S5E7 A Conversation on Maine’s Working Waterfront: Responding to Changing Times

On this episode, Bill Zoellick, Monique Coombs, and Jeremy Garielson join us for a panel discussion on Maine’s working waterfront. The panelists discuss the waterfront’s economic and cultural significance, on-foot access, preservation, community involvement, and much more.

Resources

Scuttlebutt

Transcript

[00:00:00] Monique Coombs: And our towns just haven’t been able to keep pace and so it just becomes this sort of like cycle of like trying to create regulations trying to manage and then also not making any decisions because of concerns around like litigation from new residents and so we’re really sort of like stuck. Stuck in this rock and a hard place of new and old and trying to do what’s best.

But again, as we’ve been saying, it’s like not, it’s not a one solution. It’s not a one policy. We really got to think about this holistically and try to build out our toolbox the best way.

[00:00:30] Eric Miller: That was Monique Coombs, a panelist in our conversation about working waterfronts in Maine.

 Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discuss the policy matters that are most important to Maine’s people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. My name is Eric Miller, and I’ll be your host.

Today we’ll be discussing Maine’s working waterfronts with Bill Zoellick, Monique Coombs, and Jeremy Gabrielson. Bill Zoellick chairs Gouldsboro’s Coastal Resilience Committee, which plans and implements projects to prepare Gouldsboro for higher seas and larger storms. He also works with Gouldsboro’s Shellfish Committee and is the first author of “Getting to the Shore on Foot, Sustaining Harvester Access”, in Maine Policy Review Special Issue, “Our Shared Ocean”, Volume 32, Issue 2.

Monique Coombs is the Director of Community Programs at the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, an industry-driven noMPRofit working to restore the fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and sustain Maine’s fishing communities for future generations. Currently, she is working to identify ways to protect, preserve, and grow Maine’s working waterfronts as well as building the Fisherman Wellness Program.

Coomb’s authored “Critical Crossroads, Coastline Challenges in Preserving Maine’s Working Waterfronts” in Maine Policy Review Special Issue “Our Shared Ocean”, Volume 32, Issue 2.

Jeremy Gabrielson is the Senior Conservation and Community Planner in the Department of Land Protection with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. He has a strong interest in coastal resiliency, coastal access, and locally driven economic development in rural communities. Gabrielson serves on the Beginning with Habitat Steering Community and the Coastal and Marine Working Group of the Maine Climate Council. His specialties include marshland protection and restoration, marsh migration, coastal resilience, climate change, conservation planning, spatial analysis, and process design and facilitation.

Maine’s coast is a signature feature of its geography and a vital part of the state. According to the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry, its scenic shorelines draw more than 6 million visitors each year, largely due to the landscape’s unique natural beauty and thriving coastal communities.

However, Maine’s working waterfronts, which play an essential role in sustaining these communities economically and culturally, are facing new pressures from rapid demographic and technological changes. Waterfronts are especially important to harvesters and business owners who need to access the shore on foot, but the sharing of private and public coastal property is becoming increasingly contentious.

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequently more people working from home, Maine is continuing to see an influx of people moving into the state. As Maine tries to accommodate these new inhabitants, coastal development is increasing and shoreline access is being carved up into pieces of private land.

Fishermen and harvesters have a long-established relationship with coastal towns, as on-foot access has always been a part of these communities’ culture. But with land quickly being bought up by newcomers, this culture may not be understood or adopted. In Pearson et al. ‘s Maine Policy Review article on “Protecting the Coast Over Time”, they say, quote, less than 10 percent of Maine’s coast is accessible to the public. Maine has a long tradition of permissive trespassing, including for clammers, but as soon as land gets purchased by someone not interested in continuing that access, it can quickly disappear, end quote. It is now more crucial than ever for harvesters who rely on shared spaces and access arrangements to continue to build relationships with town officials and landowners.

It is also equally important to preserve the land itself, with all of its ecological diversity, with sustainability and appreciation in mind. Policy responses can be part of the land-protection solution, along with programs like Land for Maine’s Future, which, quote, has invested over 130 million dollars in conservation projects, helping acquire more than 600, 000 acres of land throughout the state, end quote, according to the Pearson article I mentioned earlier.

Other organizations such as the Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association and Tidal Bay Consulting have developed templates and frameworks for towns to assess their waterfront access and to collect inventory data, as well as to grow community relationships with harvesters. As Maine’s coastal communities continue to change, collaboration will be necessary to ensure that the land is preserved, its history and culture honored, and that shoreline access points will be easily accessible to those who rely on it for their livelihoods.

And now on to our panel discussion with Bill, Monique, and Jeremy.

Hi, everyone. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Can you explain what the working waterfront is and why it is so important to Maine’s culture and economy? And can you explain how on foot access plays a crucial role for people living and working on the coast?

Bill, we’ll start off with you.

[00:06:23] Bill Zoellick: I live in Gouldsboro. We have about fifty-five-ish miles of shoreline in a community of about 1,600 people. That’s because we’re on a peninsula, so there’s a lot of shoreline. The town’s makeup, really, it’s history and also sort of the way the town operates is really tied to the water, all of it, completely.

We’ve got about five pretty active harbors. Working waterfront is embedded in what the town is, in how it thinks of itself and what it focuses on. In the article we wrote for MPR, we make a distinction between on-foot waterfront and then waterfront that has a place and somebody owns it and there’s often zoning that says, okay, this is supposed to be used for commercial waterfront purposes.

So we have both kinds. We have a working waterfront that’s harbors and stuff like that. And the article that we wrote focused mostly on the other kind of waterfront. Which I think maybe tends to get a little lost because it’s less visible. And that is the waterfront that people access on foot in order to harvest from the intertidal.

Clam harvesters for sure, worm harvesters. And they’re really different. One is there’s a, there’s actually some sort of a legal agreement in place that says somebody owns this, somebody there’s a, it’s used intensely. That’s the normal kind of working waterfront, and we were trying in our article to focus on the other kind of waterfront that is diffuse.

