PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • October 4, 2024
A sprawling lawsuit to expand public access to intertidal land in Maine was filed in Cumberland County Superior Court in 2021 against more than a dozen private property owners, some of whom had called Maine Marine Patrol on alleged trespassers picking rockweed from their shores. The plaintiffs are asking the justices to declare that all intertidal land in Maine should be considered public, undoing a 1989 decision in which the court held the land could be privately owned. The lawsuit has garnered most publicity for the questions it raises on recreational access to sandy beaches. But the effort also seeks to undo a Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling from 2019, in which the court unanimously ruled that the public does not have a right to harvest rockweed on privately owned, intertidal land.