News: Second Battle of Penobscot Bay. Melee of estuary and aquaculture interests over fate of estuary

For Immediate Release

PENOBSCOT ESTUARY This dynamic zone, where the dissolved tincture of 8,000 forested square miles of interior Maine  encounters the  Penobscot Bay pressing its salty tides inland, is become a war zone. (cont'd below image)

For more than a year, multinational  and local aquaculture interests, pitted against  community activists  and bay fishery and conservation groups, have  brawled their way through municipal and state hearings and  public events.

Now foes of two land based aquaculture plans, flush from bringing  the  permit review of one to a standstill, are pressing the legislature to make state regulators "think like an estuary" with a series of reform and science bills, the first of which  LD 620 An Act Regarding Licensing of Land-based Aquaculture Facilities -  faces its first committee vote Tuesday in Room  214 of the Cross Building.

LD 620 adds this clause twice  to the existing law when it is deciding whether to deny the application or revoke an existing  one. 

"alone in the use of a body of water or in combination with the aquaculture activity of any other land-based aquaculture operations using the same body of water " 

" Estuaries like ours are small enough and their flushing rate slow enough," said bay activist Ron Huber   "that  while one of these landfarms could be an  lawfully defensible burden,  multiple fish farm effluent discharges, especially of  hormones and other biochemicals released by salmon  could  have a demonstrable unacceptable effect."    He said that  the survival of smolts, elvers  and alewives  transiting the estuary in their migrations could be put at risk. (Continued below image)

The bill gives the Department of Agriculture Conservation and Forestry the authority to  require its consulting agencies, DEP, DMR and DIFW  to prepare a cumulative impacts assessment  when multiple salmon tankfarms  are proposed for a single estuary/ 

Without this,  reformers warn,  Maine is in danger of triggering a goldrush  scramble  for permits  and land leases along the lower river and upper bay.    "I've looked at dozens of Maine agency comments on big  coastal developments and small." said Huber  "Concerns about  the cumulative impact of new projects  when combined with existing ones, rarely enter the calculations. "

One 

LD 620 empowers the Dept of Agriculture to  produce a  big picture of what decisionmakers can expect  for the greater estuary if they approve going ahead with an additional salmon tankfarm. This is vital to smart bay management. 

Agency review of Nordic Aqua Farm's ambitious plan for building one of the world's largest land-based salmon aquaculture facilities  has been suspended, after a sharp-eyed activist tipped attorneys  for NGO Upstream Watch and Maine Lobstering Union, to a glaring fault in the project design,.

Attention has turned to Augusta,  where Tuesday the legislature's  Agriculture, Forestry and Conservation Committee will examine its evidence and conscience, then approve, amend or kill  LD 620 the aquaculture reform  bill.    

Filling the Gap  Critics say the state is so new to land based salmon farming that its selected overseer, the Department of Agriculture Conservation and Forestry, has yet to put together rules and regulations to interpret the one page law, 7 MRSA §1501."Land-based Aquaculture license".  

"Taking on a multinational industry with a flimsy one page statute and non existent rules is an open invitation  to repeat the disastrous start of Maine's fishpen salmon aquaculture in the early 1990s." Huber warned legislators at their earlier public hearing on the bill. "That is when  investors triggered  a gold rush for permits, that were grandfathered in under the then-new  salmon fish pen laws.  Don't worry, they said."

What happened? Too many salmon farms, licensed too close to each other in too many environmentally sketchy areas . The fouled seafloors, disease and parasites  that these immense unmoving schools of salmon  stimulated were as bad for the natural ecosystem outside the pens as for those inside.

It took years  and much bad blood between  conservation and fish pen farmers to bring salmon net penning down to more realistic levels.

"We do  NOT want to go down that same path with a flurry of land based salmon farms pumping effluent into the Penobscot Estuaruy . But we will if we don't  use LD 620 to let the agency take these first steps  slowly."

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