Dredging plan at Bass Harbor awaits funding

TREMONT – Despite a list of more than 50 people waiting for local moorings and more than 20 years of efforts to get the project approved and funded, it is unclear how soon the town’s largest harbor will be dredged, according to local and federal officials.

Millard Billings, Tremont’s town manager, said Wednesday that officials have been trying to get the federal government to dredge Bass Harbor since 1984.

“The longest one was Saugus, Mass.,” Billings said, referring to the record wait for a dredging project to be approved. “That one was 26 years.”

According to Mark Habel, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ navigation section in New England, the project has received all its necessary permits. The one thing that is holding it up, he said, is approval from Congress in the form of funding.

“We got an approved feasibility report last year,” Habel said Wednesday. “We’re awaiting funding to begin design and construction.”

Billings said the mooring field in Bass Harbor, accessible from the villages of Bass Harbor and Bernard on either side, could be expanded by as much as one-third. There are 115 moorings in the harbor’s 24-acre anchorage area now, he said. Eight more acres of anchorage area are planned for the harbor’s east side and its north end. How many more moorings might become available once the project is finished depends on the size of the boats that would get moorings, he said.

Habel said the project was first brought up in the 1980s but the current application has been in development since 2000. He said 5,000 cubic yards of harbor bottom would be dredged for maintenance near the existing Bernard pier while 55,000 cubic yards would be dredged from the expansion areas east and north of the existing mooring field.

“It’s about $1.7 million,” Habel said of the project’s estimated cost. The town would have to pay 10 percent upfront and then another 10 percent once the project is completed, he said. The federal government pays the rest.

Billings said the town has raised $300,000 for the dredging.

The town had to include some environmental mitigation efforts in order to get approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection to dredge in the intertidal zone, according to the town manager. At first the state wanted the town to plant eelgrass in the harbor, even though there is no eelgrass in the area to be dredged, Billings said, but then agreed to let the town place a conservation easement on Sawyers Island instead. The easement includes all of the island – about a 1-acre plot in Bass Harbor off Ann’s Point – and 8 acres of the surrounding intertidal zone, he said.

Billings said Thursday that the dredged material would be dumped in a “300-foot hole” in Blue Hill Bay, north of Hardwood Island. The Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Marine Resources both have approved dumping the material at the site, the soil of which is similar to the material to be dredged in Bass Harbor, he said.

Billings said Bass Harbor has become busier over the years as development on Mount Desert Island and the lobster industry has grown. The presence of more seasonal pleasure craft in MDI’s other harbors has caused some displacement with the island’s fishing fleet, he said.

“A lot more of the fishermen have moved over here,” he said.

As for getting congressional approval, Billings said the Maine delegation has been helpful in trying to get the project funded in the federal budget.

“We’d like to get it under way as soon as possible,” he said.