It’s, hopefully, there’s a lot of it and it’s used all over the coast, and the use is relatively light, but most notably, the use is by permission. And so it isn’t something that, that the harvesters own. It’s something where there’s a sort of a social contract. There’s an agreement that this, it’s a good thing for harvesters to have access.

And one of the things that we wrote about in the article, and we can talk about more later, is how, as the coast changes, those social contracts are at risk and we have more and more cases where suddenly uses that have been for hundreds of years suddenly don’t exist anymore. And so we’ll get into that, but I’ll let others talk about working waterfront.

It’s a great question.

[00:08:41] Eric Miller: Yeah. Monique, would you like to add on to what Bill has artfully articulated?

[00:08:50] Monique Coombs: Sure. So I live in Harpswell. We have 216 miles of coastline. And I think it’s actually really neat how when people live in coastal communities, especially those connected with the working waterfront tend to know exactly how much coastline is their community and usually say it with a lot of pride.

Like we’re very fortunate and filled with gratitude to live in these spaces. For myself, as well as the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, when we think about the working waterfront, we think about a sense of space, a place for fishermen, for their businesses, as well as, it’s a big part of the culture and community within working waterfront communities.

I have two kids that fish, and they spend much of their summer down on the waterfront. They go haul their traps, during the day or they go pogie fishing with their dad. And then in the evening you can find them down there with a bunch of other kids striper fishing and mackerel fishing it’s really like this, like Main Street for a coastal community to be on the working waterfront. And I think, to Bill’s point too, there’s a lot of different kinds of working waterfront for fishing.

There’s the walk-in access necessary for clam harvesting and being in the intertidal. There’s space that’s necessary for gear storage and gear maintenance. And then there’s the larger properties, we call those smaller properties discrete working waterfronts. And then there’s the larger working waterfront properties that are necessary for buying and selling lobster and other products.

And then the other thing I’ll just say is, working waterfronts are also an incredibly important aspect of food security in the state of Maine, because this is where we’re bringing seafood for people to eat. And so it’s culturally significant, economically significant, it’s significant for the food system.

So it’s critical infrastructure for the state of how intertwined

[00:10:42] Eric Miller: those communities are and how those various local and state level uses are all happening in such a small area. Jeremy, would you want to unpack some of the like human and environmental intersections of how it, these working waterfronts are so culturally and economically important?

[00:11:01] Jeremy Gabrielson: Sure, yeah. So I guess just building a little bit on what Monique was saying, talking about these discrete working waterfront sites, I think whether we’re talking about fisheries, shell fisheries, where a lot of harvesters are reliant on overland access, foot access to commercial flats, or the lobster fishery, or other small boat fisheries, if you go back in time a little bit a lot of our access was privately owned, discrete working waterfronts.

And over time, one of the things that we’ve seen change is that with increased development pressure, and I know we’ll talk about this a little bit later. There’s been a shift from some of the use that happens in those discrete working waterfront facilities onto public facilities, private facilities, private access point still play a huge role.

But there’s a shift in some of the access in, onto publicly owned and managed sites and those may be owned by a town, they may be owned by the state, they may be owned by a land trust. That’s a use, especially the overland access, that’s a use that can often coexist really well with other uses, recreational uses or other ways that properties are managed.

But one of the things that we’ve seen is there’s also a lot of pressure for folks to get down to the water for other reasons too, right? We all like to go down to the water in the summer to hop in the ocean or sit by the beach. And so as there’s sort of this change in the overall mix of public versus privately owned sites, and also as there’s this change in recreation, a lot of communities are trying to figure out how to meet that balance and make sure that we’re meeting the needs of harvesters.

I think one of the, for me, one of the things that’s really important, particularly when we’re talking about these discrete working waterfronts that are used by shellfish harvesters, is just recognizing the critical importance to harvesters of that overland access to the flats as an aspect of safety.

More and more with a move toward private sites, we’re seeing harvesters accessing flats by boat, which is, can be a great way to access the flats. It can also become problematic, particularly in the winter months when tides are high and storms are high if you don’t have a safe way to get onto those flats over land.

And so that’s where there’s a real critical role for folks like Bill, who’s doing great work in Gouldsboro to help secure access from landowners to maintain that access, overland access to the flats..

[00:13:25] Eric Miller: So I want to tug on a thread you mentioned there, Jeremy, and some of the changes that have been happening in the coastal areas.

I think you all touched on some changes a little bit, but how can statewide policy interventions intervene or otherwise interact with some of these changes and the evolving needs of harvesters, waterfront businesses, private property owners and new residents in coastal communities, while also ensuring on-foot shore access for all in the face of higher real estate costs and local socioeconomic inequality, Jeremy, you don’t mind continuing on.

[00:14:01] Jeremy Gabrielson: Sure. I mean, I think one of the things that’s important to recognize is that both the nature of the fisheries and the nature of the land uses are changing, right? So I don’t think there’s one policy intervention that solves this problem. And as we’ve been talking with folks like Monique and Bill, one of the things that we’ve all recognized is that we really need a range of tools that can work.

From the state level down to the local level down to really the level of working with an individual landowner who may have very specific concerns about when and how people are crossing their property to get to the flats. And one of the things that we’ve been working on is developing a range of tools that kind of go from working with a landowner to purchase access, to zoning or other municipal regulations that are supportive of allowing continued access to the flats to even temporary agreements, license agreements, where you know maybe a landowner has some concerns and would like to see some additional management from the part of the harvester community.

But they’re not ready to talk about or they’re not interested in talking about an easement or a permanent land use tool. And really all of those things need to kind of work together to respond to the needs of both landowners and industry.

[00:15:22] Eric Miller: Thank you, Jeremy. Monique, in your piece, you touch on this concept of gentrification in a coastal community and I would love for you to unpack that a little bit and how people have been affected by changes in real estate prices and these coastal communities and how they can be affected by potentially being further away from the access points that they may wish to get to.

