The first time someone from Maine visits a harbor in the Canadian Maritimes, there’s always the same epiphany — “Whoa! Take a look at those fishermen’s wharves!” Of course, the Canadian system of government investment and decision-making is vastly different than ours. But still, you cannot help but notice Canada’s large, expensive, well-maintained public wharves that berth their fishing fleets, which offload their catches to government-financed processing companies in plants located at the heads of those wharves.
We’ve always done things differently here along the Maine coast. We don’t really expect the government to build public wharves for fishermen. After all, there are some 145 harbors along the Maine coast and no one wants the government to be all that involved in that many places. The common practice used to be for fishermen to build and maintain their own wharves. Sometimes a few fishermen and other marine businesses — a bait business, a net maker, an icehouse — went in together to build and maintain a wharf. Waterfront businesses are small, local enterprises; Maine fishermen are mostly independent owner-operators, not contractors to large corporate fish processing companies. We do not need to get into a lengthy discussion of whose system is better, but Maine and Canadian waterfronts are just as different as two neighbors can be.
The threats and dilemmas facing the coast are not the same as losing the family farm because Maine has trouble competing with farming in other parts of the country. The loss of waterfront access has been happening every day for the past decade and a half, while lobster fishing has enjoyed an unprecedented boom in landings and earnings for those same 15 years.
What has changed in Maine, as everyone knows, is the price of waterfront land. There used to be a lot of it along the Maine coast, and it was cheap enough that local families could own and control their own access to the ocean and to hand down their “privilege” to the next generation. Now working waterfront families not only cannot afford to buy shorefront, it is almost impossible to afford the taxes to stay where you’ve been for generations.
No other fact of life so fundamentally undermines Maine’s coastal and island way of life than the alienation of traditional access that underpins the local resource-based economies of fishing, clamming, boatbuilding and aquaculture. It’s the shipworm gnawing away at the structure of our communities. Without access, the Maine coast will simply become a cartoon “Vacationland” where we’re all be extras in a Disneyesque version of “Captains Courageous” with sou’westers and corncob pipes saying “Ayuh” for the tourists and summer people.
Tax reform has, of course, been on everyone’s lips ever since we dodged the Palesky mortar-round last November. The first round of tax relief legislation signed recently by the Governor enacted a soft spending cap and modest expansions of the circuit breaker and homestead exemptions. But with the simultaneous adjustments in the school funding formula, most coastal towns will see virtually no tax relief. The legislature giveth and taketh away.
For working waterfronts and for everyone interested in the future of the Maine coast, the most important initiatives to protect our way of life are still tied up in the legislature. Let’s not kid ourselves; there are no silver bullets that will fix working waterfront access once and for all. We need different techniques and strategies to preserve access because local circumstances are so different from town to town along Maine’s 5,000 miles of saltwater coast. Like a carpenter who needs different tools for different parts of a building, we need different tools for different parts of the coast.
Here are some of the tools we need in the kit:
* Pass a working landscapes bond to provide matching state funds to buy land or purchase permanent easements to provide commercial access;
* Expand partnerships with local towns, citizens, nonprofits and land trusts to identify and help fund acquisition of critical local waterfront parcels before their use changes permanently into seasonal residential use;
* Approve a referendum for a constitutional amendment that expands the current use tax exemption for fishing properties on the coast similar to the exemptions commercial forest and farms have received.
Note that the first two tools come down to raising money. We are going to need raise funds both publicly from ourselves through bonds and privately through far-sighted partnerships with local leaders. We can stretch our dollars best and furthest through these kinds of creative partnerships. The third tool really amounts to a tax shift from one group of taxpayers to another and is thus is controversial. But still it will be important in some limited number of situations.
There are 45,000 readers of The Working Waterfront. The average legislator hears from two or three constituents on any given issue and often makes up his or her mind in an absolute void of popular opinion. The future of the coast and the soul of Maine are hanging in the balance. If that does not frighten you into action, nothing will. Make your voice heard. Support working waterfronts!
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.