The foreshortened days of late December and the slow turning toward the longer days that loom beyond the equinox are a good time to climb up our ramparts, or onto our widow’s walks, to survey the landscapes and seascapes of this unruly coastline.
For Maine’s islands and working waterfront communities, the past year played out against the backdrop of an overwhelming statewide mandate from voters to begin to protect our remaining working waterfronts. We voted by a 72 percent margin to accord commercial fishing properties on the coast the same kind of favorable tax treatment voters have provided for commercial forest and farmlands for decades. Our working coast is surely one of Maine’s most powerful icons and an increasingly valuable source of our distinctiveness — a quality that has virtually disappeared along every other American coastline. The $2 million pilot bond issue that was also approved a year ago is an expression, we trust, of a long-term commitment to protect an essential characteristic of what makes Maine, Maine.
At the same time, the news from the fishing grounds is more discouraging than ever. After 15 years of trying to reverse the decline of cod and haddock in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, New England’s bedrock fishery remains in a deplorably depleted condition. We now face the prospect of having protected working waterfronts from rural gentrification just as the remaining over-capitalized fleet catches the last few codfish in the Gulf of Maine. The only good news on the groundfish front is that even the last remaining holdouts for preserving the management system based on the number of days fishermen go fishing agree that the system is intellectually and practically bankrupt. Some other new strategy of managing our groundfisheries is essential. But what?
Maine’s lobster fishery is stable, at least for the time being, but even for this critical part of the coastal economy, the seismic shifts in the industry away from fresh live product that consumers boil and pick toward pre-packaged products have caught Maine flat-footed. Canada has stolen a march on us by investing in new distribution and marketing technologies so that more Maine lobsters are sold to our Canadian friends who add value and then sell them back into the U.S. market. Maine’s Department of Marine Resources report that two-thirds of Maine’s lobster harvest (some 46 million pounds worth $187 million) is shipped to Canada where, after processing, it is converted to between $260 and $300 million of value-added products. At least one new Maine lobster company aims to change that, but Canadian processors currently control the market.
Whether this market control is responsible or not, the fact is that lobster prices this year have not kept up with the escalating prices for fuel and bait. Thus, the number of new lobster boats, engines, traps and other economic “multipliers,” including new 4-wheel drive pickups at the ends of wharves along the coast will likely be diminished for the first time in recent memory. If current market conditions slow the rapid over-capitalization of the lobster fleet that characterized the last decade when lobstermen enjoyed record catches and record prices, this may be a good thing. What was Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase about bubble investments — irrational exuberance?
Speaking of fuel prices, the summer’s run-up in fuel prices to $3 per gallon for regular gasoline and upwards of $3.50 for diesel, has settled back a bit. But no fisherman I know and few thoughtful motorists seem to believe that we will ever again see prices down in the $1-$2 per gallon range we enjoyed for most of the past decade. I am as transfixed as the next person by the thought that deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere off the American continental shelf can buy us some additional time for a rational energy policy to emerge, but I would not invest a penny in betting on cheaper energy futures. In the meantime, island energy prices continue to spiral out of control and this has begun to stimulate new thinking into alternative energy sources along the coast, most especially in wind and tidal power in communities such as Vinalhaven and Swan’s Island.
On the boatbuilding front, the news along the coast was mostly pretty good. One of the curious features of American economic policies is that as wealth accumulates at the upper end of the income scale, upper income individuals invest in new boats — really expensive boats that employ many of our best craftsmen to bend and shape wood, fiberglass and high tech composites into ever more elegant hulls, gleaming decks and digital pilot houses that are also wonderfully labor intensive to maintain. It is instructive to recall that the last time Maine’s boatbuilding industry suffered a near depression was after the passage of a Clinton-era luxury tax on boats (among other items) that was so devastating, George Mitchell had to employ his considerable political skills to have it repealed.
If we look back on 2006 as the time the tide turned on many fronts, including working waterfronts, the year will also be remembered as a time when tax reform tried and failed again to find a coherent statewide constituency. Everyone is in favor of tax reform, but the referendum proposals of the past two years have failed to gain majorities while the legislature and executive branches have mostly tinkered around the edges.
Not only are we the most heavily taxed citizens in the country, but also the skewed reality of our increasingly resort-oriented economy means that affordable homes and affordable communities along the coast are now as rare as blue lobsters. The other day, on the way out to the Cranberry Isles on the mail boat, I met a young woman coming to do some cleaning for an elderly invalided islander. She had not come from Mount Desert Island — housing there became too expensive more than a decade ago — she had not even come from Ellsworth where housing may have been barely affordable five years ago. She came from a little rural enclave out beyond the edge of Ellsworth and had traveled almost two hours for a house cleaning job. Housing for young people and their families — or the lack thereof — has become the most crucial missing link in sustaining viable community life. The lack of adequate housing causes the kind of sprawl into the countryside that degrades the landscape and then increases the administrative burden to provide services, leading to increased taxes in an apparently never-ending spiral.
In addition to housing, we believe new technologies, including broad band Internet access, are also vitally important, most especially to isolated rural communities. Chebeague Islanders recently took the plunge to invest in a new system that now provides reliable, economical high-speed Internet access to its first 50 users. Information is perhaps the most empowering resource of our futures — and it has never before been available on a level playing field to isolated rural communities. The information economy, long hyped and undelivered, is virtually at our fingertips.
The Island Institute’s priorities for the coming few years will be focused on offering information that will help communities interpret how some of the broad international, national and state trends referenced above will affect Maine’s islands and working waterfronts. Maine’s island and working waterfronts can and will, we trust, develop locally tailored strategies that take advantage of opportunities these broad trends might offer while mitigating their worst features. We will be investing and leveraging additional resources in Internet and other information technology, working waterfront access, fisheries management reform and affordable housing. But all action is local.
In the end, however, it is the local expression of these resources — whether in the traditional economies of fishing, lobster fishing and boatbuilding; in the creative arts of story telling, writing, photography and painting; or in digital business applications (or a combination thereof) — we believe understanding our opportunities and taking advantage of them through collective vision and action is the key to our future.
Not a completely bad year trails aft, and a more hopeful one shimmers on the horizon.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.