[00:15:45] Monique Coombs: I’ll say too that I just want to echo some of what Jeremy said that it’s really a holistic approach to the working waterfront that’s going to help with fishing businesses and people can serve these properties because as they said before, like they’re all different. And each property is going to have its similar issues, but unique set of issues that will require unique solutions.

And so I think it’s matching good policy with communication and outreach and temporary options as well as permanent options. And I think that goes into what you just asked too, there are quite a few obstacles, unfortunately, that commercial fishing businesses are facing these days with working waterfront being a piece of them.

The storms in January really exacerbated issues on the working waterfront as well as within fishing businesses because the cost of doing business is going up. Access to goods and services is becoming more challenging. For fishermen, the further they have to move from the water, the more expensive it can get for their business, I mentioned that gear storage and gear maintenance near the water is important, and it doesn’t seem like it would be, but lobstermen have 800 lobster traps, and if they’re having to navigate getting them out of the water, finding a place to store them, they got to put them on a trailer, that’s a lot of time and money that they have to spend managing that. And it can again, exacerbate costs to their businesses.

I think the other thing that’s really important to note in this is that for shellfish harvesters, there’s a couple of towns that have new ordinances that make it easier for harvesters to continue to clam in areas that they’re not living anymore.

But if you don’t live in the community that you are, where you harvest, you can’t vote in that community. And I think that there’s some inequality in that as well, because you aren’t able to vote on things that could potentially impact your business.

With gentrification, I was actually just, sort of unpacking this a little bit with a colleague yesterday. I think it’s much more subtle in coastal communities than it is in urban areas. Cause it’s not like all of a sudden you look down the road and you’re like, Oh, a coffee shop, a bookshop. Oh, there’s a hipster. It’s very slowly, you’re like, wow, it’s really expensive to live here. Wow. There’s no houses on the market. Well, like it’s just incremental, especially where working waterfronts are very often hidden from the general public sort of anyway. You have to know like where the cove is or where to go down to find the working waterfronts. It’s just incrementally growing and it’s creating some challenges within the communities, as I mentioned, the cost of doing business and things like that.

The other challenge too, is we are in a home-rule state, which is awesome because if you want to make a change, you have the power in your community to do that. But sometimes, committees that are less familiar have people on them that are less familiar with living on the waterfront or living next to commercial fishing businesses.

There’s a new level of advocacy that’s required of commercial fishermen to be able to, participate in municipal meetings and fight for their businesses, fight for that access to the waterfront. So it’s a good question, but tough to answer because it’s not in the traditional sense. It’s incrementally changing ways of doing things. And so I wrote about it for the Maine Policy Review. It’s still something I’m sort of exploring and figuring out like the language around and exactly how to define it for communities. But I think it’s notable and it’s happening in coastal communities, Southern Maine for sure.

Midcoast a lot, Downeast. It’s going up there a little bit more. Yeah.

[00:19:18] Eric Miller: Yeah. The fascinating bit about the voting potential disenfranchisement along with some of the economic disenfranchisement that could come from being pushed further away physically from where you get your livelihood or at least a portion of your livelihood.

It was really interesting and interesting to hear what thoughts you have continuing as you noodle over it over time, Bill, do you have anything you’d like to add on to what statewide policy interventions or local policies could be helpful for maintaining on foot access?

[00:19:49] Bill Zoellick: Yeah, I’ll be happy to speak a little bit about statewide stuff, but I want to build a little bit on what Monique was just talking about too. The gentrification or the change is, it’s complicated. And as I’ve dug into this, I realized that people from away coming to the Maine coast is not a new thing. It’s been going on for a long time. And I really puzzled about why this might be different now.

And there’s always a possibility of, well, this is really not so different than we’ve been doing it for such a long time. And I actually do think it is different. And part of it is, I’ll just talk about Gouldsboro again. We had a pretty large expansion of subdivisions and other folks coming in the 70s and 80s, on a little bit into the 90s.

And so there were a lot of places that were, from a shore access standpoint, like undeveloped land that was, yes, it was owned, but it wasn’t much used, that turned into people’s house lots. So that was a pretty big change. However, most of those folks and then I know them actually now, pretty much absorbed into the community and into the culture of the community.

So one example of that is that there’s an understanding that this is a fishing community, and that’s what it’s about. And if you’re here, that’s where you live. That’s what you’ve chosen to do, and it’s not something else. There’s an awareness that you don’t really put fertilizer on your lawn.

That’s just crazy, it runs off into the ocean. And that generally seems to be understood. I don’t know whether that was understood earlier, whether it’s understood over time, but I’m seeing over the last couple, three years, as Monique said, it’s not only a lot of people, it’s an enormous change in price.

So all of a sudden, to be on the shore, you either have to have been there a while, or it’s really a different kind of person that can do that with a different kind of background. And my concern is that for them, it’s less about being part of a small fishing community and having that being a big part of their life, and more about, investing in an Airbnb or a Virbo that can actually produce revenues.

Well, that’s really different and it’s you know, it changes something important. It’s a little different than what was going on in the 70s and 80s. And those are the sorts of things that I puzzle about. I try not to be alarmist. I, we’ve done this before, but my concern is that there are maybe, more voices in the community that are focused on other things, that aren’t focused on this as a place.

There’s a coastal community where people make a living from the sea. Maybe that’s less important now. I don’t know. But those are the sorts of things that I think might matter as we go through this, what seems to me like a pretty fast transition over the last few years.

With regard to state policy, there’s a couple of things that we mentioned in the article we wrote.

One is that some of it is just informational. If the state could be part of the messaging that the working waterfront is important, having newcomers be aware that the state actually has very strong protections for liability. One of the big concerns is, well, I can’t let somebody cross my property because if something, then I’m liable legally.

