Yarmouth finally gets harbor dredged

First published in Landings, December 2014/January 2015.

It takes a long time to get a small harbor in Maine dredged. At least, that’s the way it was for the town of Yarmouth, which lobbied the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) for ten years to have the Royal River cleared of mud and silt. The $2 million project finally began in October this year, the result of “persistence and political pressure,” said Nathaniel Tupper, Yarmouth town manager.

The ACOE mandate is to keep the nation’s navigational channels open. But the United States has a lot of navigational channels and the Corps’ annual budget for dredging has shrunk in each of the past eight years. So it must prioritize projects.

To do that the Corps uses a complicated array of weighted criteria to evaluate each project, 116 criteria in all. It’s a national ranking process that favors larger, commercial ports which handle a high volume of cargo each year. For Maine, that means only major ports – Portland, Searsport and Eastport – would rank high on a list of possible dredging projects. Harbors such as Wells, Yarmouth, or Camden would not.

So how did Yarmouth manage to make the Royal River, which was last dredged in 1995, a high priority project? “The Corps’ scoring system also looks at the economic impact [to the local community],” explained Tupper. “The Royal River is primarily a recreational safe harbor. But we have three significant commercial marinas and other businesses.”

The town contracted in 2008 with the Portland Greater Council of Governments to have a fiscal impact analysis done of the harbor’s value. The report concluded that $25 million in annual revenue went in to the local economy from recreation, tourism, fishing, boatbuilding and transportation businesses linked to the harbor; more than 300 jobs were tied to those businesses. “We argued that [the dredging project] would be a $2 million investment by the Army Corps versus a $25 million economic impact,” Tupper said.

Economic impact was one factor in the town’s favor. Another was the relative weight of Maine’s Congressional delegation. Prior to retiring from the Senate in 2013, Senator Olympia Snowe served on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. Senator Susan Collins currently is on the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations. “We kept in regular communication with their staffs. Whenever we could, we had local fishermen and people from the marinas tell our story,” Tupper explained. “Senator Collins was particularly helpful.”

Yarmouth also offered to share the cost of the dredging project with the ACOE. “We presented the Corps with a cost-share formula,” Tupper said. “It conveyed a strong message to them: ‘Yarmouth wants to be in a partnership with you.’ Partnering at least gets your name mentioned at the scoring table.”

While the Royal River dredging project took ten years to make happen, there is hope that other small Maine harbors might not face such a discouraging path. A $12.3 billion water resources bill signed into law by President Obama in June may make finding funds for small harbor dredge projects easier. The Water Resources Reform and Development Act authorized a bevy of new ACOE projects, established a new loan financing program, and put in place changes to the project review process.

The law also tackled funding issues in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF). The HMTF was created by Congress in 1986 to fund the operation and maintenance of ports and harbors. It is funded by a Harbor Maintenance Tax which is charged against the value of imports and domestic cargo arriving at ports that have federally-maintained harbors and channels. HMTF monies are used for maintenance dredging, dredged material disposal areas, jetties, and breakwaters.

But since 2002, the Fund has seen an ever greater surplus at the end of each year. The HMTF receives around $1.5 billion in taxes annually, but only half that amount was distributed for harbor maintenance projects.

Rep. Chellie Pingree, in concert with other coastal state Representatives, pushed for a provision in the Water Resources Reform and Development Act requiring that 10 percent of the annual allocation of harbor maintenance appropriations be directed to “emerging harbors,” defined as a location that “transits less than 1 million tons of commerce.” Furthermore, the Act now authorizes 100% of HMTF money go to harbor dredging projects by 2025. The provision regarding “emerging harbors” authorizes about $30 million nationally for maintenance of these small, shallow draft harbors in the next federal budget, however but Congress must still appropriate the funds.

“In our case it was a lucky accident that the Corps had money at the time it did,” Tupper commented. Perhaps such luck will not be needed by other Maine harbors in the future.