The story’s familiar: a lifelong resident gets a state permit – over the objections of some neighbors – to raise oysters in a coastal river. Two years later, another local man applies for a second permit to do much the same thing. Again, neighboring property owners object, concerned about property values, state rules they don’t like, and the views from their front porches.
The area in question is the Bagaduce River, which drains into Penobscot Bay near Castine.
The landowners formed the Bagaduce Watershed Association (BWA) in 1999, in response to the first aquaculture lease application from Jesse Leach, a Penobscot native. BWA claims a membership of over 100 families.
Leach, 55, met the criteria demanded by the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR), was granted a lease, and since then has farmed oysters along a bend in the river at Bagaduce Falls, just off land owned for four generations by Jacqueline Gott’s family.
Leach staked out his site knowing it would be good growing ground for oysters. In order to grow out shellfish with the rapidity needed for profitability, the waters must be shallow, warm and moving. Looking down into the water from Gott’s dock on a July day one sees fish, shellfish, and horseshoe crabs scuttling this way and that.
Watching horseshoe crabs was part of her childhood experience, Gott said. The crabs are one of the things that make the place so special to her and her family.
Unlike Gott and her family, however, many of the riparian landowners, those within 1,000 feet of the river, are newcomers to the area. They kayak, sail, canoe, explore, revel in the wildlife, and otherwise recreate on the water. They value – and want to preserve – what they consider the pristine quality of the environment and waters by which they now dwell.
Members of the group, therefore, swung back into action in January 2002, upon receiving notice that Michael Briggs, 49, a Hancock County native who lives just over the Penobscot line in Blue Hill, had applied for an aquaculture lease in the Bagaduce’s Northern Bay.
As many as five brickyards once lined the bay because of the surrounding clay soil, along with two sardine canneries. Today lobstermen, crabbers, scallopers, clammers, finfishermen, and seaweed growers continue to harvest Northern Bay’s waters.
Carol Beaven, a Blue Hill realtor and Brooksville resident, wrote on behalf of the BWA to the selectmen that “the value of the whole area could be affected by what does or does not happen in the years ahead. People love this river because of its unspoiled natural beauty, and aquaculture leasing should be regulated with everyone’s use of the river in mind. No one agency should have the right to lease all the acres it chooses for the use by an individual or a few individuals at the expense of the majority who live here or visit.”
Members of Penobscot’s Board of Selectmen sound generally supportive of mixed use in the area. First Selectmen and Penobscot native Bing Gross mentioned the various types of harvesting done in Northern Bay and added, “They used to put out salmon weirs on the Penobscot River. Nobody objected.”
Selectman Paul Bowen, a Hampden native who has lived in Penobscot for 30 years, said, “My feeling is that this has to be a shared project.” Referring to recreational small craft users as well as commercial and recreational fishermen, he added, “All of these uses have to be respected.”
Selectman Stanley Shorey, a Verona Island native who has lived in Penobscot for 30 years also, said, “The most important thing to remember is that the people who are all worked up about this have property on the bay; the rest of us can’t afford it. It’s NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard. The waters are public property; we all have a right to be there.”
Continuing Shorey’s thought and speaking of the number of people who attended an informational meeting held in January, Gross said, “We can’t represent 50 to 60 people, we have to represent 1,344 people.”
Among that larger number are mapmaker and book editor Jane Crosen, 48, and her husband, boatbuilder Richard Washburn, 53. Crosen, who, as a member of the Penobscot Comprehensive Plan committee, stated in a letter sent to the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR), dated Feb. 12, 2002, that “a modest-based aquaculture operation would seem to fit with Penobscot’s natural resources-based character…. Penobscot has a history of land-based and marine-based industries.”
She added, “I personally would prefer to see this type of small-scale marine-based enterprise in town than I would the kind of gentrified waterfront we are seeing more and more along the Maine Coast.”
Washburn hopes Briggs will get his lease, and said, “I think it would be a good thing for Northern Bay to have some kind of fishery or natural resources industry, something more recognizable than clammers or people harvesting seaweed.
“To see this aquaculture develop,” he continued, “I think is good because it helps focus interest on the health of the bay.”
Crosen’s feelings since writing the letter, however, “have flip-flopped,” she said. She has sailed around the bay with Washburn and mentioned seeing many wildlife-rich places to explore. “As a recreational boater,” she said, “the whole idea is to be out in the wild with no manmade obstructions, to have open spaces to explore.” All it takes, she said, is a few rafts to destroy that feeling.
She has been working on a map of the Blue Hill peninsula. Regarding Leach’s clearly visible, experimental, vertically-suspended oyster trays near Bagaduce Falls, an area frequently used by kayakers and canoeists, she said, “It’s okay looking north, but looking south, you can see a lot of aquaculture rafts. It looks chock-a-block. I didn’t give the falls a Scenic View [symbol] on the map.”
When Leach first put out his trays at Bagaduce Falls, Gott said she called him and asked, to no avail, that he not place them directly in front of her house and dock, partly because she swims across the river there every day in summer. (Recently, he did accommodate her request not to place one of his trays in front of her front window.)
Now she has heard that he has an application to place more trays in right front of the falls. “It’s too dangerous; there’s too much river traffic at that spot,” she said, adding that she plans to call the DMR and tell them so. (Briggs later explained that there wouldn’t be trays or any floating gear at the falls, as Leach plans an experiment with bottom culture.)