No, not in Maine. There are strong protections, but people don’t know that. So if the state began messaging more about this and being more visible in terms of supporting the waterfront and this, when you come here, that’s what this is about. And sort of having it, people understood, oh, okay, this is what’s going on here.

Other things would be, it’s complicated because if you’re talking about private property, It’s more difficult to think in terms of financial incentives. It’s possible. So at a state level, we could be exploring things such as tax incentives for allowing part of your land to be used as shore access, things of that, and those are things that I think need more examination and more attention in order to have it be just part of what people think of when they’re on the shore.

There are a lot of different things that are telling them access. And working waterfront is part of what’s going on here. It’s, this is not a place where you put a fence around your house and it’s yours, and you’re sort of in suburbia. It’s really a very different concept of land. This land is used. It’s not just owned and decorated.

[00:24:31] Jeremy Gabrielson: And if I could just build a little bit on what Bill was saying around the changes in how people are coming to and using coastal properties, in addition to some of the more intensive use of properties that may have been, a summer cottage that was used for a few weeks in the summer, that’s now become a much more intensively used Airbnb with turnover, every week all throughout the summer months. One of the other changes that we’re seeing is that information is a lot more readily available. And so that secret spot that you may have learned about after 15 years of summering in Gouldsboro, now everybody can go on to Google Maps and find out where it is.

And so that changes both the nature of access sort of on those discrete properties that may have never shown up on a map where people just knew that they could walk down over somebody’s lawn to get down to the flats, but it also changes the number and intensive use at properties that do show up on the map.

And so that sort of that increased recreational use at publicly known locations also has the potential to displace harvesters from places that they’re relying on to get down, whether it’s for moving gear or for getting down to the flats to use for harvesting. I think there are strategies that land managers can use on an individual basis to help deal with some of that.

I know the Woodward Point Preserve that Maine Coast Heritage Trust manages in Brunswick is an example where there’s a long-standing harvester access on that site and as part of a very thoughtful design we were able to separate the portion of that property that’s primarily used for commercial purposes from the portions that are primarily used for recreation so that both of those uses can coexist on one property.

I think that’s something that I’d like to see more of both on publicly owned and land trust owned properties, but it definitely does take that thoughtful approach to design to make sure that the wave of recreational use doesn’t wash commercial harvesters out of sites that they’ve relied on for a long time.

[00:26:36] Eric Miller: That’s so interesting how global trends manifesting in these interesting areas of short-term vacation rentals then having effect on local real estate prices and the kind of culture of a community that didn’t necessarily experience a lot of tourism before. I mean, there are certainly coastal areas of Maine that have always had tourists, but then those little nooks and crannies that get discovered through finding on Google Maps or someone maybe on a social media platform that highlights like, Hey, I found this really cool little area.

And then more people start to visit, which as Maine gets quite a bit of revenue from tourism, it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out over the years. Yeah, Monique.

[00:27:18] Monique Coombs: I just I wanted to add because I think the Airbnb, the short-term rental issue and coastal communities epitomizes some of the larger issues because short-term rentals are not new in coastal communities.

There’s a lot of like fishing families that back in the day, that was their job as caretakers for other homes. The house I live in, we bought from my in-laws and my mother-in-law saves everything. So she had some of the previous owners’ letters between them and the lobsterman that was the caretaker.

And they were just like wonderful letters to read. I think we’re, some of the new residents and gentrification, and some of the things that we’ve already been talking about, come into play here is that there’s this sort of knee-jerk reaction to have this one size fits all solution because there’s this perceived or real concern about Airbnbs and Vrbos and so it’s we need a rule. We need an ordinance. We need to, put these fees or fines or whatever on these properties. But if you really start to take some of this away, there are some coastal communities where it’s still fishing families, it’s still local families that are managing these properties.

And so it’s this balance of new and old that I don’t think we’ve figured out. And I think one of the issues is, and this is potentially where policy could come into play as well, is like, municipal capacity just doesn’t exist. So Harpsville has been a tourist town forever. We’ve had short-term rentals forever.

We’ve had commercial fishing businesses forever. We haven’t had the population that we have forever. We’ve only had it since, 2020. So I think the pandemic really drove some of the amenity migration, the climate migration, the COVID migration. And I bring that up in the article about gentrification in the Maine Policy Review.

And our towns just haven’t been able to keep pace. And so it just becomes this sort of like cycle of trying to create regulations, trying to manage, and then also not making any decisions because of concerns around like litigation from new residents. And so we’re really stuck in this rock and a hard place of new and old and trying to do what’s best.

But again, as we’ve been saying, it’s not a one solution. It’s not a one policy. We really got to think about this holistically and try to build out our toolbox the best we can

[00:29:34] Bill Zoellick: Just adding on a little bit to what Monique said. And using Gouldsboro again to serve as a case study, it’s the one I know. Gouldsboro’s strength right now relative to other communities I see around is that it has had over the last 30, 40 years, it has had a lot of folks who have settled here from other places, and it has incorporated them into the operations of the town and really quite successfully. And so there’s capacity here that comes from people who have come here and if people hadn’t come here, Gouldsboro would be much less vibrant and much less successful in being able to, I’ve only been here 20 years and many people like me are working to help the community. It’s a tricky thing. It isn’t simply that, we need to, close the doors.

But it’s as Monique said, there’s something about the pacing of it and maybe the short-termness of it. And so when I settled here, we moved here in the year 2000, I’ve been here that long. And then I haven’t gone anywhere else. But the notion that you have a lot of people churning, then all of a sudden the connection to place, it’s just not meaningful anymore.

