The controversy over shellfish aquaculture in the Bagaduce River fits into a much bigger story. This simple case of allocating scarce resources vs. sustainable development (or however one wishes to describe it) is part of a high-stakes game on the Maine coast in which the poker chips are people’s homes, the right to farm the sea, points of public access, businesses that need to be located on the shore, berthing space for fishing boats, the availability of mooring space – in short, all of the scarce and valuable things that make it possible to live and work between Kittery and Calais on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Maine.
People are fighting over Northern Bay on the Bagaduce – over its bottom, the right to navigate it, the right to have it look or feel a certain way – just as they are fighting over the right to live affordably on Chebeague Island, the right to build boats on the waterfront in Southwest Harbor, the right of public waterfront access on the Harpswell peninsula, the right of fishermen to wharfage at affordable prices in downtown Portland. Islands and coastal communities have faced a crisis in affordable housing for a decade or more.
There are ironies, of course: the same prosperity that makes an islander’s home a hot piece of real estate is what has brought buyers to his or her doorstep. For every “rich-out-of-state-buyer” (a cliché, of course, but it conveys an idea) who pays a premium price, there’s apparently a willing seller, local or otherwise. Every such transaction, under current tax law, means a racheting up of the neighbors’ property tax valuations.
On Northern Bay and elsewhere there is further irony: there is a long history of industrial development along these shores – canneries, sawmills, brickyards, shipyards and the like – that declined and disappeared only a lifetime ago. The peaceful banks of rivers like the Penobscot, the Royal, the Kennebec, the Presumpscot and the Bagaduce once echoed with the ring of shipwrights’ adzes, the whine of sawmills and the bustle of canneries. To characterize them as “pristine” is to ignore the history of their working waterfronts.
Up to now, the Game for the Coast seems to have gone to those who started with the most chips – a handsome piece of real estate to be developed, a well-stocked checkbook to buy it. But the rules could change, and they probably should. Two years ago voters narrowly defeated a proposed change in the Maine Constitution that would have extended “current use” taxation to real estate connected with the fishing business; that idea is sure to come back. On islands and in coastal communities, year-round residents have grown tired of property taxes being driven inexorably upward by a small number of high-dollar sales, tired of local people being squeezed out, cut off from the ocean that has supported them for generations. The Maine Legislature has convened a study committee to investigate alternatives and propose remedies on the property tax side of things, at least. Maine’s next governor is out there right now, stumping the state for votes. If he listens, he’ll learn of the discontent in the electorate. And if he’s as smart as he wants us all to think he is, he’ll do something about it.