Coast Guard wants states to license boaters

AUGUSTA – The head of the U.S. Coast Guard wants the states to license every recreational boater in the country, including 300,000 in Maine, to improve national security.

Critics of the idea in Congress and Maine, however, say the proposal is dead in the water.

“On the water we can’t do the same thing in your ports that a policeman can do on I-5, I-95 or I-35, [which is to] make a stop and validate the identity of the operator,” Coast Guard commandant Adm. Thad Allen said recently at a meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Allen told the state lawmakers in attendance that while he has no detailed plan to propose, he believes the nation’s ports and waterways are vulnerable to terrorist attacks and that security agencies need additional tools to reduce the possibility of those attacks. He said requiring a boat operator to be licensed and prove a minimum level of competency, like a driver’s license requires, would improve security and safety on the waterways.

But Maine’s two senators are not supporting the call for a mandate on the states or the underlying analysis that licensing the more than 77 million Americans who operate watercraft for personal uses would improve national security.

Sen. Olympia Snowe serves on the Senate Commerce Committee that has jurisdiction over the Coast Guard and was surprised at Allen’s suggestion.

“This would be an impossibility,” Snowe said. “There are better ways to target what we have to do as a nation to secure our ports.”

She said security of the waterways requires far greater efforts at inspecting cargoes and the commercial craft carrying them than imposing a huge regulatory burden on individuals and the states. She doubted the proposal will get very far in Congress.

“I would be very reluctant to pre-empt the states in that area,” Sen. Susan Collins said. “Regulation of recreational watercraft has long been the responsibility of the states.”

Collins, the ranking minority member on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said she believes requiring a license for recreational boaters goes “too far” in the balance between national security and individual freedom.

“We need to make improvements in port security and in securing our nation’s waterways,” she said,” but I don’t think this is the way to proceed to accomplish that goal.”

Collins pointed to port security legislation that was adopted last fall as the way to improve the nation’s maritime security. The measure provides for increased staff and equipment to search cargo coming into the United States.

Maj. John Fetterman of the Maine Marine Patrol is also the vice president of the National Association of State Boating Law Administrators. The group does not favor having the federal government mandate the licensing of boaters but believes each state should make that policy decision.

“There is only one state that licenses boat operators, and that is Alabama,” he said. “There is a distinct difference between licensing and certification.”

Fetterman said when you license somebody to do something, there is the implicit power to take away that license. He said the Coast Guard has been pushing the licensing idea both for security and safety reasons.

“The states already register boats,” he said. “We can track who owns that boat when we stop it on the water. But I think we need to do more for safety on the waterways.”

Fetterman said Maine took a “small step” this year when a new law took effect Jan. 1 requiring 16- and 17-year-olds who want to operate personal watercraft to take a boater safety education course.

He also is reviewing options for what Maine could do to bolster its safety efforts. He said state lawmakers required the Marine Patrol and the Warden Service in the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to review Maine’s current safety requirements, which Fetterman said are inadequate, and to make recommendations to this Legislature for improvements.

“Maine is one of only four or five states that do not require a boating safety course of some type,” he said. “We had 16 boating fatalities last year, and we had three times the number of accidents reported as the New England average.”

Fetterman said the report is not yet ready to submit to the Legislature, but he is certain it will not include a recommendation to license recreational boaters. He expects, however, it will recommend a phased in mandatory safety program for boaters.