[00:30:45] Jeremy Gabrielson: And I think that really speaks to the need that Monique was articulating for assistance from at the state level around how best to manage or how to think about managing coastal access sites, whether they’re primarily working waterfront or not. I know a number of years ago, we did an analysis that looked at where there are coastal access sites, including recreational sites up and down the coast and how that’s changed over the last 20 years. And one of the things that really struck me in doing that is just the huge number of different individual entities that manage coastal access sites. You’re just looking at municipalities, we’ve got 130 some odd towns up and down the Maine coast and many of them really only manage a handful of coastal access sites. And so I think there is a, there’s a real need for assistance from, and there are folks at the state who are meeting this need, but I think there’s a need for more assistance for communities to best understand how these trends are playing out over the coast and what their options are and best practices might be in managing coastal access sites to balance some of these needs.

Bill’s doing a great job. The town of Gouldsboro is doing a great job figuring this out and they’re really a leader in this space. But for towns that don’t have that dedicated volunteer capacity, I think some additional planning and resources from the state would really be helpful in, and helping towns sort through those issues.

[00:32:17] Eric Miller: I really appreciate how you all articulated an issue that invokes such strong reactions from people and often gets under-discussed and gets, headline warfare and doesn’t really get good faith conversation around how exactly we can understand what’s going on and looking forward into addressing them and the historical nuances that led to this point.

And so I really appreciate how you all did this. We have covered a lot of ground already with how some of the pressures on working waterfronts are now and looking forward. Monique, would you mind talking about any of these challenges that are coming in the next five or so years for Maine’s commercial fisheries that we haven’t touched on yet?

[00:33:00] Monique Coombs: I mean, this is such a, the working waterfront in Maine, there’s so much nuance and even just in our coastal communities. And I think that’s because I don’t know how to say it other than we’ve been fine and then the pandemic happened, and to what we’ve mentioned that pace has been kind of hard to keep up with, and that’s actually kind of the same for commercial fishing businesses.

My understanding, I’ve only been part of the fishing industry for, my husband and I have been together for almost 20 years, it used to be there was sort of one issue a year that would be pretty dramatic and, really impact the fishermen’s business and even the pace of the challenges that commercial fishermen are facing has been exacerbated, costs of doing business, environmental impacts, things like the storms, changes on the working waterfront.

Commercial fishing industry is one of the most regulated industries in the United States and regulations aren’t slowing down, gear changes, and that’s a lot for commercial fishermen to keep pace with. And, the working waterfront, like I mentioned right out of the gate, is it’s this sense of space and safety for fishermen.

Their communities are obviously their homes, and I think that this is one of the harder challenges to manage and contend with because, it is home. It is your space. And so when you start to lose that, it really starts to affect someone’s mental health. Anybody that’s heard me talk about working waterfront, I always bring up solastalgia, which is the feeling of homesickness when you’re already at home.

And I used it prior to the storms in January of this year because of development and things like gentrification. If I go out on the boat with my kids, I look up on the shore and I’m like, Oh my God, where’d that house come from? Everything’s just constantly changing. And then the storms happen, and they changed even more and a lot of people lost their family or instead have been there for generations and they’re probably not going to be able to build them back.

And that’s heartbreaking. And it’s significant change to coastal communities. So that’s why for us at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, I run our Fisherman Wellness Program and our Working Waterfront Program. And they intersect more often than I ever thought they would because they are so intrinsically tied.

So there’s a lot of challenges for fishing businesses now and in the future. And I think there will continue to be, but that’s what makes identifying ways to preserve access and protect our working waterfront and our coastal community so important is because people deserve that sense of home in their communities.

[00:35:32] Jeremy Gabrielson: Yeah, and I guess just to build on that, I think it’s also really important for us to talk about and think about and come to better understand how various aspects of climate change are going to impact this fishery. And they’re going to impact all fisheries but in particular when we’re talking about commercial shellfish.

When I first started to get involved with protecting working waterfront access for shellfish harvesters 20 years ago. One of the things that was widely recognized at the time and I think it’s really still a foundation of this work is that commercial harvesters have an immense amount of knowledge about how to harvest fish or shellfish, worms whatever species they’re working with, how to get down to the places where they’re harvesting them, how those animals respond and change over time.

And one of the things that we’re seeing in addition to some of the coastal shoreline change, which is, became really evident in the January storms, is that the nature of the fisheries and the nature of the access is changing. I think when we sit down with harvesters, and I’m sure Bill can speak to this, there’s a lot of, I gain a lot of knowledge from understanding where and how people have traditionally accessed the flats to make their living. One of the things that’s not clear to me moving forward is whether the places that have always been used are necessarily going to continue to be some of the best places to access the flats in the future.

And that may be because of access issues with roads that haven’t been historically experienced coastal flooding, experiencing that on a more frequent basis, but we’re also starting to learn about how sea level rise is influencing the flats and where they are just physically located on the map.

The charts that were drawn in the 70s and 80s are not an accurate representation of our intertidal zone anymore. And that’s changing rapidly. So I think those are all things that we as a community need to come to better understand so that we can continue to support these industries in the future.

[00:37:37] Bill Zoellick: I’m chairman of Gouldsboro’s Coastal Resilience Committee. And one of the things that we focus on there is trying to understand and get some idea looking into the future as to what the potential impacts might be over the next 5 or 10 or 15 years from climate change and in some ways the January storms that are terrible, but they also were useful or constructive insofar as they really demonstrated how really big things can happen quickly. It stimulated conversations in Gouldsboro that probably wouldn’t have happened had those events not happened. So one of those things I get that we’re really focused on to be specific, for instance, we had, the state has suggested that communities such as Gouldsboro ought to be managing for four feet of sea level rise by the year 2100.

And we had four feet of sea level rise this year. And, it’s not happening every month on a tidal cycle. But the idea that you could all of a sudden have a lot of water covering a whole lot of wharves and in places where you don’t want it to be, septic systems and all sorts of places, it happened.

And one of the things that we’re focused on over the next year is to look at all of our harbors and to really begin engaging not just the public infrastructure, but also looking at all of the private infrastructure and trying to get people to think together about, okay, what does this mean? And it is, as Jeremy said, we’re probably going to need to move some things back.