There is no comprehensive plan for the Bagaduce watershed. Environmental activists and BWA members suggest, and in some cases demand, that the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) grant no aquaculture leases until such a study has been done. The difficult part, of course, is paying for such an expensive undertaking.
The DMR, which has the sole authority to approve the leases (and which aquaculture opponents think “rubber-stamps” lease applications) has been understaffed for years. It could not take on such a project. Neither could the Town of Penobscot.
“There have been lots of efforts to change the rules by which the DMR grants leases,” said Maggie Williams, 54, coordinator for the Downeast chapter of the Maine Audubon Society, a Penobscot resident for several years and a leading member of the BWA. She and other BWA members want better notification, too.
Williams wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the local Castine Patriot. “Citizens here in Penobscot (Northern Bay) were first notified back in January that there was a pending six acre shellfish aquaculture lease in our front yards and that we had less than 30 days to prepare for the lease hearing. Since then, many of us have had our lives upended in an undemocratic DMR process that seems designed through its rules to minimize public input and imposes one special private industry – aquaculture – and all its impacts on the local people, towns and environment without any vote or including us in the planning. Here it is, six months later, and the specter of unlimited growth of aquaculture leases in our area looms even larger.”
Williams’s comments prompted several letters, including one from Colin Baker of Castine. “I have found the recent diatribes against shellfish aquaculture in the Bagaduce to be highly biased and unrealistic,” he wrote. “Many of the arguments presented in the letters seem to be based on poor understanding of shellfish aquaculture combined with a thinly veiled NIMBY sentiment …”
Mike Briggs, the applicant, responded in print to Williams as well. “All rivers in Hancock County,” he wrote, “are limited for oyster cultivation because most areas have inadequate water temperatures. Add the fact that you can’t interfere with eelgrass beds, existing fisheries, navigation and other restrictions and that leaves very few areas suitable to raise oysters. Any claim that the Bagaduce will be filled with oyster FARMS is simply not true.”
Caren Plank and her husband, William McWeeny, own Mollie’s and Sparks Islands in Northern Bay. Plank informed Williams that Briggs had applied for an aquaculture lease in the bay. “It was a deep, deep concern,” Williams said. “It’s like getting the wind knocked out of you. Everything you love is dramatically going to change.”
Plank and Lucia Gill Case started calling each other and within a week had drafted a letter to inform townspeople and scheduled a public meeting at the Penobscot Town Hall. At that meeting, McWeeny and Case noted people’s concerns and made up a list of 65 questions they asked Briggs at a later, informational meeting. “A core group,” Williams said, “has been getting together ever since to research the aquaculture lease process.”
One reason the riparian landowners are so upset is the visibility of Leach’s vertically hung trays, which stick up five to six inches from the water surface. Briggs’s horizontally hung trays stick up only two to three inches. Also, Briggs’s first proposal was for six acres; he later down-sized his lease to about two.
“It’s been rough: rough for Michael [Briggs], rough for us,” said Maggie Williams. “He called off the public hearing scheduled for Feb. 13, and came back with a revised plan that I believe he thought would mitigate people’s concerns. I credit him for that effort.”
Briggs, who spent two years researching every river system in Hancock County prior to making his lease application, said he chose a site farther away from riparian landowners than any other oyster aquaculture site in the state, in order to be a good neighbor. “I was willing to make less money in order to be farther away from everybody,” he said. (The DMR requires notification of such sites to those whose property falls within 1,000 feet.)
“Despite [Briggs’s] effort,” Williams said, “the visibility of his operation was still a major concern” to her, the BWA and the McWeenys, who bought Mollie’s and Sparks in 1986 and moved to the area in 1999, living half the year in Brooksville, half on the islands. McWeeny, who teaches science and math at the Adams School, in Castine, said, “We gave up family, friends, and professions to move here – I took a major cut in salary and my retirement fund to come here. We do environmental education on Sparks and Aunt Mollie’s. The purpose is being in a natural environment. This will affect our livelihood.”
Briggs, on the other hand, said a major reason he’d chosen to pursue oyster farming is because of his son, Eric, now 21, who has suffered since age 12 from a severe form of Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder affecting behavior. “Being on the water is calming for Eric,” Briggs said. “I’m determined to do this, if for no other reason than that my son can make a living.”
He said when he told Williams and the McWeenys about Eric, “They simply brushed that aside.”
Briggs withdrew his revised proposal, he said, because nobody would work with him, and his opponents were not interested in compromise.
From the opposition’s point of view, at least, things could get worse. Briggs is now considering leases in three possible sites, one of which is a few hundred feet from Sparks Island, but away from the focal point of Northern Bay. “I was willing to use a site farther from people that wouldn’t be as profitable,” he said; “but if they’re going to fight me all the way, why should I make the effort?”
On March 14, Patriot editor and publisher Nathaniel Barrows ran an editorial that set off a barrage of op-ed pieces and Letters to the Editor that continues from week to week, pro and con. One letter, from Colin Baker, called for “a little tolerance and flexibility” from the opposition, as did Barrows, who concluded his own editorial with a plea for mutual understanding:
“These interested parties, organizations and landowners must drop their absolute ‘not in my back yard’ stance to undertake an open-minded dialogue of shared concerns early in the process, which can ultimately create acceptable and doable projects.
“There will be no resolution – only absolute winners and losers, missed opportunities, then ongoing strife, conflict and bitterness – without communication.”