AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Janet Mills wants to roll back protections for the sand dunes that partially make up the state’s preferred site for a landmark offshore wind terminal.
The Democratic governor’s bill, which was submitted this week by Rep. Gerry Runte, D-York, a member of the Legislature’s energy committee, is aimed at clearing the way for the terminal. The Mills administration picked Sears Island in Searsport over nearby Mack Point as its preferred staging ground for shipping wind components out to sea.
The state’s preference for Sears Island has been controversial, and it has been opposed by some conservationists plus an eclectic coalition of conservatives, progressives and tribes. Mills’ move to roll back existing environmental laws could add fuel to their arguments. The bill will give skeptics including fishermen another platform to oppose offshore wind in general.
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Mills’ bill was made public late Wednesday. On Friday, Runte said he had been approached by administration officials within the last “couple of days” who told him they had recently realized that dunes on Sears Island posed an issue that the Legislature needs to resolve.
The measure would exempt a wind terminal from coastal sand dune protections. Maine Department of Transportation spokesperson Paul Merrill noted that the dune affected by the project is not naturally occurring and accumulated due to the placement of a jetty. Runte and the state are working on an amendment that protects natural dunes on the island, Merrill said.
“We’re only talking about a small portion of the overall land that’s defined for the work,” Runte said.
Coastal dunes are protected under the Maine Natural Resources Protection Act, which requires development to not interfere with dunes or increase erosion hazards beyond them. Sears Island is uninhabited and undeveloped, though environmental groups waged a legal battle through the 1990s on the heels of several commercial development ideas from governors.
The offshore wind terminal is yet another one. Mills aims to position Maine among the first states to deploy offshore wind, using floating technology that has been developed over nearly two decades at the University of Maine in Orono.
It is a key part of meeting ambitious state and regional climate goals, and the industry could add thousands of new jobs in Maine. Yet fishermen and their political allies are skeptical that their industry can coexist with turbines that will be in federal waters in the Gulf of Maine.
The Mills bill shows that the state is “making the mistake of designating a preferred location, and then trying to find the reasoning to make it happen,” Kyla Bennett, the science policy director for the Massachusetts-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which opposes the site, wrote in an email calling the new measure “despicable.”
“This is not the way this is supposed to work,” Bennett wrote.