We need certainly need to build them higher and all of those conversations are just really getting going and we hope over the next year to be able to have them be something other than just anxiety and talking about what you’re worried about and turn them into things where we actually can sort of say, okay, what does that mean?

And what does that mean in terms of local ordinances? What does that mean in terms of decisions that we make together about this harbor? So climate change is a very big deal in terms of all of these things we’re talking about.

[00:39:48] Eric Miller: Let’s keep talking about climate change. Are there any instances where climate change resilience and adaptation ordinances and projects inadvertently can cause harm to what’s happening at the working waterfront and potentially not necessarily be immediately helpful or at least perceived as not immediately helpful by local fishermen and businesses. And what is important to consider when bringing policy solutions for something as grand as climate and applying them in these shared spaces, Bill, if you want to continue.

[00:40:24] Bill Zoellick: Sure. I would like to give a tip of the hat to the state of Maine and to Governor Mills and the people that she’s brought together to work with these issues because I feel like rather than deciding that there’s a bunch of top-down stuff that needs to be mandated.

The state has taken an approach of providing funding to do work locally. The thing that is so important to understand, I think Monique was, somebody was talking about all of the, maybe Jeremy was talking about all of the hundreds of different communities and policies, and that isn’t a bad thing.

Context matters enormously here. There is no way that what works even in one part of Gouldsboro Rocky Shorefront is going to work other places where there are mud flats and marshes. You really have to know, and this is again where local knowledge becomes so important. You have to know the place, and you have to have some sense of what is likely to happen, and, understanding that, it’s a new world.

We’ve never seen that much water before. The state’s approach, which has mostly been in funding local action, I think is exactly right. It isn’t come down and try to find a prescription that fits across the entire state of Maine. That’s nuts. What you really want to do is fund local work, getting use of local knowledge, fishermen, harvesters, and trying to then have that go from just conversations into action and that takes money and it takes bringing in people from various firms that can help us do that work.

And so I just applaud the way that the state has approached this. It’s good stuff.

[00:42:01] Eric Miller: My initial reaction to that is that seems like it would foster a stronger local social contract of addressing a big issue where you don’t have people who you don’t recognize coming to your area and telling you how it’s going to be.

You’re deciding together how it’s going to be. Yeah, Jeremy, if you would like to add on to Bill’s,

[00:42:20] Jeremy Gabrielson: I’ll second Bill’s observations and speaking as one of the folks who served on the coastal and marine working group of the Climate Council recently, I really valued the amount of input from folks in the industry in a wide cross section of Maine that has gone into developing that climate action plan and the value that it places on local solutions.

I think to your question, what I heard more in that group, I heard less about specific resilience actions that were impacting fisheries negatively and more just a need to think about and understand how we can adapt some of our existing environmental regulations to the climate reality that we’re now living in.

And one of the places that I see this coming through is in sort of floodplain management and floodplain ordinances. We have a national floodplain and flood insurance system that is adapted for a climate reality that we no longer live in. And so we need to adapt that. And that creates disincentives for property owners to invest in the types of resilience actions that we would like to see them making to make sure that we have viable working waterfront infrastructure into the future.

I don’t know what the solution is it’s probably some mix of federal, state, and local, but, I think, ideally, what we would like to see is environmental regulations that create incentives for folks who need to be interfacing directly between land and water. So people who own wharves and boat launches and, like fishermen need to get from the land to the water that needs to be right in the floodplain.

That the regulations make it easy for them to, as easy as it can be for them to design structures that are going to work and be resilient in the climate reality we’re living in. While also recognizing that there’s probably a lot of uses that aren’t going to be appropriate in that shore zone where there’s going to be increasing storm damage and increasing erosion.

So I hope that nuance around protecting working waterfront infrastructure is something that we can build into our existing environmental regulations more so than an impact of, unintended consequence of new climate resilience actions.

[00:44:39] Monique Coombs: Yeah, I mean, I just, I agree with everything Bill and Jeremy said.

I think some of the concern for me with this is more at the federal level, just seeing how things happened after the storm. There were a handful of working waterfront properties that did have flood zone insurance. They submitted their claims. They were denied because it was an act of God. And then they were dropped by their flood zone insurance companies.

And it turns out that flood zone insurance does not cover any structure over the water. But the issue with that is when a wharf takes out any type of loan, SBA or other federal loan, they are required to get flood zone insurance. And so now, especially after these storms, being able to access that is going to be impossible.

And second, it’s useless. And so to Jeremy’s point, I think that it’s not necessarily creating new things, but adapting what exists to actually be cognizant of and thoughtful of what we do want on the waterfront, which is these commercial fishing businesses. And what we don’t want on the waterfront, which is potentially mansions, we’ll call them right.

And what’s really hard and this goes back to some of the stuff we were talking about with gentrification is many people that are buying properties and places like where I live in Harpswell right now are buying cash. And so they don’t get flood zone insurance because they don’t have to. And it’s not cost-effective for them. They might, caught flood zone insurance is incredibly expensive. They might as well just pay for whatever happens. And so where FEMA is trying to disincentivize it’s going in the wrong direction, the fishing businesses and the businesses on the waterfront are being impacted more then the residential properties. And so I think that actually is with education and outreach and good advocacy for better policy. Hopefully we can make some changes. But right now that just that doesn’t exist. And it was really tragic after the storms, how we learn, to Bill’s point, though, never want them to happen again, but man, we learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work for waterfronts. And I think that there’s still a lot of learning to do there. But the flood maps, the flood zone insurance, we’ve got some work to do there.

[00:47:03] Eric Miller: Yeah, that’s something that I’ve run across in my own work of FEMA’s maps and the lack of comprehensiveness and what the new climate reality is, as to how Jeremy said it.

Bill, you mentioned, oh yeah, no, please go ahead.

