NAF opponents lay out “violations of due process” and “errors of law” in BEP decisions
In a Friday, Dec. 18th filing to Waldo County Superior Court, attorneys for Belfast landowners Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace laid out a three-pronged attack on the Maine Bureau of Environmental Protection (BEP) Nov. 19th rules granting Nordic Aquafarms (NAF) four permits needed to construct its fish-raising factory. Attorneys Kim Ervin Tucker and Dana Strout put the ‘Title, Right, or Interest’ (TRI) issue front and center. “[D]enying Petitioners and other Intervenors the due process required by law rendered the BEP process a sham – devoid of independence from DEP and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Board’s statutory responsibilities to protect the environment and public health and safety.”
NAF’s TRI claims rest on an August 6, 2018 easement between it and Richard and Janet Eckrote, neighbors to Mabee and Grace. That easement was amended multiple times since 2018 but was never good enough to justify BEP moving forward with NAF’s applications. Tucker and Strout list 13 separate errors in BEP’s handling of the NAF applications [1]. “As a consequence of these identified defects in process, the findings made by the Board when it found NAF's applications to be complete and legally adequate, are unsupported by competent record evidence “
Tucker and Strout’s 40-page argument documents BEP’s repeated efforts to ignore its own procedures, granting NAF at least 11 separate chances to prove its claim of “sufficient TRI. ”[2] After closing the administrative record on NAF February 14, 2020, BEP continued to communicate with NAF and accepted information from it while denying company opponents the same opportunities. “[T]he Record was only closed to new or newly discovered evidence submitted by the opponents – NAF had unlimited rights to submit addition and materially different evidence with impunity…” the Mabee-Grace lawyers assert.
BEP’s favoritism towards NAF gave Nordic several unfair opportunities to tip the permit-review scales in its favor. By cherry-picking portions of the full NAF-Eckrote easement and its amendments, BEP chose to sidestep its responsibility to ensure NAF’s claims of TRI were sufficient at the beginning of the permit application process and at every crucial step along the way to the Board’s November 18, 2020 decision to issue permits.