Maine Coast News Maine Coast News Maine Coast News Maine Coast News
For Immediate Release February 9, 2004
Contact Penobscot Bay Watch 207-594-5717 coastwatch@acadia.net
Maine legislators to get presentation from Governor's Task Force on Aquaculture
Augusta. Members of the Maine Aquaculture Task Force will persent the results of their year long effort to come up with needed reforms of state aquaculture laws. The Task Force released the final draft of their report last month. Members of theLegislature's Marine Resources Committee will hear their recommendations at 1 pm today in Room 437 of the Statehouse.
For more information about the Aquaculture Task Force and its hearings throughout 2003 Click Here.
Supporters of the Task Force's recommendations say the state needs to make it easier for business to profitably raise salmon, mussels, oysters, and several other animalsi n the waters off Maine.
The Task Force recommends doubling the maximum allowable acreage ofstate marine waters and seafloor that companies can lease from the state, favors reducing the power of Maine coastal towns to regulate aquaculture operations in municipal waters, and supports barring towns from charging fishfarms and shellfish farms town mooring fees.
The Task Force's Stakeholder Advisory Panel dissented from some of the Task Force findings and made numerous suggestions to the Task Force concerning municipal control; . Not all of them were added to the report that the legislautre will consider today.
Conservation groups including the East Penobscot Bay Environmental Alliance, Conservation Law Foundation, Bagaduce Watershed Association and others have strongly criticized the Report.
East Penobscot Bay Environmental Alliance, or EPBEA, has been especially critical. According to a statement issued by the group, the Task Force wrongly concluded that the current system of leasing by the DMR has no substantial problems, despite years of citizen complaints to the contrary..
According to EPBEA,the Task Force is suggesting that the problem with the leasing process was not the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) or the laws, but the public's ignorance of DMR procedures and regulations, and that the public is in need of “education.”
On a more detailed level, according to EPBEA spokesperson Jane McCloskey,the Task Force
*Supports disallowing municipalities from having veto power over aquaculture leases.
*Refused to consider impacts of aquaculture on land businesses in lease applications
*Decided not to allow local stakeholders any power to make decisions on lease applications.
*Thumbed their noses at citizen concerns about foreign corporations owning salmon farms in Maine by recommending the doubling of allowable lease acreage.
*Disallowed any consideration of the effect of aquaculture leases on riparian land values
*Supports disenfranchising citizens from the aquaculture leasing process by recommending that lease renewals not require a public hearing, no matter how many call for one.
*Refused to consider the effect of leases on private conserved lands—except in extremely limited cases.
*Decided, [despite overwhelming information to the contrary] that the commercial fisheries were protected by the current leasing system.
Coastal resident Todd Merolla of Northport points to the poor condition of an existing mussel farm near his Northport home as evidence the existing laws and regulations don't work. According to Merolla, an experimental mussel lease up for renewal and and expansion off Kelly Cove is poorly maintained and poses a hazard to boats travelling a popular fairway along the west Penobscot Bay coast between Belfast and Camden. Despite at least one collision and many near misses of the existing three steel beamed rafts, and evidence that one ofthe rafts is breaking up, DMR is concluding that quadrupling their number will not pose and increased hazardto navigation.
Merolla and many others are challenging that finding at the upcoming February 19th hearing on the raft expansion proposal at the Edna Drinkwater Elementary School located at 56 Bayside Road in Bayside, Northport. He and others may also contest it in the federal permitting part of the lease process.
Other critics raised additional issues with the report.The public is urged to attend today's meeting of the Legislature's marine resources committee at 1 pm in room 247 of the Statehouse in Augusta.
For more information about the Aquaculture Task Force and its hearings throughout 2003, Click Here.
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