[00:47:19] Monique Coombs: Yeah, well, I was just going to say, to what Bill and Jeremy said, same thing is Gouldsboro and Harpswell, very similar, right? We have different neighborhoods within our sort of umbrella. And what works in Cundys Harbor is not going to work on Orr’s and Bailey, is not going to work in South Harpswell.

This is really stuff that needs to be done from the ground up. That’s why with our organization, we created Scuttlebutt in the town of Harpswell, which is a guide to living and working in a waterfront community. And it was suggested to us to do like a statewide one. And we were like, No, because our culture in Harpswell is different than Bill’s in Gouldsboro.

I mean, it’s the same, but different. And so Bill, like they did one in Goldboro and it’s awesome. And it came out beautiful. And we just did one in Brunswick. And I think it’s such a better way to meet the audience where they’re at is to do it within the community. So we’re continuing to try to empower other people to do that in their coastal communities and hopefully that’ll help as well.

[00:48:11] Eric Miller: That’s awesome. And any information you’d like to share, we can include in the show notes as like links or whatever you like. So we will have that there. Let’s dig in one of those programs specifically, like the Land for Maine’s Future and how it helps to preserve the waterfront’s historic character and economic vitality in the face of development pressures.

[00:48:34] Jeremy Gabrielson: Yeah, I’m glad to talk a little bit about funding. And so the Lands for Maine’s Future Program is a great funding source that has funded a huge amount of conservation work across Maine, both within the coastal areas and not. And there’s kind of two aspects of it. There is a working waterfront program within Land for Maine’s Future, which really is largely used for commercial operators who own a wharf and want to make sure that wharf stays in working waterfront use. And then there’s also sort of your standard Land for Maine’s Future programs, which help either land trusts, towns or state agencies acquire land for public access.

A variety of folks have used both of those funding sources within Land for Maine’s Future to protect coastal access up and down the coast. It’s a great tool. It’s one of several public funding sources that Maine Coast Heritage Trust and other land trusts have worked very closely with to do what we can to try and protect the places that are most used by the public, as I referred to earlier, the places that show up on the map often so that they’re available for public use. And typically that does include some mix of both recreational and often working waterfront use. I think that the biggest observation that I have about all of the funding programs is that they’re great programs.

The level of funding is not. enough to address the level of need. And there, in addition to working waterfront there’s also funding that’s available to help develop public boat launches and public access sites, and we’ve worked with a number of communities including Gouldsboro to help access some of those funds.

And there’s just not enough funding to meet the need. And so that’s really, the biggest thing that I would hope to see both for the federally-funded and state-funded programs that communities are accessing to secure permanent working waterfront and permanent coastal access sites is there’s just a need for more funding in those programs.

[00:50:41] Bill Zoellick: Just to add to that a minute. The funds right now that are available and this is great, the funds. There’s a lot of relatively large amount of funds for planning and that’s good. It’s, we were talking earlier about the need to get people together. So we’re certainly using those funds in order to create a conversation within Gouldsboro rather than just sort of having some people decide.

It needs to come from the bottom up. There’s funding for that. Speaking to Jeremy’s point, what the next part of it though, once we have a plan and once we actually have some preliminary engineering designs, funding to actually get the work done, very scarce.

[00:51:19] Monique Coombs: Yeah I want to add, and this is something that we really like, started to dig into post-storms.

So the discrete working waterfronts that we’re talking about was from a report that I did in 2019 called the State of Maine’s Working Waterfront, where I just started to parse out like the different types of working waterfronts that exist, including these smaller wharves that are often used for gear storage, gear maintenance.

They have ambiguous ownership, like maybe they have 24 shareholders, or maybe they have a couple of lobstermen or one fisherman and it’s a handshake agreement with the property owner, so it can run the range right. What they often don’t have is lobster or product coming across the dock and so the issue that we’re finding with funding and this is , I mean, it’s a big issue but and I’m not sure how to do it is like, how do we value these properties that don’t have economics attached to them, because fishing is only one part of a fisherman’s job description. They go fishing some days but some days they’re working on their boat some days they’re managing their gear.

They got to get paid. They got to go in the marine store. But if we devalue those other aspects of their jobs that are necessary to go fishing, it only makes it harder to go fishing. And so with the storms, there were, as I mentioned, so many family properties that were lost so many small discrete working waterfronts that were lost but their access to funding was nominal if not nonexistent because they couldn’t provide a number of jobs they couldn’t provide the economics of how many lobsters were going across their dock.

And so it’s understandable to be able to prioritize that you need those types of metrics, but for the bigger picture, and for the long run, and to be able to conserve working waterfront in the future. And I guess this would almost speak to intertidal access points too, right? Because it’s not necessarily like you can pull up a slip and be like, 200 pounds of clams went across that path the other day.

We need to find a way to value that in a way that we can help support all of these businesses because like I mentioned, we lost a lot of those discrete working waterfronts. It’s going to put pressure on the larger properties as well. And so to Bill’s point, we can plan, but for those properties to actually be able to expand to be able to accommodate some of the lobstermen that lost access to these other smaller properties, that funding doesn’t really exist.

And, there’s a lot of nuance to that because there’s private properties and there are businesses, but to our points that I think we’ve all tried to make throughout this is we have to think holistically about this. It can’t just be about the lobsters going across this dock. But what do we want the future of commercial fishing and the working waterfront to look like in Maine in 5 to 10 years?

[00:53:56] Jeremy Gabrielson: And just to build on that a little, I work for a land trust so my primary experience is with accessing funding that is really designed to prevent conversion of working waterfront use to other uses. And so those are really useful tools Land for Maine’s Future. We work with coastal wetlands grants. We work with a variety of state and federal funding sources that are really useful when you have a willing landowner who is willing to sell some or all of the rights in their land to prevent that long-term conversion, but going back to earlier in the discussion, we talked about a need for a range of tools.

And one of the things that came up repeatedly in the coastal and marine working group is that while we have good tools, we can use more funding in the tools to prevent conversion. There’s also a range of other tools that are needed to help make investments in privately owned facilities that are, they’re likely to stay privately owned facilities, but that nonetheless have this public value because they’re an important part of supporting the working waterfront industry.

