by Becca Shaw Glaser June 28, 2022, The Free Press
One of the most depressing moments for me came at the end of the meeting. Two Maine governmental bodies with the word “environmental” in their names had just unanimously agreed to hand over a chunk of Rockland Harbor to a multibillion-dollar, megayacht-catering corporation as we teetered on the cliff of climate apocalypse. The Safe Harbor Marinas reps, having won, began laughing heartily, and then members of the Maine Board of Environmental Protection joined in.
It was June 16 and the BEP was considering an appeal of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s decision to hand over a chunk of the public’s Rockland Harbor to Safe Harbor Marinas. Safe Harbor, a members-only club and the world’s largest marina corporation, is owned by Sun Communities, a real estate investment corporation that is traded on the stock market. In January, along with 15 other midcoast residents, I joined the appeal of the DEP’s decision. The appellants are Rockland Yacht Club members, Rockland mooring holders, members of the Rockland Volunteer Gardening Group, Rockland Harbor festival goers, the director of a Rockland boatbuilding school, a former state rep for Rockland and Owls Head, a Farnsworth Art Museum trustee, a Millay House board member, kayakers, and those who enjoy the Rockland Harbor boardwalk and Sandy Beach. We argued, among other things, that Safe Harbor Marinas’ filings for their Rockland marina expansion permit were incomplete, that the DEP should have required a full visual impact assessment, and that the expansion would unreasonably interfere with the public’s enjoyment and use of that section of Rockland’s inner harbor, particularly with their plan to dock 200-foot yachts and locate their dinghy dock so close to Rockland’s sole ocean swimming beach.
This experience was my first time directly interacting with the processes of the DEP and the BEP, and ultimately it reaffirmed for me why my idealistic, bruised heart still belongs to socialist feminist anarchism, because, as the cliché goes, our governmental entities don’t holistically protect the environment, factor in the
climate crisis or respect the little people like us down here in the Rockland area. In situations like this, facing off with a giant corporation like Safe Harbor, which knows exactly how the system works, knows how to navigate it, and has the money to do so, we barely stand a chance. Most citizens like me, who care about the environment, animals, people’s rights, who believe that the public’s
enjoyment of, and access to, the world is infinitely more important than corporate earnings, we don’t know how all of the bureaucratic systems work, we don’t have endless money to hire lawyers, consultants and PR teams, we don’t get tax breaks and government grants for our corporate investments, and most of us sure aren’t getting paid to work on the issues we care about. Right now I’m in a fortunate position, being paid (a modest amount) to write on subjects I’m passionate about in The Free Press. Otherwise, I am like most people: we do our activism for free, scrambling to fit it in among the many other demands of living.
In Case You Needed a Reminder that Regular Citizens Are Drastically Disadvantaged Compared to Corporate and Government Interests
How was I to know the ins and outs, the fact that I wouldn’t be able to speak at the appeal hearing over Zoom, even though I’m an appellant, unless I dragged myself to Augusta (great policy for the environment, by the way)? How was I to know, earlier in the process, that I (maybe) could have requested a public hearing with the Maine DEP about Safe Harbor’s application? You might think I’d know more, given my years of experience as an activist and doing semi-investigative reporting, but there I was, emailing back and forth with DEP staff with job titles such as “Environmental Specialist III,” expressing how unfair it was that the public would not be allowed to speak or even ask questions at their site visit in Rockland, yet the DEP staff would be talking at length with Safe Harbor reps during the visit. Surely those staff members could have informed me that I could request a public hearing. Instead, it wasn’t until after the apparently inflexible time frame for a public hearing had passed that I was told by DEP staff, rather chastisingly, that it had been an option, but that I was now out of luck. In some ways, having orderly, reliable rules is important for transparency, but when there is no flexibility, when most of us don’t understand how these processes work, when the processes feel archaic, when I am trying to locate documents they say will be “on our website” in a few days, rather than being sent a direct website link, it is clear that the government is not working by us, for us. (Evident in the illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court’s recent devastating and flat-out-wrong decrees as well, announced after I had turned this article in.)
