acadia is among a handful of national parks with sea shores and will need to deal with the challenges of the rising seas. Apart from that, there are many projects which will enable the park to look ahead instead of staring in the rearview mirror, MacDonald said.
Acadia recently received a $23 million federal grant as part of the Great American Outdoors Act of 2000, MacDonald said, but that money is intended to chip away at the NPS’s huge deferred maintenance backlog of which Acadia has $65 million.
The new climate corps would be five times bigger than its predecessor, employing about 1.5 million Americans without the age cap or racial and gender restrictions that limited the original CCC, according to the Evergreen Collaborative.
It would take on a much more expansive portfolio, including installing solar panels and wind turbines, maintaining public transit systems, and retrofitting homes and buildings to be more energy efficient. It would offer Medicare health coverage, child care stipends and partnerships with labor unions to provide pre-apprenticeship education to enlistees.
The new plan aims to build modern federal campuses or offer rental vouchers near work sites and would embed itself into the community fabric, providing grants to existing local programs and partnering with civic organizations to serve long-unmet neighborhood needs.
“The size, the efficiency, and the confluence of a strong role for government in alleviating unemployment with a commitment to important goals ― that’s where the original CCC is a model, the general idea of it,” said Benjamin Alexander, a historian at the New York City College of Technology who wrote a book on the original program. “I stress ‘general idea’ because I think, for the most part, the potential similarities stop there.”
The program would build off the model of AmeriCorps, the civic jobs program funded in part by the federal government. But it would pay better, take on a more centrally directed mission and help corps members plan for long-term careers.
Despite being the largest existing federal corps program, AmeriCorps employs only 75,000 volunteers per year, many earning a stipend of no more than $4,000 for up to 12 months of service. The CCC would pay 20 times more workers at least $15 per hour, plus benefits, and provide a Green Careers Network that would seek to train enrollees for permanent jobs and direct them to high-paying private employers. That provision actually echoes the New Deal corps, which provided enlistees with classes on agronomy, typing and forestry in the camps at night after the work was done.
Perhaps there is an opportunity in the new CCC to address MDI’s intractable housing problem, which remains a monumental challenge for virtually every institution and business. Perhaps there is a triple bank shot here to make Acadia the model national park of the millenium, transform MDI into a vibrant year-round community serving the needs of a new cadre of citizens and ensure an air-tight strategy to battle the ravages of climate change (which should include the banning of cruise ships).
Biden is likely to need 10 Republican votes to pass the American Jobs Act. Can we make Susan Collins one of them by asking her to champion the fortification of Acadia National Park, Maine’s single largest tourist attraction, with a war-like focus?
The looooons, the looooons .. they’re welcoming us back …”
SOMESVILLE - Emails from Billy Helprin - naturalist, conservationist and director of the Somes-Meynell Sanctuary - fill me with great anticipation, urgency and joy.
This week was his opening salvo of many more to come, to announce the season of rebirth here on MDI, and to prepare us for the most solemn task - the preservation and nurturing of the genus Gavia, or the Common Loon. We avid loonies has Billy to thank for diligently monitoring these extraordinary creatures with his videos and his expert interpretations:
“On a beautiful, sunny Tuesday (3/30) I was able to watch the Echo Lake South male and a territory-challenging male for several hours. The challenger was in full breeding plumage but the reigning male was not quite there yet, with a fuzzy looking head and neck. They were in continuous confrontation mode, with both of them giving their territorial yodels and a great deal of ritualized aggressive behavior.”
Go to these links to see some of this:
“While these two were going at it on the south end of the lake, the Echo Lake North male was doing reconnaissance on the north end. He was in an alert posture, stretching his neck upward and looking down the lake. When he came close to Ike's Point he lowered his position in the water and lowered his head - most likely to avoid detection by the males to the south.
Here is a short clip of the loons looking skyward, most likely checking to see if an eagle was flying over. There were some turkey vultures cruising around the cliffs above the south end of Echo Lake.”
There are decades of knowledge and experience in that shared observation, made even more compelling by modern photography which enabled Billy to record moments which scientists 20 years ago would not have been able to match.
Billy’s other observations:
“We had a very short true winter season, with consistent ice coverage of most of our lakes only lasting from the 3rd week in January until the 3rd week in March. The late ice cover timing was confusing for some loons on MDI and across the northern tier of states where they reside spring through fall but have to or should depart for the winter. There were numerous instances of loons getting stuck on lakes that were open and apparently safe places to be until, suddenly, they were not.
His last season's summary: “Nine out of 13 chicks hatched in 2020 survived to be able to fly to the ocean for the winter, a very good success rate. 2019's chick's fledged to eggs hatched ratio was 8:11; 2018 was 3:7; 2017 was 4:6.
“Most of our residents are back on their territories now, and we are still trying to confirm individual identities based on seeing their leg bands for those who have them. The earliest MDI lake loon sighting that I know of was soon after ice out on Echo Lake, March 25th by Ray Yeager. Ice out was earlier that week @ the 21st -22nd. On March 27th there were no loons observed on Upper Hadlock, Lower Hadlock, Little Long Pond, or Somes Pond. On the evening of the 29th there were 2 loons to the southwest of Echo Vista on Echo Lake.
Here is Billy’s Summary of loon observations on other MDI lakes:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_ea3eEFJ6QP2ZrMBPDJAUYyhNWK4iDLL/view?usp=sharing
Onto alewives in May!
THE PUZZLE
Lincoln’s Log
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden was one of two House Democrats to oppose two gun control bills that passed the chamber March 11 and would require background checks on firearms transfers and expand a review period for gun purchases. Since then there has been 60 mass shootings as defined by the Gun Violence Archive, including the multiple deaths in Atlanta, Colorado and Indiana. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting