The woman’s story is an indicator that the health of the bay has improved, says Payne, but he’s quick to add that he can give more objective evidence as well.
“Ten years ago, 49 percent of the bay’s clam flats were closed due to pollution,” he says. “Now, that number is in the teens, a 30 percent reduction. There were 350 overboard discharges; now that is under 200. Swimming beach closures were frequent; now they are rare.”
FOCB began as a grassroots volunteer organization that grew out of a meeting in 1989 to address Casco Bay pollution. The bay’s state had been highlighted in a much publicized “Troubled Waters Report” that labeled it as one of the most polluted bays in the United States.
The organization, the first to be totally focused on Casco Bay, has since grown to 1,500 members. It has developed several large programs, which serve as umbrellas for many other projects that are overseen by a 21-member board and coordinated by seven full-time staff who work with over 150 volunteers.
Payne stands at the center as BayKeeper, a term derived from “Riverkeeper” programs started in other parts of the country in the 1980s. Several features define Payne’s position and, he says, explain why FOCB has successfully worked with industry, individuals and the public to fulfill its mission: “To improve and protect the environmental health of Casco Bay.”
One of the most important things, Payne believes, is the visibility of a person out in front. “The buck stops here,” he says. “During my first week as BayKeeper, a woman from Long Island called with a problem related to dumping demolition material in the bay and told me, ‘This is the seventh call I’ve made. The DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] says it’s not in their jurisdiction; it’s not the building inspector’s territory, not the police, not the Coast Guard….’ It turned out that the problem did legally fall under DEP, but at that time they had 400 employees, and she hadn’t hit the right one. I was able to put her in touch with the right person.”
When Payne became BayKeeper, FOCB decided he would strive to be a strong advocate for the bay without being in-your-face-adversarial. “We wanted to try to promote solutions with a problem-solving approach based on fact-finding and science,” he says. “At the beginning, we were setting out to do something in a really different way, but now, it almost seems commonplace, which it should be. Before we started, there had been a lot of yelling and shoe pounding and hot editorials exchanged in the paper. We set out to change that landscape, and I think we’ve done that. We have only one mandate, and that’s to be credible. That’s what allows us to do what we’ve done. We’ve built trust that we’re going to be fact-based, science-based.”
He does add, though, that “non-adversarial doesn’t mean I haven’t been in some quite heated discussions. But that’s where the trust comes in. We can disagree and yell, and I can storm off, but I don’t go to the press. I come back another day, and we’ll work on the problem some more.” To date, FOCB has not initiated any lawsuits.
Payne says FOCB takes a pragmatic approach to its work. “We decided early on that that some problems can’t be solved all at once,” he explains. “In that case our goal is consistent progress. We’ll do what can be done today to reduce the pollution, then what can be done this month, then ultimately, the final fix, without laying off people or causing a bad economic downturn. Most people hang their heads when confronted with a way they are harming the bay, and accept responsibility for their actions. If discussions get hot, we try to stick to the issue and facts and try to point out the positives, telling them, ‘If you do this, here are the good things that will come from it.’ We make it clear, though, in the end, the pollution will stop.”
An example, he says, is the massive lobster relocation project initiated by FOCB in 1999 to protect Portland Harbor’s lobster population when the U.S. Army Corps dredged the navigational channels.
“The Army Corps didn’t have to allow the relocation,” he says. “It cost $100,000, which the dredge committee raised with help from the Casco Bay Estuary Project, municipalities, Portland Pipeline, everywhere we could.”
FOCB started the process, he explains, by helping Portland’s Waterfront Alliance found the Portland Harbor Dredge Committee, which met every month for five years before the dredging began.
“We saw dredging on the horizon and knew it was a very contentious subject,” he says.”We brought in fishermen, pier owners, everyone involved. We wanted to develop a way for the dredging to be done in an environmentally sound and economically pragmatic manner, address problems like where does the sediment go, what about the lobsters.”
It turned out that fishermen, volunteers and the state Department of Marine Resources relocated 34,000 juvenile lobsters. On last inspection, some that were tagged were thriving in their new home, while at the same time, others, perhaps a new crop, were digging burrows in the sides of the freshly dredged area.
Because of his work to prepare for the dredging, Payne was asked to serve on a state dredging task force. Now, the DEP requires that before any dredging job begins, a lobster survey be considered to determine if there is a significant population in that area.
The bay is visibly cleaner than in 1991, and FOCB has made progress in many areas including extensive water quality testing, operating a pump-out program for recreational boats, developing a BayScaping program for watershed landowners, and cooperating on projects with other organizations like the Casco Bay Estuary Project and the state Departments of Marine Resources and Environmental Protection. Still, the work continues to expand.
There’s so much to be done, says FOCB’s Managing Director for Programs, Mary Cerullo, that the organization has developed what she calls “mission creep.” There’s no cure. It is a natural outcome of trying to protect and improve the environmental health of a 229-square-mile body of water bordered by 12 coastal towns and has a watershed that encompasses 41 communities that stretch 958 square miles from Bethel to the coast. While the watershed includes a mere three percent of Maine’s area, it is home to 25 percent of the state’s population, about 270,000 people. Approximately one-half live in the 12 communities that border the bay.
Residents and the businesses they are associated with account for a mind-boggling amount of sewage, treated and untreated; lawn fertilizers, pesticides, industrial run-off and other pollutants. These gradually make their way into the bay along its 578-mile shoreline and through several river basins, including the Fore, Presumpscot, Royal and New Meadows Rivers. An FOCB report, “Community Strategies to Improve the Bay,” to be released this spring, says “runoff associated with land use within the Bay’s watershed is the biggest threat to its water quality.”
Originally, Cerullo says, the organization had planned not to be involved above the head of the tide in its river work, but eventually, a new project, BayScaping, will cover the entire watershed area.
An additional hazard to the bay’s health is posed by the its approximately 5,000 recreational boaters, some of whom continue to dump raw sewage directly from heads or holding tanks into the bay’s waters, although this is against federal and state law, and whose boat bottoms are coated with toxic copper paint. Payne serves on a state committee to revise state toxics rules, and another one covering boatyard and marina practices whose boat bottoms are coated with toxic copper whose boat bottoms are coated with toxic copper paint. Payne serves on a state committee to revise state toxics rules, and another one covering boatyard and marina practices.
During the past 10 years, population increases along the bay’s shore and in the immediate watershed, including 35.5 percent in Falmouth, 22.7 percent in Cumberland and 16 percent in Phippsburg, have notched up the threats to its health.
“In places in the bay we can find almost any chemical that we use in society,” says Payne. “I know a spot where you can find mercury and coal tar (which is carcinogenic), but that’s not all over the bay. There’s lead in sediments, and that’s not going away for thousands of years. We just hope we can reduce the amount of all the pollutants going in, and that new, cleaner sediments can come in and cover up what’s there.” There are other spots, he adds, where dissolved oxygen is so low it endangers the health of plant and animal life.
“We really didn’t know what kind of shape different parts of the bay were in 10 years ago,” Payne says. “Now we’ve collected enough data to start to get a picture of the bay and learn there are lots of areas with a good healthy report card, and others where we will focus our work.”
For further information about FOCB, visit its web site at www.cascobay.org or call 207-799-8574.