The Maine Bureau of Environmental Protection Disguises an Arbitrary Decision in the Warm Cloak of Bureaucracy
The BEP members seemed concerned, theoretically, with the details, with legality, with dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and yet in the end, their decision came down to what seemed largely like the whims of a seven-member volunteer board, appointed by governors, none of whom are from the midcoast, and who got to
disguise this arbitrariness, and apparent bias in favor of corporate interests and the DEP’s prior approval, behind the heartwarming excuse of bureaucratic tedium. Ultimately, these members seemed far more concerned with the hardship that the multibillion-dollar company would suffer if it were required to do things like a full visual impact assessment, wait for a public hearing to be held in July, or to, yes, simply be denied its expansion plans, than about the loss of beauty, public waters and free movement that the little people of midcoast Maine would suffer.
None of these members have any local skin in the game, and they repeatedly referred to Rockland Harbor, a harbor they seemed entirely unfamiliar with, as a “commercial harbor.” This is the sort of argument that goes: because Rockland already has a few cruise ships, and other large boats, there should be no limits put on them at all. At no point was it mentioned that the Rockland City Council has passed regulations to limit cruise ships in the harbor, because, no, we don’t want an unlimited number of them around here.
It seemed to typify the board members when board member Steven Pelletier of Topsham — so clueless about Rockland that at the end of hours of discussion in which Sandy Beach was frequently mentioned — referred to our beloved beach as “Pebble Beach” and made the claim like it will be no big deal to have enormous 200 foot–plus, multistory boats blocking our views and passage from Sandy Beach. He said, “The scenic issues, I mean, it’s all kind of in line with what you expect to see in a harbor, I mean, at the end of the day, and views from
Pebble Beach, you know, ten percent of what you can see now may be affected, would be affected by larger vessels, and I’m not swayed that any of these things are really cause for a denial of the permit, so I would suggest that we deny the appeal.”
Are gigantic gas-guzzling boats that obscure all other harbor views really what we should “expect to see in a harbor,” especially in a section that is as singularly precious to Rockland as Sandy Beach? Should it be expected that we lose 10% of the viewshed (keeping in mind that the 10% is a figure the DEP came up with, which may not be accurate, especially from every angle)? Should we just “expect” to have harbor views and waters clogged up by wealth-hoarding, climate crisis–exacerbating megayachts and cruise ships? Maybe in the end we will all get used to it, but this is fundamentally about much more than one small community on the coast of Maine facing the loss of some of its water, some of its sky. At its core it is about corporate control and government entities — including the ones that have the word “environment” in their name — giving corporations things that previously “belonged” to the public. Why should any loss of public enjoyment, land, water, sky, be acceptable when it is being given away to line corporate bosses’ investment portfolios, to give the ultrawealthy more “destinations” to trounce around the earth like it’s their golden playground when kids in our area are sleeping in motel rooms because the houses their families rented are being sold for twice the price as a year ago?
While a 269-foot Cruise Ship Was Docked at Safe Harbor Rockland, Safe Harbor’s Lawyer Said that Those Sorts of Boats Wouldn’t Be Docked There
June 15, 2022: The 269-foot, five-deck cruise ship American Constitution is docked at Safe Harbor Rockland, blocking all harbor views and dwarfing everything in its path. A lobster boat and other boats near it look like toys. People look tiny as ants.
June 16, 2022: BEP member Susan Lessard of Bucksport (one of two BEP members who were originally appointed by LePage [the rest are solely Mills appointees]) asks: “So, things like the [cruise ships American] Constitution and the [American] Independence, they dock at the public harbor, correct?”
Safe Harbor Marinas attorney Sean Turley: “Correct.”
Lessard: “The intent isn’t for this marina to do commercial vessel docking … so those 200-foot vessels — I know them; they come to Bucksport — are going to sort of stay where they are [at the public landing].”
Turley: “Correct.”