And I think the storm, as Monique said, really highlighted a lot of the need for those tools. I guess I would make an analogy. It’s a somewhat imperfect analogy to the evolution of how we’ve thought about agricultural protection over the last 20 years, where agricultural easements and purchasing land is still a really important part of that puzzle, but more and more you see groups like Maine Farmland Trust and others who are getting involved with helping farmers develop business plans, or maybe there’s some other type of small business assistance that comes outside of that sort of land trust model, but I think those are the types of tools that we just have fewer of right now.

[00:55:44] Eric Miller: It’s amazing how much energy and knowledge there is to be applied through these formal mechanisms of state funding opportunities to organizations on the ground doing work to individual action. And I think I really appreciate how you all were able to articulate your various roles and how those various things get applied and affect the Maine coast.

And so to cap things off, thank you all so much for being here and addressing all of these issues and the work that you do. And so for our final question, I think it’s a nice segue going from the programs and how people are involved to what other education programs and advocacy efforts exist for people who want to get involved with preserving the working waterfront.

Monique, if you wouldn’t mind starting.

[00:56:32] Monique Coombs: Sure, so we have actually leaned into some of the education and outreach side of the working waterfront, while also trying to work on policy, but I mentioned the Scuttlebutt, and if there’s people in coastal communities that want to create a Scuttlebutt, we will give you our templates, we will support them, we will do whatever they need to get it done, it’s incredibly important, as I mentioned, that it really come from the community itself, and I can send you the link to that.

But we have also done working waterfront panels in coastal communities, which I think have been just really good way to open up discussion and give people, new residents or even older residents, an opportunity to ask questions about the working waterfront where they maybe have never known where to go for that kind of thing.

And I think it’s that the education and outreach is incredibly important because the more people can be invested and care about the working waterfront, the better it is for everything across the board and communities. We also have a working waterfront inventory template tool that we created with Tidal Bay Consulting.

That’s also available on our website. It has everything that somebody needs to know to count working waterfront properties in their community, where to get the data, how to get the data. It’s got different matrices so people can fill in whichever table is most appropriate for their community. They can pick one or they can do them all.

And I think those kinds of things are, again, are incredibly important because municipalities or committees within a municipality or a group of people can do them themselves. They don’t even necessarily need MCFA, and I hope it empowers communities to support their working waterfront and learn more about their working waterfront.

They’re good ways for people to get involved again, because they can just take them and run with them. And I think that’s a great way to think about preserving the working waterfront. Because, again, if people care, if it’s everybody likes to do things, with self interest, so if they can care about it and it matters to them and it resonates with them, they’re more likely to try to protect the working waterfront.

[00:58:31] Bill Zoellick: The education as we sort of have been talking about last hour, it needs to be local. So again, hats off to Monique. The Scuttlebutt, we adopted it. It becomes a way for us to have a conversation within Gouldsboro about who we are, which is different than what Harpswell is, but it’s a conversation about our community with newcomers.

We want to welcome newcomers, but we also want to begin bringing them in rather than having them sitting outside in the community. They’re here, but they’re not here. No, be part of it. So again, the leadership they’ve done and also with the inventory, we’ll be using the inventory.

So what this, this resources, they’re produced collaboratively, shared across the state, but then are implemented locally. And I think that’s a big deal. The other thing I just want to stick in as a thank you is I think Maine Policy Review is a unique publication and a unique effort. And what it does is it’s the only place I can think of where you can have conversations about the kinds of things we’re talking about now. Thank you so much for facilitating the “Our Shared Oceans” issue. And so much good comes out of that. So I’ll end there, but thanks.

[00:59:43] Eric Miller: We really appreciate the kind words and what impact Maine Policy Review, as well as this accompanying podcast, can have in creating a platform to have the conversations and continuing them and other people taking the reins.

So to finish off, Jeremy, if you’d like to, if you have anything you’d like to add or how people could get involved with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.

[01:00:05] Jeremy Gabrielson: The best place to start is probably by checking out our website which is mcht.org, got a bunch of information there on coastal access, but I think beyond that, I’ll just echo what Bill said is that really getting involved at a local level is really important.

And so that could be reaching out to folks in your town. Many towns in Maine have a harbors committee or shellfish committee and reaching out to them. I have a number of colleagues who don’t work directly in the fisheries but care about the success of coastal fisheries who are involved in their local harbors committee and shellfish committee.

That’s a great way to get involved. There’s also over 80 other land trusts in Maine, many of whom are in coastal Maine who also care about these issues. And you can find out if you don’t know who your local land trust is, and you think that they might be interested in getting involved in supporting working waterfront issues, you can go to the Maine Land Trust Network website, mltn.org and find out more.

[01:01:00] Eric Miller: Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much for being here for an hour to have this wonderful and incredibly important and extremely timely conversation about Maine’s working waterfronts.

And thank you, listener, for joining us today as we discussed Maine’s working waterfronts. I’m Eric Miller, and I’ll see you next time. If you enjoyed this episode and the previous discussions we’ve had on this podcast, please consider donating to the Maine Policy Review by visiting the journal’s website linked in the description.

Our team comprises Barbara Harrity and Joyce Rumery, coeditors of Maine Policy Review, Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. Thanks to faculty associate, Kathryn Swacha, professional writing consultant, Maine Policy Matters intern, Nicole LeBlanc, and podcast producer, editor, and writer, Jayson Heim.

Thanks to Nathanael Batson for composing our podcast music. Check out mcslibrary. org to learn more about Margaret Chase Smith, the library and museum, and education and public policy. The Maine Policy Matters website can be found in the description of this episode, along with all materials referenced, a full transcript, and social media links.

You can give our team your topic suggestions and recommendations by filling out the form at the bottom of our webpage. Remember to follow Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Thank you for listening.