Resident throws spanner in the works by appealing a wastewater discharge permit state regulators issued last November.
A multi-million indoor salmon farm is locked in a dispute with a resident who is seeking to sink Whole Oceans’s project in Bucksport, Maine (USA) project, as reported in bangordailynews.
Ms Holly Faubel filed an appeal in December in response to Maine’s Environmental Protection Department granting Whole Oceans a wastewater permit on Nov. 21. The permit was seen as “the last hurdle” for the salmon farmer to buy a portion of the site in the project’s first USD 75 million phase.
Ms Faubel wrote in her appeal that she owns 250 feet of shorefront in Belfast, and that she and her family swim in the Penobscot River area near the site and eat mussels, scallops, seaweeds and other products that come from those waters.
However Whole Oceans counter-argue that the resident lives too far away – “approximately 14 miles away from the project site in Bucksport, measuring in a straight line” – to appeal the permit. The company allege this in a motion filed with the state Board of Environmental Protection earlier this week, in an attempt to dismiss Faubel’s appeal.
“Thus, Ms. Faubel is clearly not entitled to the liberal view of particularized injury afforded [in previous board decisions and case law] to those who are abutters or neighbors and she must instead show how she is ‘unique’ from everyone else who uses the waters of the Penobscot River, Belfast Bay, and the rest of the Gulf of Maine,” attorneys for Whole Oceans wrote in the filing.
Whole Oceans hope to start building this spring.
