BANGOR DAILY NEWS • February 14, 2025
The major storms that hit Maine in the winter of 2024 damaged large sections of the coast, eroding bluffs, banks and beaches while also harming docks, piers and other waterfront infrastructure. The resulting effort to rebuild has inundated the state’s environmental regulators, fueling a roughly 50 percent increase in the number of applications they’ve had to process. The bulk of that uptick has been from landowners wanting to stabilize their sections of coastal shoreline. Now, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection has proposed rules that are meant to streamline the handling of those applications, by allowing more of them to be approved through an expedited process known as permit by rule.