5/23/2024
Though Current Conservation Land
Can we hold the Maine Department of Transportation accountable for bull-dozing their way toward developing Sears Island and industrializing Penobscot Bay, along the way breaking promises, rewriting environmental protection law, changing the Sears Island conservation easement, withholding from the public important development costs and impacts and avoiding open, honest, transparent public involvement?
We might be tempted to begin our list of facts illustrating MDOT’s abuse of authority and public trust with the illegal filling of Sears Island wetlands and construction of the causeway, apparently in violation of its permit, in the 1980’s. But let’s keep to the more recent offshore wind record of broken promises and undisclosed development activity.
Pursue Sears Island
On September 15, 2021, MDOT consultant Kay Rand sent email (copy attached) to several people in the Governor’s administration about an OSW/Port Development Stakeholder Plan.
Her attached Stakeholder Management Plan revealed the goal “To develop and execute a stakeholder outreach strategy that would enable Governor Mills to announce the results of the M & N study, announce a commitment to pursue development of Sears Island as the Renewable Energy Port of the Northeast… Sears Island to become the Renewable Energy Port of the Northeast.”
This and other documents provide abundant evidence that Sears Island was the target location for Maine’s offshore wind manufacturing, assembling and launching facility as early as September 2021.
During the Offshore Wind Port Advisory Group (OSWPAG) process beginning in May 2022 (see https://www.maine.gov/mdot/ofps/oswpag/) participants received regular verbal assurances from MDOT representatives that “no decision has been made” regarding site selection.
But then, in February of this year, Governor Mills announced selection of Sears Island as the site for an offshore wind facility. For the first time, this announcement made public the goal to develop Sears Island long discussed in confidential communications within MDOT for at least two-and-one-half years.
Why Sears Island
During the Governor’s announcement in February, she claimed, without supporting data, that Sears Island development “will cost less” and “is expected to result in less environmental harm” than would development of a state-owned but privately operated offshore wind facility at Mack Point.
The “cost less” assertion raised major questions not yet answered in part because, a few months earlier, at the last OSWPAG meeting, we were told, “The total project cost for construction is very similar for both MP ($460 Million Total Project Cost) and SI ($470 Million Total Project Cost).”
Sears Island’s current undeveloped, natural condition, provides important ecological services to the region and state, especially for fisheries, carbon sequestration and publicly accessible recreation. Mack Point does not provide these ecological services. According to a reliable source, every acre of intact Sears Island forest locks up between 80 and 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year – CO2 that cannot harm our climate.
Developing Sears Island proposes removing all vegetation and life from more than 100 acres on Sears Island, nearly one-third of which is existing or historical wetland, and then harvesting 1.4 million cubic yards of soil to create an impermeable, nearly level work area. Doing so constitutes radical, permanent, irreparable ecological damage, forever eliminating current upland and associated marine environmental benefits. This exactly flips an appropriate climate-change response and dramatically undermines any claim that developing Sears Island instead of Mack Point represents the least environmentally damaging choice.
Broken Promises
In 2007, the state promised to choose Mack Point as the preferred location for future marine transportation development. The Sears Island agreement, signed by 38 stakeholders including the Maine Department of Transportation, and adopted as state policy by then-Governor Baldacci and the State of Maine’s Joint Standing Committee on Transportation, says: “Mack Point shall be given preference as an alternative to port development on Sears Island.”
The Sears Island agreement also committed the State of Maine from ever harvesting soil from the island. Ever. Not one cubic yard of soil would be harvested and certainly not 1.4 million cubic yards of soil!
Sadly, the Governor’s announcement and subsequent actions taken by MDOT toward developing Sears Island render the promises made in 2007 by our government worthless.
Broken Laws
But highly questionable governmental actions in pursuit of developing Sears Island continue. In March this year the Governor brought forward the sand dune bill that allows violation of sand dune system protections on Sears Island and creates a dangerous threat in the future for any environmental law that may interfere with MDOT development aspirations. Though initially failing to pass in the House, the bill eventually became law after strong political pressure.
New Sears Island Road and Rail Corridor
And now we come to the MDOT application for a federal grant specifically to develop Sears Island. Nestled within several documents associated with the grant application is page 2 of a two-drawing file titled, Sears Island Wind Port Concept Drawing 2024-04-29, copy attached or available at https://www.maine.gov/mdot/grants/infra/.
The illustration depicts a new “heavy load” access road and rail corridor as part of Sears Island development plans for the first time, at least in public.
As proposed, the new approximately 2,300-foot-long rail and road access corridor passes through a thickly wooded portion of the island, crossing at least two perennial streams and disturbing additional wetlands along the way. Assuming a 100-foot width, the corridor would destroy more than 5.25 acres of intact natural landscape, in addition to the more than 100-acre upland ecological destruction at the facility site proper.
Adding insult to injury, the proposed new road and rail corridor requires changing the conservation easement boundary in the vicinity.
Friends of Sears Island Vice President Rolf Olsen received confirmation of the new road and rail access plan from Kay Rand in response to his query. Rand also substantiated that the new access corridor would cross a portion of the conservation parcel and necessitate a change in that parcel’s boundary.
According to budget information included with the grant application, clearing, grubbing, excavation and borrow, grading, drainage, erosion control, paving and other work related to this access corridor will add $8 million to the cost of developing Sears Island. Mack Point already provides both a heavy load road and rail.
The new Sears Island rail and road access corridor presents yet another failure by MDOT to incorporate an honest understanding of climate change into decision-making. As MDOT fiddles for federal grant money to pursue a mega facility on Sears Island, the Earth tilts toward catastrophic climate change.
I will venture the opinion that, had the Mills administration and MDOT focused offshore wind port research on Mack Point as promised in March 2020 (see attached press release), as promised in the Sears Island Planning Initiative, and as the historical record certainly suggests is the rational approach, including deeply exploring development possibilities there with Sprague Energy, they might already have secured permits and seen construction begun.
Accountability Now
End the insulting double-speak. With honor and integrity, not intrigue and obfuscation, open-up and bring the full spectrum of facts to this decision. Accountability now!
Steve Miller
Stakeholder Management Plan re Sears Island Preferred Site
Governor Mills Announces Assessment of Mack Point Terminal in Searsport to Support Growth of Renewable Energy Industry in Maine
Alliance for Sears Island 