BDN (Maineville edition): State legislators scrambling as furious fishermen fight plan to "close the commons".
Augusta. Beleaguered Maine scallopers, groundfishermen and shrimp harvesters are telling the Maine legislature that they face financial ruin if a tiny state public lands agency becomes a political powerhouse by leasing Maine's commercial fishing grounds out from under them.
The fishermen fear that this could take place if the legislature approves LD 1810, An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's ....
"Who wrote this junk bill?" said fishermen Brian Preney of Boothbay, a member of the state's Sea Urchin Zone Council. "Would anybody with any civic responsibility propose such a poor piece of legislation? I would like to know who wrote it and who they represent, because it certainly is not me or the people of Maine."
The bill would authorize the Department of Conservation's Bureau of Parks & Lands to lease nearshore state waters to the wind industry, and loosens the state's and municipal environmental and conservation laws, rules and ordinances to be used the state waters windfarm application decisionmaking process.
LD 1810's public hearing took place March 11th.
At the March 11, 2010 hearing, Marine Resources Committee co-Chair Leila Percy told the Utility & Energy Committee, which is considering LD 1810,
that
to protect marine resource users, th
e 35 page bill - which was only introduced in committee that week - required careful scrutiny before any final action is taken.
"I want to speak about the bump in the road, " Percy told the committee. "I haven't had a chance to read the bill. bsp;And a lot of my constituents haven't had a chance to read the bill."
Percy called for the bill to passed as a "resolve", then brought before fishing and tourism based coastal communities and before the Marine Resources Committee and the Natural Resources Committee, before final action on a bill in 2011.
"I think having everyone's voice in a much greater conversation would be helpful" she said.
Other portions of the bill have also come under fire. If passed, the Bureau of Parks and Lands could:
* Offer 2 year "lease options
"
, 3 year
"
predevelopment leases
"
, 5 year
"
pre-operation leases
"
, and 30 year operating leases. In addition the Bureau plans to offer 50 year leases of the state's submerged marine lands to wave and tidal energy interests.
Photo: former aquaculturist turned wind industry rep Des Fitzgerald at ME Fishermens Forum 2010
LD 1810 would also:
* Allow the banning of commercial fishing within the wind leases using any gear that wind industry insurers deem risky to wind farm's underwater cables and structures.
* Allow wind companies to use eminent domain on shoreline and inland property owners, to allow the industry to cut powerline and tower rights of way through private land as needed to connect the offshore developers to the national grid.
* Forbid coastal towns from assessing property taxes on wind turbines or related equipment and facilities in the municipalities' waters that are "below the mean low-water line on waters subject to tidal influence."
* Forbid coastal resorts from challenging nearshore windfarms for threatening to degrade economically critical, measurable scenic values without penalty or need to compensate other users for lost values.
* Forbid Maine citizens from filing appeals of Maine Department of Environmental Protection windmill project decisions to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection. Would-be appellants would need to go straight to state court.
* Forbid the Maine Board of Environmental Protection from assuming jurisdiction over Maine Department of Protection windmill applications.
If passed, critics say, the relaxed and weakened standards could stimulate a wild west style submerged lands rush, with speculators staking exploratory claims over Maine fishing grounds, then selling their leases for a tidy profit to one of the big energy concerns that hope to dominate the wind energy business.
Political leaders are taking action.
As a result of the fishing industry's concerns, . Speaker of the House Hannah Pingree has pledged that the bill will be extensivey modified.
"I thik we’ll scale down the bill significantly", she reassured one concerned constituent. "We were disappointed the bill came from the Governor so late in the session with so many big issues to be resolved."
The state's heating industry is also up in arms about the bill, which proposes phasing that business out and requiring Mainers to use electricity for heating their homes and workplaces.
Final action on LD 1810 takes place 1pm Thursday March 18th, when the Maine legislature's Utility and Energy Committee holds its work session on the bill
Views: 117
Comment
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Comment by Joanne Moore on March 18, 2010 at 8:53am
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If I know lobstermen ( I used to be one) I'll bet they have thought about using him for bait.
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Comment by Long Islander on March 18, 2010 at 8:48am
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I hope the lobstermen have thought about firing their sellout leader.
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Comment by Charlie on March 18, 2010 at 8:24am
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Something similar is happening in Michigan with the Great Lakes. It's in the news that legislation is being evaluated by the state and several promoters are also in the news proposing hundreds of turbines near shore in Lakes Michigan, St Clair and Ontario.
The certain outcome of merely discussing these possibilities is to crush the market values of all Great Lakes shore property, thousands of miles worth billions of dollars. The same will happen in Maine.
A leading indicator of this will be real estate prospects asking agents whether there will be windmills in site. Since nobody has an honest answer rational prospects should walk away. The same thing is happening to onshore residential real estate where turbines are considered possible. Values will decline because owners will spend less on maintaining their property, there will be fewer prospects, and banks will toughen lending criteria.
This is common sense, why is it being ignored?
If there was a carbon tax that made windmills competitive without subsidies there still wouldn't be windmills being built. Electricity consumers would find better solutions. The subsidies have the government picking the technology winners instead of letting everybody work on solutions. The problem with a carbon tax is that it's a consumption tax for practical purposes, very regressive and toughest on the poorest people.
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This is madness! This is a government run amok. I haven't heard of these kind of onerous commands coming from government since 1936 Germany! Stormtrooper/Carpetbagger Digate ought to have his butt kicked all the way back to Boston Harbor. Who the hell does he think he is dictating to enact the destruction of our state? Bring back the public stocks! Let the people of Maine show this lowlife what we think of him and his wind-nut cronies. They must be mainlining crack if they think they can get away with this.
Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law
Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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