BANGOR DAILY NEWS • October 16, 2024
Opponents of the stalled-out project to build a land-based fish farm in Belfast are welcoming the preliminary findings of a surveyor whom the city recently hired to identify the boundaries between it and the neighboring town of Northport. Belfast used eminent domain in 2021 to secure access to intertidal land at the mouth of the Little River where Nordic Aquafarms aimed to install pipes for its project. But courts ultimately ruled that the eminent domain taking had relied on a defunct survey that confused a section of Northport for Belfast. Belfast councilors agreed to vacate the eminent domain action, and commissioned the new survey of the Belfast-Northport border. On Tuesday, surveyor Robert Yarumian II said that his preliminary findings were that, beyond the upper mouth of the Little River, the city’s boundary extends in a straight eastward line. In that intertidal area, he found that there is an area between the boundaries of Belfast and Northport that neither community has jurisdiction over. Opponents of the Nordic Aquafarms project were quick to celebrate the preliminary findings.