by Becca Shaw Glaser October 19, 2021, The Free Press

“I can’t tell you how dismayed I am by all of this and how hard it is for me to
be polite. Because no matter what you call it: marina, dockage, floating —
it’s a parking lot. It’s a damn parking lot for boats. You’re taking paradise
and putting up a parking lot. And it’s a shame. And it’s an example of the
way the country is being split between the rich and the poor. And if you tell
me that I can look at your butt instead of your side and be happy about it, I’m
outraged.”
— Jeremy Chapman, Rockland City Council Meeting on Safe Harbor Marinas’
expansion plan, October 13

Right now, despite what you may have heard, the public can lose access to
Rockland’s beloved harbor boardwalk at any time. In October 2020, real estate titan Sun Communities bought Safe Harbor Marinas LLC, the largest owner and operator of marinas in the world, for an easy $2.11 billion. Just a few months later, SHM bought Rockland’s Yachting Solutions marina and four acres of land around it, adding Rockland to its arsenal of 100-plus marinas. Announcing SHM’s acquisition, Chief Investment Officer Jason Hogg described the marina in Rockland as a “canvas for expansion.”

Why is Sun Communities getting into the marina business?

Valued in the stock market at over $22 billion, Sun Communities gobbled up revenue of $1.398 billion last year, primarily off of people’s need for shelter across the U.S. and Canada. Million Acres, a real estate investing news and advice website, writes, “Sun Communities is a consolidator. It has been steadily buying up manufactured housing and RV communities over the last decade, growing into
the largest operator in this still highly fragmented space. Meanwhile, it’s adding a new growth platform in marinas, another highly fragmented industry ripe for consolidation.”

What is the “growth platform” — the commodity, in this scenario? Rockland’s shimmering harbor with the giant moon rising above it? The ocean? Us?

Public use of the boardwalk could be taken away at any moment

A January 2021 VillageSoup article about the Rockland marina real estate deal said, “Stuart Smith, an owner of Rockland Harbor Park LLC [the company that
sold the marina land to SHM], said the sale included an easement that will ensure continued public access along the entire boardwalk. He said he was adamant that public access be preserved along the boardwalk.”

Wouldn’t it be lovely if what Smith implied — that the boardwalk had been preserved for public access in perpetuity — were true? It’s not. The easement agreement between SHM and RHP reads, “In the event the Parties determine it is necessary to impose restrictions on use by the general public of the SHM Easement Area, such as, by way of example only, limiting the hours of usage, the Parties may do so by a written amendment to this agreement …” The agreement is identical for the RHP section of the boardwalk.

The cold truth is that, according to the easement, if RHP and SHM agree, they can restrict or even completely remove public access to our beloved boardwalk. Unless the community and City Council take decisive action, public use of the boardwalk will remain at the mercy of a shifting set of corporations.

Another Marina Expansion Plan

Many community members, including myself, vigorously opposed the previous
plan by Yachting Solutions, a plan that called for drastically transforming Rockland Harbor. Then things about the marina seemed to get quiet for a while (you know, the pandemic, a change of ownership), so many of us were caught by surprise that a new expansion plan by SHM was suddenly whizzing toward state approval before we had had the chance to look it over in detail. Turns out that SHM wants to start dredging in Rockland Harbor on November 1.

Looking over SHM’s expansion proposal, I have concerns and questions similar to my thoughts on Yachting Solutions’ previous plans. Under the SHM marina expansion plan, we locals will have an undisclosed number and size of megayachts clogging up our view, potentially impeding our enjoyment of and access to the harbor. And how can a plan for multiple 150-foot finger docks on the eastern side, given that they would be entirely outside of SHM’s submerged land lease, even be considered for approval? Isn’t anyone concerned about SHM’s plan to be the primary location “north of Boston” providing bunkering, enabling the transfer of enormous amounts of fuel (“10,000 gallons” was a figure used by Bill Morong, a consultant for SHM) to boats in the inner harbor?

As a volunteer with the Rockland Volunteer Community Garden Group, I have created and tended the gardens at Sandy Beach for over 10 years. Without 2-D and 3-D models showing how the expansion plan will affect our views from all directions, how can we know how it might affect the lovely, open feeling we now enjoy at Sandy Beach, the boardwalk and Harbor Park?

A Dog and Pony Show for the World’s Largest Marina Corporation

On October 13, the Rockland City Council, responding to community interest, held what was billed as a chance for the public to comment on SHM’s
expansion proposal. I was expecting it to be an opportunity for the public to be heard, and perhaps engage in community discussion around the issues involved. Instead, the meeting mostly felt like a dog and pony show, with SHM being allowed, or even encouraged, to take far more than its fair share of public airspace. The world’s largest marina corporation got to set the tone at the start, giving a light-on-facts presentation about their past and current plans, and as the meeting continued, the SHM consultant was allowed to essentially interrupt city
councilors repeatedly; councilors even suspended their own voting process several times in order to let SHM’s consultant and the engineer for the project speak, though no one else from the community was allowed to comment during that process. Maybe worst of all, during the public comment period, in which community members are typically allowed to speak one at a time, without being interrupted, the corporate reps were permitted to respond to many of the comments right after, and even during, the commenter’s speech. It might be more understandable to give that sort of gooey, preferential treatment to a small local business, but when you’re tangling with the world’s largest marina corporation, owned by one the largest real estate consolidators in the world, the public’s voices need to be put first and foremost.