A BEP Member Plied Safe Harbor to Detail the “Damage” the Multibillion-dollar Corporation Would Suffer if the Public Were Granted a Hearing in a Few Weeks
Toward the end of the meeting, BEP board member Robert Duchesne of Hudson directed a question at Safe Harbor’s lawyer: “A lot is being made of the fact that the site visit took place in November, but the department has an application, and it needs to do something with it, and it would be probably inconvenient to your client for the department to say for no other reason, ‘Gee, sorry, we can’t act on it until July.’ What kind of delay or damage would that do to your client if the department were to delay that long for no other reason?”
Safe Harbor Marinas lawyer Sean Turley seemed to light up, as though he had been waiting for a question like this, and replied, “So, significant, and in fact in this case, very significant. Because what’s going on here is we had the Boating Infrastructure Grant granted in 2017, which sets an outer deadline of winter of 2022/2023, so to simply kind of arbitrarily…, ‘Oh we’re just going to push this off for a year’ would be incredibly damaging.”
How did a question like this have any business being asked by a BEP board member? I doubt that watching out for the bottom line of corporate permit seekers is within the BEP’s guidelines as to how to decide an appeal. If it is, it’s yet another illegitimate aspect to this governmental body’s claims to be looking out for the public and the environment. The appellants’ lawyer, Jason Theobald, took issue with Duchesne’s question, saying, the DEP’s job is to ensure that the standards are met, particularly whether the impact is unreasonable or reasonable: “So I think, to the extent that the delay may cause some financial harm to the applicant, I think [that] is kind of beyond the scope of DEP.” The false logic of Duchesne, a former state legislator, is to claim there would have been “no other reason” to hold off on the permit. The BEP could have found many reasons: deciding that a public hearing served the public interest, or that the DEP was at fault for not requiring a full visual impact assessment, that the wildlife survey was inadequately done, that too much was surveyed off-season, that the application was incomplete, that the DEP was wrong to conclude that the Safe Harbor expansion would have only a “moderate” impact, and that it would not “unreasonably interfere” with public views, fishing, recreation and other uses.
Also of note is that a similar question was not asked of the appellants’ lawyer or the few appellants in the room. “How will us denying your appeal cause damage or inconvenience to you, to your community, to your faith in governmental processes?” The BEP’s failure to ask the same question of the appellants could be a sign that the process is structurally tilted in favor of businesses.
The Median Age of the Maine Bureau of Environmental Protection Members Appears to Be 66
The median age of the BEP board members appears to be 66 years old (gathering their ages from reasonably reliable sources like whitepages.com). The youngest member is about 43; the oldest, 73; and most are in their 60s. Might we see different outcomes if the board had more younger people, many of whom are feeling the climate emergency with an intense urgency, and which many Baby Boomers have completely dropped the ball on? Sure, the Boomers on the board might be good at the technicalities of government processes, but they seem to have disregarded or forgotten what the real heart of the matter is. In this case, it’s about the rights of the public compared to the rights of giant corporations; the rights of animals, the rights of the water and the animals and plants who live in that water to not be warmed out of existence by the mega-resource-intensive,
wealth-hoarding vessels that Safe Harbor Rockland will be luring in; it’s about the fact that we need to immediately stop subsidizing and building megayacht infrastructure as we face a planet with burning forests and cities, dried lakes shooting arsenic into the air, dying ice caps, hot, acidified oceans. Any board or
department that claims to protect the environment and the public benefit but fails to be led first and foremost by those most elemental principles should be entirely dismantled. The Maine DEP exists ostensibly to protect the environment, but what it actually does is grant (and occasionally deny) permission to pollute, destroy habitats, and give away the public commons.
At the end, Safe Harbor and the Bureau of Environmental Protection members all had a good laugh.
Becca Shaw Glaser has gardened at Sandy Beach for over a decade, starting when she and her dad (then Rockland’s Harbormaster) created the perennial gardens by the port-a-potties. She loves it. She also loves her uterus and despises a government that believes it owns her uterus, her body, her life.