The Little Town that Could

This piece was originally published on CounterPunch

It’s not every day a small town beats back a $500 million industrial project, but that’s exactly what just happened in Belfast, Maine, population 6,700.

The project was a land-based industrial fish farm as big as Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park and two Boston Gardens – combined. In dollar terms, it might have been the biggest industrial project in Maine history. It would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, vital wetlands, part of a popular hiking trail, and the habitat of the extraordinary, and threatened, bobolink bird, which, at all of 1-2 ounces, migrates 12,000 or more miles a year, and 1,100 miles or more in a single day.

And in the best-case scenario, Nordic Aquafarms of Fredrikstad, Norway would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and then would have simply walked away when the mammoth project had run its course and become inoperable in 20-30 years – leaving behind its vast buildings.

And then there was the cumulative effect of the 7.7 million gallons of effluent per day that Nordic would have dumped into Belfast Bay.

For fully seven years the Nordic project stalked Belfast, propped up by a craven town government and DINO Maine Governor Janet Mills, who never saw an industrial project she didn’t want to ram down the throat of a reluctant citizenry.

But local citizens, environmental activists and a gaggle of enviro-lawyers can’t claim all the credit for the demise of Nordic’s Belfast project. Nordic’s own incompetence deserves a good chunk of the credit.

There were many nails in Nordic’s Belfast coffin, but the biggest was Nordic not owning the intertidal land it needed to lay its saltwater intake and effluent discharge pipes. Nordic knew early on it didn’t own the land, but it said nothing, apparently hoping no one would notice.

But someone did notice. Firebrand Nordic opponent and deed-and-title research whiz Paul Bernacki discovered it, and Nordic, caught with its pants down, said in a Facebook post that it wasn’t their place to say who owned what. Hours later, perhaps realizing the post constituted a land-grab confession, Nordic took down the post.

Nordic could have bought the intertidal land, and the upland seaside home connected to it, which were both for sale, but it didn’t, in an apparent effort to save a few bucks. Nordic rolled the dice and lost, and spent the next several years paying big-boy Maine lawyers to defend its hallucinated right to use land it didn’t own.

To build its project, Nordic needed a barnful of state and local permits, and all of them required clear title to all needed land – something Nordic didn’t have. Not even close. But state and local licensing agencies found a way around the ubiquitous clear-title requirements: ignore them.

Nordic opponents also faced a Belfast City Council that rammed through a crucial zoning change in the face of written comments that ran 130-0 against the rushed vote. With that, the city council was off to the Nordic races, and for six years it never looked back.

The City of Belfast spent more than $160,000 on legal bills defending the ill-fated project, and when the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2023 that Nordic didn’t own the intertidal land it needed, the Belfast City Council went to the mattresses and attempted to seize the needed intertidal land through eminent domain. But Maine law bars eminent domain for private purposes, so the city council announced that it was creating a public park on the needed property.

The so-called park was laughable from the get-go. To access the park, visitors would have to park across Maine’s arterial Route 1, and then dodge vehicles in a 50-mph zone with limited visibility, all to enjoy the company of an industrial pump house in the middle of the alleged park. And with a 14-day dispersal rate for Nordic’s daily effluent discharge of 7.7 million gallons, park visitors could enjoy more than 100 million gallons of effluent discharge right offshore.
Nice.

But the Belfast City Council’s inept land seizure spilled over into the neighboring town of Northport, and under well-established Maine law, one cannot take what one does not own. So the Maine Supreme Judicial Court tossed out the city council’s farcical eminent domain action.

Undeterred, the city council then voted to spend thousands of dollars on bizarre schemes to hire pliant surveyors to redraw the Belfast-Northport town line. One need not travel 650 miles to Washington to find clueless public officials.

And when the Belfast City Council finally gave up that ghost, Nordic, which for six years had professed its undying love for Belfast, sued the City of Belfast for not following through on the sham public park.

After the 2023 Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling, and after Belfast residents Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace sued Nordic for $2.5 million for wrongly claiming part of their property, Nordic’s home office in Fredrikstad, Norway cut loose its U.S. operations in an apparent attempt to insulate itself from the potential liabilities of operations whose prospects looked decidedly grim.

Then in January 2025, almost two years after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court sealed Nordic’s fate, the company finally abandoned its Belfast project.

And so ended the seven-year saga of a $500 million industrial project beaten back by the citizens of a small town in midcoast Maine. Such victories don’t come along every day, but it happened here, and the world is a better place for it.