I wrote this letter on Halloween. How appropriate, because there is a “man in black” at the back of the hearing room whenever a Nordic Aquafarms permit application is under discussion. That man is a justice on the Waldo County Superior Court. He – not the state Board of Environmental Protection – will decide Nordic’s fate.

Nordic wants to ignore an inconvenient truth: It has no right to cross the intertidal land of Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace to build its pipelines into Belfast Bay. Nordic has known this since the first surveyor’s report it paid for in August 2018. The Mabee-Grace intertidal lands are in a conservation easement held by the Friends of Harriet L. Hartley Conservation Area.

The Friends legal team presented Waldo County Superior Court with a trail of deeds, leading back from Mabee and Grace, through Harriet L. Hartley, all the way to 1937. The easement that Nordic signed with Mabee’s and Grace’s neighbors ends at the high-water mark. The neighbors don’t own anything below that point.

While Nordic has convinced state and municipal folks that it has sufficient grounds to complete the permitting process, any permit issued hangs on the decision in Waldo County Superior Court.

The facts in the case are clear: Mabee and Grace own the intertidal land. The Friends group holds the easement. But Nordic hopes to bully the owners and exhaust them financially, all the while pretending to be a good neighbor with nothing to hide. Not my idea of a good neighbor.

I’m waiting for the man in black.

Andrew Stevenson
Belfast

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