This post originally appeared in the Maine Morning Star. Written by Slade Moore
Beals is a visually stunning place, an archipelago ripe with the kind of Instagram-ready seaside and working waterfront scenes that draw summer-long crowds to southern Maine destinations. But dangling like a pendant from the Downeast coast, it’s far closer by distance and tradition to maritime Canada than Portland.
Driving south over the crest of the Beals Island Bridge reveals much about the community ahead. Modest homes dot Beals’ gently sloping uplands. Fishing piers and wharves jut from the shoreline. Commercial lobster boats and the odd bottom-dragger crowd the mooring fields. During the summer months, pleasure craft powered by either motor or sail are conspicuously absent.
For some towns like Beals, whose economies revolve around heritage fisheries, the growing number of aquaculture leases along Maine’s coast warrants a degree of vigilance and even action. Thirty-three leases were approved in 2025, a 27% increase over the previous five-year average of 24. Since 2022, eight Maine towns have responded by asserting varying degrees of home rule over aquaculture development.
As chair of the Beals select board, Glenda Beal is central to efforts to balance stewardship of heritage fisheries and the environment with the potential benefits of aquaculture. One challenge to that stewardship is what Beal considers the uneven power dynamic in the State of Maine’s centralized system of decision making for aquaculture siting and oversight.
That system provides Maine Department of Marine Resources with what they consider is exclusive authority to lease submerged lands in coastal waters for scientific research or aquaculture. Marine Resources’ aquaculture lease application review process allows public comment, but it also somewhat constrains notification of hearings and reserves final say in the approval process for the department. In addition, as of June 20, 2025, there is no longer an option to request a public hearing for renewals.
“The state has been erroneously deciding these things with as minimal amount of local input as possible, and we feel that’s not right,” Beal said.
Largescale aquaculture operations, usually ones that grow finfish in coastal waters, are what concerns Beal the most because they have a demonstrated potential — if managed incorrectly — to inflict damage to the local environment and undermine traditional maritime uses. The largest operations fall under “standard” aquaculture leases, the most liberal of several types administered by Marine Resources. They allow applicants to establish individual growing areas measuring up to 100 acres each with a total aggregate of 1,000 acres for all leased areas, although the agency may in some cases allow the total to reach up to 1,500 acres.
At the core of Beal’s concerns are lost access to long-fished areas in local waters and pollution from fish waste and uneaten feed — both associated with the 50 acres that Cooke Aquaculture leases from the State to grow pen-raised salmon. Citizens also reported observing other effects of the Canadian multi-national’s leases: seabirds entangled and dying in aquaculture netting, debris washing ashore, cut or dragged lobster trap lines, and navigational hazards like unmarked mooring lines and 30 to 70-foot lengths of derelict tubing bobbing in the tide.
On January 14, 2025, Conservation Law Foundation filed a 44-page complaint against Cooke in the U.S. District Court in Maine, citing “toxic discharges of fish feces, sea lice, diseases, chemicals, trash, and escaped fish” at 13 Cooke lease sites, including three in and adjacent to Beals’ town limits in Eastern Bay. Each of these three leases also experienced a fish “die-off” event in the summer of 2024 that, according to Beal, left many questions unanswered.
“Cooke never did notify the town about the die-off, which we also found to be unsettling, since they claim to be good neighbors. We found out through fishermen who noticed the dead, floating fish carcasses and all the activity at the pens,” said Beal.
Cooke filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in September 2025 and both parties will present arguments in early 2026. A Cooke Aquaculture spokesperson declined to comment on this story.
With all this fresh in the minds of local citizens, Beals voters passed an aquaculture ordinance in October that regulates the construction, operation, expansion, and modification of aquaculture facilities in coastal waters. The ordinance also provides a 150-acre maximum limit on aquaculture facilities in the waters surrounding Beals, including subtidal waters where the sea bottom is not exposed during low tide.
Five other Maine towns have enacted ordinances that regulate aquaculture in the subtidal zone: Cutler, Lubec, Penobscot, Waldoboro and Winter Harbor. Cushing has a 180-day aquaculture moratorium in place.
The Department of Marine Resources takes issue with town ordinances extending to subtidal waters. Though the agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment, spokesperson Jeff Nichols told Bangor Daily News in February 2025, “State law is clear. Under state law, the Commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources holds exclusive jurisdiction to lease lands in, on and under the coastal waters”.
John Duff, professor of Environmental Law and Policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, agrees, stating that “while ‘home rule’ is an oft-cited claim by fans of local governance, it is still constrained if, when, and where the state exerts its own authority.”
Aga Dixon of law firm Drummond Woodsum concludes otherwise. She said the firm, which was commissioned by Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation to craft the model aquaculture ordinance used by several towns, “researched whether Maine municipalities have the legal authority to regulate aquaculture, and we concluded that they do — under both their broad ‘home rule’ powers and under state law.”
As to whether town aquaculture ordinances can legally extend to the subtidal areas of coastal waters, Dixon says, “In short, yes. A municipality can exercise its home rule powers over its geographic territory. For coastal communities, that territory extends three miles out to sea.”
According to Bangor Daily News, Marine Resources doesn’t plan to take legal action against any towns that adopt aquaculture moratoriums or ordinances. Absent a legal test in the courts enough of a gray area exists to embolden additional municipalities to enact aquaculture ordinances while others will defer to the state’s authority.
Should towns that have asserted home rule over aquaculture decisions have concerns about the aquaculture industry taking legal action against them? John Delaney, who helped organize Lubec’s successful aquaculture ordinance, doesn’t think so.
“Lubec isn’t demanding anything of the aquaculture industry that they haven’t already promised to do: to be a good neighbor and a good steward of Maine’s coastal waters,” said Delaney. “If they decide to sue the town for holding them to that promise, it will speak volumes about their true intentions.”
In December, Beals held a town vote that amended their month-old ordinance. Reflecting the lack of local capacity in many of Maine’s Downeast coastal towns, the update largely focuses on establishing an Aquaculture Review Committee. Yet, with limited resources available, how Beals and the other towns will manage to execute their new roles in the complicated world of aquaculture review remains uncertain.
According to Beal, the interest in town ordinances “is not to stop aquaculture but to try to have it in a way that’s fair to heritage fisheries. It needs more oversight at the local level than what the state is able to afford.”