FRENCHBORO — Five years after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was alerted to illegal moorings in Lunt Harbor, this tiny island community’s main thoroughfare, the situation lingers on, although there has been some improvement.
Recently the Corps’ senior project manager, Jay Clement, who administers the federal navigation projects that run through the harbor, warned folks who remain in violation of federal law they face potentially hefty fines and the forcible removal of illegal structures, as mooring, docks and derelict boats are known in Corps lingo.
Frenchboro, on tiny Long Island in Blue Hill Bay, is a jewel of a village nestled around the horseshoe-shaped harbor. As the automobile ferry eases into the state terminal after a 45-minute ride from Bass Harbor, lobster fishermen are delivering early-morning catches and cleaning their boats, visitors have debarked from a tour boat to lunch at a couple of eateries on the shore, and old pickups are lined up on the ramp to take delivery of essential supplies.
The harbor, which narrows at the waist to create protected anchorage for small boats, features a brand-new town dock. There are also many signs of the sea’s rough manners—disintegrated piers, dilapidated boats, tumbled shacks.
The circumstance of these illegal structures mainly came about through traditional uses of the harbor by generations of deeply rooted families. In 2011, Clement said the situation was put into the spotlight when complaints were made to his office.
On July 25, Clement made his third visit to the island in three years, the goal of each visit to provide guidance on updating the town’s harbor ordinance to include mooring management, with the expectation the plan would clear up illegalities.
“In Lunt Harbor, there are certain requirements as to what can and cannot occur,” Clement said.
The updated ordinance is well on its way to finalization, Harbor Ordinance Committee chairman Rebecca Lenfestey said after the meeting.
“The ordinance is drafted, we had a public meeting just over a month ago, we took public comments and concerns, we made some changes, and we’ll be preparing it for the public to vote on at a special town meeting on Aug. 27,” Lenfestey said. “It’s been a long process, and we have tried our best to have open meetings and include the public as much as possible in determining what needs to be in the harbor ordinance.”
The situation of illegal moorings was not something brought to the town’s attention, Lenfestey said; the complaint went directly to Clement’s office.
In 1970, Congress authorized the Corps to establish a 1.5-acre, 6-foot-deep anchorage in the inner harbor, a 3-acre, 10-foot-deep anchorage in the outer harbor, and a 75-foot-wide channel that connects the two. The areas were dredged in 1977.
The projects must remain open for navigation; moorings are allowed only for privately owned recreational and fishing boats, as authorized by the town’s harbormaster.
Rental and service moorings, and encroachments such as a float extending from a pier—are not allowed.
Enforcement on the part of the Corps is discretionary, Clement said. So when he spoke on the same topics in 2011, he declined to initiate remedial actions because residents said they would draft a mooring plan and remove commercial moorings.
“And you have made some progress on the requirements,” he told residents at the July 25 meeting.
“Some folks have cleaned up some unauthorized things that existed. But not all of that has been taken care of. So I can’t turn a blind eye forever. If I were to know [that residents would respond], ‘Well, the heck with it, we’re never going to work on our ordinance again, we’re not going to clean up our act,’ and if I were to contact certain individuals and say to them, ‘You need to do X, Y and Z concerning your mooring or lobster car or whatever,’ and they just ignored us completely, then I have the capability of levying fines and seeking out other legal remedies to force the removal or otherwise compliance with our regulations.”
And, he added, “Some of those fines can be hefty. The letter of the law is $10,000 to $25,000.”
Clement said the situation impacts prospects for maintenance and improvement dredging. The Corps will not dredge a federal project until illegalities are cleared up. That’s a concern: A 2007 harbor survey showed there was considerable shoaling since 1977, and more has probably occurred since 2007. The head of the harbor is down to almost half its dredged depth; one spot is 1.3 feet deep at mean high water. The outer harbor showed spot depths of 7 or 8 feet in the 10-foot area.
This time around, residents wanted to know the ramifications of “deauthorizing” all or part of the federal dredge project. That means petitioning Congress to return control of the federal area to the town. The proposal was considered during the town’s annual meeting in June.
“There was a public request to explore what it would mean to deauthorize,” Lenfestey said.
Clement said if deauthorization were to occur, the Corps would remain in the picture as the agency issuing permits for structures—floats, lobster cars, piers and the like—related to commercial use.
Harder on the pocketbook, Clement said deauthorization would mean any future dredging project would be paid for by the town, not the Corps. That could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Right now, he said, tiny Frenchboro has an advantage over large federal projects competing for limited federal funds, because the harbor is important for residents’ ability to survive: “You need the ferry service, you need the shipment of goods and services, you need all of that to survive.”
Portland Harbor, for example, can be served by truck, rail, bus, Clement added, and note that Frenchboro also has “the advantage that you continue to have a large fishing component.”
In the end, residents asked Clement to start the process for a new survey in order to inform future dredging discussions. Residents also committed to finalizing the updated harbor ordinance, which specifies mooring restrictions.
The current harbor ordinance, written in 1981 and updated in 2003, doesn’t directly reference the federal project at all, nor the authority of the Corps as the permitting agency of anything besides private craft.
The proposed update, which has been in the works for the past two years, corrects those omissions.
“Harbors are an evolving resource,” Clement said. “What was good back in 1970, as far as the way you ran things, is not necessarily the way you want to run things now.”