The Natural Resources Committee will recommend the Legislature approve rules protecting the four-and-a-half-acres around the most productive vernal pools – where salamanders and frogs breed – but enforcement would be phased in so landowners are not caught by surprise.
A compromise reached by the committee would give landowners two spring breeding seasons to figure out if they have a significant vernal pool on their property or on land they are trying to buy or sell before the regulations go into effect.
“Construction projects in the works now will have no impact whatsoever,” said Rep. Robert Daigle, R-Arundel, who suggested the delayed implementation as an amendment to vernal pool rules proposed by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
“If you’re thinking of buying land or thinking of selling land, you’ve got two seasons,” he said, to determine if a significant vernal pool on the property could affect the land’s value.
The department also amended its own proposal to allow landowners, who believe they have a significant vernal pool on their property, to apply for a so-called “permit by rule,” which would allow them to build on one-quarter of the regulated land without waiting for breeding season to officially test the productivity of the pond.
Rep. Ted Koffman, D-Bar Harbor, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, called the amended legislation “a very reasonable approach.”
“It sort of eases into this new part of our regulated resource. It’s an iterative approach. It’s not a gotcha approach,” he said.
“This is an example of how the legislative process works well when it works well in a collaborative way and a bipartisan way,” Koffman said. The changes made will allay the public’s concern while producing “legislation that is still doing what it is intended to do.”
Vernal pools are small depressions in the landscape that fill up with water – either rain or snowmelt – in the spring and are a preferred breeding ground for spotted salamanders, blue-spotted salamanders, wood frogs and fairy shrimp. A few also are home to rare or endangered species of turtle or snake.
Since they are dry most of the year, determining if they are significant has to be done in the spring breeding season by counting the number of egg masses in the water.
That short time frame concerned landowners and developers, who said property they already own would lose value if it couldn’t be developed or sold as a developable lot.
“The first version (of the rule) was scary because there was instantaneous implementation,” said Daigle, who is an environmental consultant. “You’ve got to bring the public around with you on these environmental issues. If you race out and implement new policies, you run the danger of running so far ahead of them that you lose your credibility.”
The department assured the committee that no lots would be rendered useless under the vernal pool rules, but there would be limits on what could be built in a 250-foot radius around the pool – or about 4 and a half acres – and even some restrictions in a 75-foot buffer around that.
The proposed law reads that “to the greatest extent practicable” there is no disturbance within the vernal pool depression and 75 percent of the 250-foot radius defined as habitat be left undisturbed with tree canopy so the creatures that breed in the pool don’t dry out.
“It could raise the cost of development on certain lots,” Daigle said, because some plans would have to be altered, but “there’s nothing really that harmful” in the legislation as it is now proposed.
“All puddles aren’t of concern here,” Daigle said, and “no lot is unbuildable,” at least not because of vernal pools. “Ten years from now this will not be a big deal.”
The proposed rules put vernal pools under the Natural Resources Protection Act, which already regulates land use near the state’s rivers, streams, ponds, wetlands and coast.
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