Perry salmon project opposed Pens would pose hazard, DMR says

PERRY – Department of Marine Resources staffers are recommending that Commissioner George LaPointe deny a Norwegian company’s application to develop two salmon farms in Passamaquoddy Bay.

The farm sites that NorWestFish Inc. proposes off Lewis and Loring coves in Perry would interfere with commercial navigation and commercial fishing in the area, according to a report prepared by DMR’s Laurice Churchill.

Churchill was the DMR officer who presided over three days of public hearings on the NorWestFish proposal last April.

Andrew Fisk, the department’s aquaculture coordinator, said Tuesday that LaPointe has not signed the order, but is expected to do so fairly soon.

According to Churchill’s findings, the proposed lease sites would pose a navigation hazard to the 500- to 700-foot cargo ships that travel in the Passamaquoddy Bay channel that forms the boundary line between the United States and Canada.

The international line is 1,700 feet from the eastern boundary of the proposed Loring Cove site and 1,300 feet from the eastern boundary of the Lewis Cove site, according to Churchill.

The area of the proposed lease site also is used by smaller vessels and U.S. fishermen, Churchill said.

“Accordingly, I find that the proposed lease will unreasonably interfere with safe navigation in the area,” Churchill wrote.

Local fishermen attended last April’s public hearing on the NorWestFish application, arguing they already had given up too much of their traditional fishing ground to aquaculture operations.

“We’re dead set against any more salmon pens,” Leo Murray, chairman of the Cobscook Bay Fishermen’s Association, testified during the hearing.

Churchill said the Perry shore still has 12 to 20 herring weirs and is described as the single remaining area in Washington County where herring fishing “has been naturally and routinely viable.”

She found that the proposed farms would close a large area to dragging and interfere with the herring fishery’s ability to harvest fish using fixed gear.

“The aquaculture lease activities proposed for this site will unreasonably interfere with fishing in the area,” Churchill wrote.

NorWestFish Inc. is a group of investors who came together in 2001 and the Perry proposal was the company’s first aquaculture lease application, according to Jorn Vad, a Pittsfield aquaculture consultant who is the local contact for the company.

DMR’s Fisk said Tuesday that a NorWestFish proposal for a farm site between Roque Island and Jonesport is on hold because the company applied for just one farm site. Two sites are needed so fish can be separated in year classes and the sites lay fallow for a year between stockings.

Vad has applied for two farm sites in East Penobscot Bay, and public hearings on those applications will take place in April, Fisk said.

The Norwegian company’s proposal was controversial, and DMR granted intervenor status in the application to 11 people or organizations. Intervenors are parties that would be directly or substantially affected if DMR were to approve the lease application.

Organizations granted intervenor status included the town of Perry, the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, the Passamaquoddy Bay Lobstermen’s Association, the Downeast Fixed Gear Association, the Cobscook Bay Fishermen’s Association, the Conservation Law Foundation of Rockland, Concerned Citizens of Passamaquoddy Bay, and the Schoodic chapter of the Maine Audubon Society.