Safe Harbor’s Wiggly Answers

After the meeting, there are still many unanswered questions about the project. I
won’t bore you by including SHM’s every wiggly answer, but here’s a taste. When asked by a city councilor, “Will the boats be running generators?” Bill Morong, the corporate rep for SHM-Rockland, said providing enough electricity that boats don’t have to run generators is “the goal.” But a goal is not a guarantee. “Will
boats at SHM ever obstruct the city channel?” Mike Sabatini, the engineer consulting with SHM-Rockland, whose firm drew up the plans for the dredging answered, “I doubt that the city channel will ever be dredged.” What?

Page 45 of SHM’s application to the state includes a dredging proposal inside the city channel that is about 300 feet long and goes the entire width of the city channel. Sabatini also said, “A boat could be sitting there, if it became a problem, it could be moved, but there’s no reason why a boat couldn’t be there for a week or a couple days. And it wouldn’t obscure the whole channel.” So, SHM would only be clogging up part of the city channel, say, for a week at a time, and SHM is cool with it, so we should all be fine with it too? Morong seemed to try to tamp down Sabatini’s comment by saying, “The intention is not to obscure the channel.” Again, intentions aren’t guarantees. “How many mooring balls will be displaced?” They were unable to give even a ballpark figure for how many moorings would need to be moved.

City Council considers pushing for the public good

At the October 13 meeting, the City Council considered a resolve from Councilor (and sometimes co-author of “Notes from Lime City”) Nate Davis, which, while not designed to affect the marina expansion itself, would give Rockland a better bargaining position for some recompense for some of the losses to the community caused by the expansion. Nate’s resolve centered around a Maine statute that kicks in if the state determines that a particular project will include a loss for the community. The statute then mandates that the state consult with municipal leaders to negotiate potential compensation that will best benefit the community. Nate said, “The state in the statute does give us some small leverage, some small means of securing the public interest into the future. And I think we should use it.” His proposal was an opportunity for the council to make clear to the state what that public interest recompense could be. Nate’s proposal included: permanent, undisputable public access to the boardwalk; public access to the (now-gated) wharf; compensation to mooring owners; and “convenient public access to, and navigation of, the municipal channel.” Ultimately, that night the council decided to contact the state to find out when the state would be making its decision on the marina expansion, with the idea being to reconsider the resolve if there was still time to do so before the state’s deadline. As of now, it is unclear to me what the next step in this process will be or what actions council will be willing to take for the public good.

Megayachts are some of the most environmentally destructive ways to travel, directly contradicting Rockland’s Climate Action Plan

Much of SHM’s project revolves around the $1million federal Boating Infrastructure Grant (BIG) that Yachting Solutions received in 2017, transferable to SHM if they can complete their plan by September 2022. In their July 2021 application to the state for marina expansion, SHM had the audacity to claim
that, “The option to do nothing [related to the BIG grant] would be unacceptable.” The world’s largest marina company, which sold a year ago for $2.11 billion, finds it unacceptable to imagine missing out on a milliondollar grant paid for by the public in the form of taxes on boat fuel? Meanwhile our public harbor infrastructure is gravely in need of funds.

Yachting Solutions’ application for the BIG grant references megayachts at least 25 times and states that the “Yachting Solutions Boat Basin is positioned to become the most attractive destination for megayachts between Portland and Bangor.” SHM, however, seems to have taken pains to avoid using the term
“megayacht” in its application to the state. But can there be any doubt that the uber-elite megayacht set is still a group they are courting, considering that their proposal calls for four or five docks that could accommodate boats of at least 200 feet, and perhaps even longer? SHM has inherited the BIG grant, and the Yachting Solutions associates who oversaw the original BIG grant are in charge of Safe Harbor-Rockland; those 25 zealous megayacht references are still very much alive.

Megayacht, or superyacht, is a squishy term, but it generally means a boat that is 79 feet or longer, and luxurious. But we should see them for what they truly represent: wealth hoarders who relish in decimating the earth, sea and all of us. A 2019 Jacobin article reports that, “the world’s superyacht fleet [300 boats, according to the study mentioned] uses over 32 million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year — all of it for the personal enjoyment of the extremely rich. The world’s superyachts consume
and pollute more than entire nations.” Unfortunately it is the state who gets to decide whether to approve the building of megayacht infrastructure in our fast-warming Maine seas in the heart of a climate catastrophe, without regard to Rockland’s Climate Action Plan.

Silver Shalis, a 175-foot megayacht parked last year at the Safe Harbor marina, reportedly costs $2-4 million to operate per year. The megayacht features a lap pool and a “curved travertine onyx and glass elevator,” while people in our community try to sleep in soggy tents on the water’s edge or beg on online community boards for a place to live in the area they have called home for decades.

The City Council seems to have largely given a friendly reception to the corporate marina chain’s expansion plan. As far as I understand, the council doesn’t have the direct authority to stop it, but they certainly could have done more to intervene. At the very least, the city needs to do everything it can to ensure permanent public access to the harbor boardwalk, the wharf and the docks and to do whatever else it can to make the marina actually benefit our community and our planet, not just the multibillion-dollar corporation and the investors who control it. Further, the state should wait on granting an expansion until we have answers about the fuel bunkering plans and the exact scope and size of the megayachts SHM can dock and until we have seen independent, accurate 2D
and 3D models of how the plan will affect our views and enjoyment of the harbor. Right now, it seems likely that that voluptuous moon will be rising soon over a much larger, gated, privatized boat parking lot.