BLUE HILL – Erick Swanson, owner of Acadia Aquaculture, has withdrawn his application for one of two proposed lease sites off Dunhams Cove and has asked that the public hearing on the other site application be postponed.

In response, the Department of Marine Resources announced on Monday that it has canceled the two public hearings that had been scheduled for next Wednesday.

According to a notice from the DMR on Monday, Swanson submitted a letter last Friday requesting that his application for a 36-acre lease site off Dunhams Cove on the east side of Long Island in Blue Hill Bay – referred to as Site 2 – be withdrawn. No other information was included in the request, which the department has granted.

Swanson could not be reached Tuesday for comment.

“At this point, there is no longer an active application on file for this site,” DMR Aquaculture Coordinator Andrew Fisk said in the notice.

In a second letter dated March 2, Swanson requested that the application for the other proposed 36-acre lease site, also located off Dunhams Cove, be postponed until a later time. The department has placed the application on hold for an undetermined amount of time, according to Fisk.

“It is clear that Mr. Swanson is working to present the most widely acceptable proposal forward to allow him to separate year classes and introduce site-level fallowing into his operation,” Fisk stated in the notice.Swanson has said that his goal is to establish four sites in the Blue Hill Bay area that would allow him to separate fish into two distinct age classes on two sites, to leave one site fallow for a year before restocking it, and to hold one site for raising brood stock salmon. That rotation method of raising salmon is helpful in reducing the risk of disease, according to Swanson.

He already has an operation off Hardwood Island, raising close to 600,000 fish in two age classes. The DMR also has granted a lease for another, smaller site off Long Island.

The department anticipates that Swanson will present an alternative and equivalent proposal in the near future, Fisk said in the release. He added that the department will hold a public meeting on any alternative that may be put forward and that such a meeting would be scheduled early in the review process in order to provide information to the wider public.

The department has been criticized in the past by residents concerned that they often have learned of aquaculture applications late in the official process. Public hearings are generally scheduled at the end of the process after much of the department’s review of a proposed operation has been completed.