Lawmakers confront waterfront issues

loading...

Two legislative proposals, one on the state level, the other at the federal level, address working waterfront issues and local officials are waiting to see how the recent passage of the working waterfront referendum will affect their towns.

State Sen. Dennis Damon, D-Trenton, has introduced a bill that would allow waterfront land or property used to support commercial fishing to be taxed at its current use versus its highest and best use.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., lawmakers will discuss a proposal to provide funding to help states, towns and organizations acquire land that would maintain commercial access to the waterfront.

Damon said Tuesday the bill was a “skeleton” bill, submitted without details, just to hold a place for it in the legislative lineup. Because it was submitted after cloture, the proposed bill must be approved by the Legislative Council, which is made up of members of the Democratic and Republican leadership from the House and Senate, before it can be assigned a committee for a public hearing and work sessions. The council is scheduled to meet Monday to discuss the issue.

Although the initial bill proposal lacks details, Damon said he has definite ideas on what the legislation should accomplish.

“I hope it would enable or encourage land that is currently in working waterfront status to remain there in order to help support the commercial fishing industry,” he said.

He also would like to see some deterrent to discourage people from removing parcels from working waterfront status.

“There will likely be some sort of penalty if property is converted or sold, so that municipalities can recover some of the revenue they may have lost,” he said.

There are several models that could be applied to balance lost revenues, including the one used under the tree-growth law, which uses state funds to offset tax breaks allowed to property owners who place their land in tree-growth protection. Other methods would just shift the tax burden to other types of properties in the town.

Damon said he will discuss those and other issues with a variety of agencies and organizations, such as the Island Institute and the Working Waterfront Coalition, as well as the Maine Municipal Association and the State Planning Office.

The new law will be very narrowly written and will apply only to waterfront property that supports the commercial fishing industry. That will mean there are a number of businesses that contribute to a working waterfront, but do not specifically support commercial fishing, that will not be eligible to participate in this program, he said.

Meanwhile, property owners and town officials wait to see what the law will look like when it’s written.

“We hope it’s going to help us,” said Winter Harbor Town Manager Roger Barto.

There is just one major property in town that could be affected by legislation, a marina which is not currently operating as a marina, he said. Although some of the town’s fishermen use the marina, they are the only ones using it now, Barto said, and there is some uncertainty about its future if it is sold.

“There’s some concern that it may not be available at all,” he said.

There also are some smaller, privately owned docks that dot the town’s shoreline, and they also could be affected by the working waterfront legislation.

“There’s a bunch of wharves in the inner harbor, some of them have only 30 feet of shorefront; they can’t be used for anything else, but they’re still taxed at a high rate,” Barto said. “That’s been a big complaint from the fishermen who say ‘that stuff is over-taxed,’ and I’d have to agree with them. But there’s been nothing for them to use.”

Farming and forestry had some tax protection in terms of the open space and tree-growth measures, he said. Fishermen had nothing.

“Of the three ‘F’s, the fishermen were left out,” he said.

The devil will be in the details with this bill, according to Stonington Town Manager Richard Avery.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” Avery said. “How the state implements this is going to determine how it affects the towns. It’s going to be a balancing act between trying to implement the stated goals of the referendum which the voters supported, and to balance that against the difficulty of having too precise rules.”

There are about 500 fishermen in Stonington and about 300 fishing boats moored in the town’s harbor. But very few of them will be able to take advantage of the new law. There are six seafood dealers and three lobster pounds in town, but less than a dozen local fishermen now own property on the water.

“It’s not going to change the pricing pressure on people,” Avery said. “It’s not the tax that cause people to sell out. They sell out for a heck of a lot of money and usually they regret it later.”

With so little waterfront property now in traditional working waterfront use, Avery suggested that it may be too late for the working waterfront bill to have significant impact on preserving working waterfront property.

“We may already be past the tipping point there,” Avery said.

A long-term solution toward preserving such property, he suggested, is to come up with funds to buy easements on waterfront properties specifically to be used for commercial waterfront activities.

“We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to conserve land; we need to do the same to protect commercial access,” he said.

Such an effort would give property owners an initial profit in terms of fair-market value for the their waterfront land in return for giving up their future profit potential.

That seems to be the idea behind federal legislation U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is promoting. Collins has introduced a Working Waterfront Perservation Act, which would authorize $50 million in federal grants for each fiscal year from 2005 through 2007.

According to information from the senator’s office, the grants would require a 25 percent local match and would assist organizations struggling to maintain commercial access to the waterfront by providing funds to help with the purchase of land and easements as well as for improvements to existing fishing infrastructure.

Collins is now lobbying members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, urging them to include the measure in that committee’s legislation to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs all fishery management activities within the federal 200-mile limit.

“I am committed to creating a federal mechanism to work in partnership with states, communities and nonprofit organizations to preserve our working waterfront,” Collins said recently. “This new grant program would help preserve important commercial infrastructure for our fishermen.”

The legislation also includes tax incentives in order to increase participation. When a property or easement is purchased, the seller would only be taxed on half the gain received from the sale. In addition, grant recipients would agree not to convert coastal properties to noncommercial uses.