In one 800-foot stretch of waterfront at Spruce Head, on lobster-rich Penobscot Bay, the annual take from the fishery is estimated at $25 million. You might thereby conclude all is well along the working coast, but there is more to the story.
In nearby Owls Head, where one of the most photographed lighthouses on the coast still reassures mariners of their position, a fisherman’s wharf and home are for sale. The price is set at upwards of $2 million. The odds are that a wealthy non-fisherman will buy this property as a second home, and there will be one less working pier, one less commercial access point, one less opportunity for traditional fishing families to follow the sea. Some 20 fishermen currently use the Owls Head wharf, and they feel anything but reassured.
“It’s a huge concern, it’s a frightening prospect,” said Rep. Chris Rector of Thomaston. On the plus side, he has seen his town’s shellfish industry revived through efforts by groups such as the Georges River Tidewater Association, which sued the town over pollution and forced a cleanup. A Republican, he supported the Working Waterfront Preservation Bond proposal, which many of his fellow legislators opposed despite the ever-higher price of land and dwindling access to the coast. “We’re in difficult economic times,” Rector said.
Along the waterfront there’s no sign of a sagging economy. Instead, there’s a continuing real estate boom as the money rolls in, much of it from out of state and all of it directed at private property. A competing new prosperity is a boom in boatbuilding, a traditional Maine industry with deep roots on the coast. In Rector’s hometown the Lyman-Morse yacht yard is expanding with the aid of tax breaks. Lyman-Morse may soon be Thomaston’s largest private employer, topping the huge Dragon cement plant, which has a payroll of more than 100 workers. Lyman-Morse already owns a major stretch of the town’s Georges River waterfront. Here, and all up and down the coast, yacht building is big business and it’s growing; commercial watercraft is a strong second.
But while boatbuilding thrives, so does the development of second homes, and these bustling industries are competing for a finite amount of deepwater shore frontage.
Squeezed out are fishermen and other local people who simply can’t swing the taxes any more. The real estate brokers are at the door. If you pump gas at the local station, if you’re a sternman on a lobster boat or a clerk at the store, chances are you don’t live near the water. You might even have to move out of town, back inland from the costly coast.
If you’re lucky enough, your family has a piece of land to share with you, or you bought a place when you could still afford the price.
Jeff Armstrong bought the former Burgess & O’Brien shipyard in Thomaston 30 years ago, and said if he had to buy it today he couldn’t make the payments. That’s true even though Jeff’s Marine — boat sales and service — has grown every year and employs 16 people. He said enlightened zoning in Thomaston keeps the waterfront mostly in marine-related uses, and while he could otherwise sell his land for condominiums and make a bundle, he believes in preserving working waterfront.
Boatyards are doing so well that “the only unemployed boatbuilders are the unemployable,” Armstrong said, and it’s hard to fill jobs. Small boatbuilder Greg Rossel of Troy agreed: “It’s a decentralized industry that’s home-grown. No big corporation, it’s not from out of state. You’ve got local taxes, local ownership and spin-off benefits. You don’t hear the old saying about how the business climate is so bad.”
Rossel, who also teaches at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, said people like the idea of boatbuilding, and boatbuilders can locate in “places where MBNA isn’t going to go.” The credit card firm employs 2,000 people in Belfast but under new owner Bank of America, those jobs may dry up. A marina project at the former Stinson sardine cannery in Belfast would be only a drop in the bucket after an MBNA pullout.
Fourth-generation fisherman Dennis Damon, a Democratic state senator from Trenton, said that lobstering alone provides jobs for 7,500 licensed fishermen. Landings last year totaled 70 million pounds worth $285 million. He pointed to a huge ripple effect from that kind of economic engine. “This is a substantial portion of our economy.” Damon is co-chair of the legislature’s Marine Resources Committee and he said preserving working waterfront is “allowing these people access to their office, in this case the sea. The door to that office is getting smaller. What happens if the office closes? Are we going to have a shutout?”
Kate Reilly, Bar Harbor native and economic advisor at the State Planning Office, said her hometown wrestles with the pressures of development, tourism and the traditional fishing industry. The cost of housing on Mount Desert means “a lot of people have been pushed off the island. Housing pressure is really pushing people off the coast,” she said, referring to Mainers who work in service jobs.
Ninety-seven-year-old Farnham Butler of Somesville, retired Mount Desert boatbuilder, contributed $50,000 to a local affordable housing alliance. He hopes the idea of creating a fund to help local people stay in their communities is contagious. “I hope it will help other places,” he said. “If you can get yourself in a position where a native house comes on the market, you can grab it before some multimillionaire does.”
Reilly pointed out there is intense development pressure on the coast, while inland regions are seeing declines. State figures show that between 1990 and 2000, the population density of coastal counties rose from 65 to 72 people per square mile. In those same years, the people per square mile of non-coastal counties dropped slightly to 31. Fifty-six per cent of Maine jobs are along the coast, she said, and 51 per cent of retail sales take place on the coast.
Endangered
For centuries fishermen have plied their trade in Maine waters, starting with the People of the Dawn, the Wabanaki native people who fished for subsistence, and continuing with European colonists who found an abundance of cod, down to the present commercial harvest, where there is no cod. Overfishing and other factors have practically ended the finfish catch near shore, and the fleet of bigger offshore vessels shrinks while scientists, fishermen and the federal government attempt to revive fishing stocks through ever-tighter regulation. Will the fish stocks bounce back? Theoretically, yes. It’s a billion-dollar question.
Just as his father did before him, Alden Leeman, 71, of Orr’s Island, fishes from wooden boats built in Friendship. He has a wharf and a tiny house he shares with a young partner, and he pays $8,000 in taxes. That’s because he has 2,000 feet of waterfront. “I can tell you, I’m falling behind every year. I can’t imagine what this place will look like in 20 years. I don’t think my kids will be able to hang onto it. These people from out of state are coming and bulldozing houses to build great big mansions.”
It’s a crisis, according to Rep. Leila Percy, a Phippsburg Democrat. “When the fishermen’s wharves are gone, there’s no access to the water. That’s the crisis we face.” That’s why, as co-chair of the Marine Resources Committee, she pushed as hard as she could for passage of the Working Waterfront Preservation Bond. (It was known as the “surf and turf” bill since as proposed it would support both coastal access and working farms. Farmers are facing development pressure to sell their fields for subdivisions, and scores of Maine farms have already been carved up by real estate brokers, particularly in coastal counties.)
Already, some traditional coastal communities have changed almost beyond recognition through high-end development that leaves them exclusive and bereft of the very appeal that newcomers seek in coming here. The general store has closed and been converted to a dwelling. Paths to the sea are gated off. There are No Trespassing signs on the old field of lupine and juniper where local families used to picnic. You can’t walk to the shore to dig a hod of clams. It isn’t just urchins and cod that are endangered. A way of life — one that employed thousands of Mainers — and a sense of place are endangered.
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This is the second in a series of articles on the importance of Maine’s working waterfronts and the many threats they face. See the August 2005 WWF article, “Coastal Character: On the Maine coast, working waterfronts set the tone” by Bob Moore.