Dirigo — the Maine state motto (“I lead”).
When Maine voters passed a constitutional referendum in 2005 to provide tax relief to protect commercial fishing properties and to fund a $2 million bond to acquire permanent access for future fisheries, there were only 20 miles of working waterfronts left along more than 5000 miles of Maine coastline. Like an underwater plate shifting position, no one realized the ripple effects this vote would send to waterfront communities around the country.
Perhaps the key reason Maine’s working waterfront referendum was successful with voters was because it attracted a broad diversity of commercial interests that had often been in conflict. Fishermen agreed to cooperate with aquaculture businesses; traditional boat builders added their voice alongside marinas, with whom they often compete for space; conservation organizations supported the effort as an economic development tool. The broad public understood if all of these diverse groups agreed to gather under a single tent, something noteworthy and important was happening.
Partly inspired by Maine’s example, a diverse group of businesses, activists and politicians from waterfronts across the nation gathered in Norfolk, Virginia two years later for the first Working Waterfronts and Waterways Symposium in 2007. This effort was followed by a second symposium in Portland, Maine in 2010, where delegates agreed to create the National Working Waterfront Network. Volunteers stepped forward to work on a steering committee composed of groups representing commercial and recreational fishermen, marine manufacturers, educators, non-profits and government agencies. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) also helpfully began to focus on working waterfronts and funded a study to determine, among other things, what the economic value and potential for job creation and job retention is for the nation’s working waterfronts.
What have we learned about the pressures on the nations working waterfronts since Maine first brought this issue to national prominence?
Representatives from North Carolina reported that 100 new subdivisions comprising 34,000 new shorefront homes had received their necessary building permits in 2007 alone. Many fish houses that had distributed local seafood for generations began to consider selling their suddenly high-value properties as the rising tide of development offered an attractive way to retire early. In Chesapeake Bay, we learned that the shorelines of fishing communities are being chewed up by storms and rising sea level, threatening their very existence. Elsewhere boat owners reported that public ramps for launching boats and kayaks are often widely dispersed or not located near public areas where people can visit. Along both east and west coasts, we heard that ferries supporting island communities suffer from increased operating costs and decreased public funding. And as the big seaports around the nation’s coasts begin to scramble to anticipate how to take advantage of the widening of the Panama Canal, short haul marine transportation companies in smaller harbors are left wondering who speaks for their interests.
Against this backdrop, people from diverse backgrounds and interests agreed that they could learn from each other’s experiences and could tweak the tools that businesses or residents in one state or town had used to help protect their local waterfronts. But ultimately, these groups of businesses and leaders agreed that national policies and funding will be required to augment their often fragile or faltering local efforts.
In Maine, most of us have a sense of what working waterfronts look like: a collection of commercial properties and wharves with all-tide access where vessels and vehicles to connected to land transportation routes load and unload. But beyond Maine, the definition of a working waterfront gets fuzzier. Along waterfronts where the dominant commercial uses is recreation, access is not just about the slip where you keep your boat, but places you want to land that are rapidly developing for private uses. Across the country, waterfront access is often not located in protected harbors, but along waterways that are difficult to access and where road connections are limited.
Thus, a national working waterfront tent will have to be even larger and broader than it is in Maine to accommodate different kinds of business interests that are often otherwise in conflict for their piece of the nation’s coastline. It is no secret, for example, that recreational fishermen have successfully promoted net bans that have put small gillnetters out of business in Florida and would like to do so other southern states. It is also well known that commercial fishermen find it deeply unsettling when aquaculture businesses receive exclusive leases to fishing grounds that were once part of “their” commons.
On the other hand, marine manufacturers sell similarly designed boats to all of these diverse businesses and have an interest in seeing all of them survive. Likewise, island communities understand that they depend on a variety of different types of businesses—both from traditional year-round fisheries and recreational tourism—to survive. So there is reason to hope that a national working waterfront agenda can help all of us focus on our common interests in protecting access to a diminishing shoreline resource that supports a diversity of commercial enterprises.
We need to focus the nation’s attention on our common resource before the last acre is converted to other uses. A rising tide both floats our boats and threatens our shorelines in equal measure and we will need to be agile and vigilant to keep from running aground on the shoals of our narrower interests.
Island Institute staff serve on the executive committee of the National Working Waterfront Network and are helping to coordinate the E.D.A. research grant.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.