At the beginning of this session, the Maine Department of Marine Resources presented the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee with a plan to overhaul the way the state considers aquaculture leases, a process now infected with bitter disputes and expensive litigation. It was a thoughtful, thorough plan, backed by research and knowledge and loaded with good ideas to make the program more open and understandable, and to make aquaculture, especially finfish aquaculture, a better fit with other uses of coastal waters.

The committee ran two years of hard work by DMR staff through its grinder. Proving the old gag about the link between making laws and sausage true, the result is a bill now presented to the full Legislature that was offensive in the manufacture and indigestible in the consequences.

The DMR plan was based upon the premise of resolving existing conflict and of avoiding it in the future. Through such measures as more precise and exacting siting guidelines (including noise and light limits, hours of operation, even the appearance of pens and service vessels), higher performance standards for environmental impact and an application review process that is more open to public participation, the department’s aquaculture recommendations were about coexistence, not banishment.

The committee, however, discarded those nourishing ingredients and substituted snouts and tails. It started with a two-year ban on new leases – a moratorium without a reason. Then it toyed with the idea of marine zoning; that is, adopting DMR’s more stringent standards only after the incalculable expense and delay of surveying Maine’s entire 3,500-mile coastline. A provision denying leases to aquaculture companies that do not pay a livable wage – a commendable standard lawmakers have not seen fit to apply to any other industry – was deleted only after ample evidence was provided that aquaculture pays livable wages to an extent other industries would do well to emulate. Municipal veto power over state leasing decisions was considered until nagging issues about the primacy of state law were raised. All this while committee members asserted their fondness for aquaculture and their desire to see it prosper.

Now, all those bad ideas have been compressed into one worse idea – local control, the last refuge of lawmakers wanting to duck responsibility. The bill that goes to the full Legislature will allow municipalities to adopt their own aquaculture ordinances, superseding state law out to the first 2,500 feet of ocean.

The current composition of the 13-seat Marine Resources Committee is shockingly short on members with any life experience connected to earning a living from the sea, which may be one explanation of why nine members would vote for something so contrary to Maine’s maritime heritage. Regardless of the activity – whether it’s commercial or recreational fishing, cargo shipping or recreational boating – the line of municipal control has always been drawn at the low-tide mark. From there to three miles out, the water belongs to all the people of Maine and they’re expected to share it.

Slippery-slope arguments can be overused, but in this case the precedent this law would set is alarming and real. Once the principle is established that any town can control the ocean nearly a half-mile out, or a half-mile radius around any island, any local prejudice – whether it’s against stinky fishing boats, ugly cargo ships, noisy powerboats or intruding sea kayaks – can be made law and an exclusionary zone established. This concept would be an unfortunate first; naturally, its first statutory application would be used against aquaculture.

Lawmakers who now must deal with this recipe for disaster would do well to consider that such an attack upon several centuries of common practice and nearly two centuries of legal precedent will be challenged at federal, state and local levels, resulting in bitter disputes and expensive litigation. Which, of course, is precisely what the DMR plan was designed to prevent.