Lawsuit filed to protect freshwater mussels surviving in Eastern Maine

MAINE PUBLIC • April 21, 2025

Freshwater mussels surviving in eastern Maine are the focus of a lawsuit against the Trump administration. The Center for Biological Diversity argues that the government has to give Brook Floater mussels protection under the Endangered Species Act."Freshwater mollusks are the most endangered group of organisms in North America, because they have to have high water quality," said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. Some of the last healthy populations of Brook Floaters are in the Penobscot River basin and river systems in Downeast Maine according to the state department of inland fisheries and wildlife. The mussels range from Atlantic Canada to Georgia, but have been hurt by water pollution, dams and development, according to the center. Brook Floater populations have shrunk to just a few scattered streams.

The search for Maine's missing wild mussels

MAINE PUBLIC • April 21, 2025

Blue mussels in Casco Bay “have been either disappearing or they haven't been able to find mussels where they usually have been able to find them for generations.” Some have linked the loss of a once-vibrant wild mussel population to an ocean heat wave in the Gulf of Maine about a decade ago. A 2016 study estimated blue mussel populations in the intertidal zone between high and low tides declined more than 60% in the last 40 years. But what if the mussels didn't disappear entirely? What if they retreated to deeper, cooler water? "We are still finding them in these subtidal or deeper water areas," aquaculture program manager at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Carissa Maurin said. "And these are locations that people wouldn't normally see unless you're there exactly at the right time, on the right date, within a two hour window."

Brunswick students sent scientific instrument into space on Blue Origin

TIMES RECORD • April 21, 2025

A little piece of Brunswick entered space last week onboard the all-female Blue Origin rocket flight. Partnering with nonprofit Teachers in Space, Karin Paquin’s middle school students at St. John’s Catholic School designed an experiment that flew on the New Shepherd rocket during the historic launch on April 14. The CubeSat, a type of small satellite, flew with other experiments — including many designed by students — in the payload of the rocket. It had also been on an unmanned flight.

USDA cancels $35M climate grant to Freeport demonstration farm

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 21, 2025

After nearly three months of frozen payments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has canceled a five-year, $35 million climate-smart agriculture grant to a Freeport demonstration farm. Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment was informed last week that it had lost its grant.The USDA announced it was canceling most of the 135 projects funded by the $3.1 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program last week, calling it a Biden administration-era slush fund “built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of (nongovernmental organizations).”

Ellsworth couldn’t get its water tested for lead in 3 recent years

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 21, 2025

Ellsworth did not meet the requirements for testing its public drinking water for lead and copper between January 2022 and December 2024, it said in a letter to water department customers earlier this month. While the city did collect water samples twice during a recent three-year period, it was unable to get those samples formally tested for the metals. On one occasion, a box of water samples that the city had sent off for testing at a lab in Auburn were “squished causing the sample bottles to open.” More samples that were collected later in another attempt were delayed too long in getting to the same lab, and so were too old to test by the time they arrived, he said. Because those issues prevented the city from testing for lead and copper in its drinking water, it sent out the notice to the water department customers and is getting its water tested again.

Many Maine fishermen applaud Trump order calling for deregulation

MAINE PUBLIC • April 21, 2025

Many Maine fishermen are applauding a new executive order from President Trump, which calls on the federal government to identify and roll back regulations that are overly burdensome to the commercial fishing industry. The order signals that the Trump administration wants to listen to commercial harvesters and involve them in decision-making and research, said Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen's Association. "There are a lot of regulations that you could take a scalpel to, right? We can clean things up," he said. "There's a piling up regulations that takes place over time, and so I think it needs to be done carefully." Martens stressed that any deregulation must be done with a healthy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has already lost staff and faces more workforce and budget cuts.

Maine adds new fees for building solar projects on farmland

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 21, 2025

Developers who want to build large solar projects on valuable Maine farmland will now have to apply for a permit and pay additional fees. The rules went into effect on Sunday after months of development and public feedback. They follow a 2023 law directing the department to develop a program to protect soil and wildlife habitat from energy development, including solar and wind power projects. It’s another step to regulate the solar farms that have multiplied in Maine since a 2019 law removed barriers to them. Ground-based solar projects are being met with increasing resistance in towns around the state for a number of reasons, including fears of removing farmland from production. Maine lost 82,567 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022.

A conservation group will buy site of failed Belfast fish farm

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 21, 2025

A local conservation group that opposed the effort to build a salmon farm in Belfast has entered a contract to purchase 54 acres along the Little River where the project would have been located. Nordic Aquafarms first announced its plans for the $500 million fish farm in 2018 and abandoned the project in January after years of opposition and lawsuits from Belfast-area residents. It then put its land up for sale for $2 million. Upstream Watch, one of the groups that went to court to fight Nordic over the project, announced Monday morning that it had entered the contract to buy the property on Route 1. The group is now working to keep the land permanently conserved.

Opinion: Trump’s attack on public lands is an attack on public health

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 21, 2025

U.S. national parks have long been called “America’s best idea.” President Trump‘s attacks on them threaten our health. The administration has fired about 1,000 National Park Service (NPS) employees. Over 34 NPS leases, including visitor centers and museums, are set to be terminated. Budget cuts and privatization are also on the table. Research shows that nature is one of the best things for your health and well-being. To benefit future generations, the NPS was established in 1916. Since then all presidents except Trump have protected more land than they removed. The Trump administration is also pushing toward privatization. This raises big concerns about the impact on visitors’ health and the accessibility of these public spaces. Privatization could drive up prices and make parks inaccessible for low-income families and older adults. ~ Kristina Carvalho, senior policy analyst, Boston University School of Public Health, and volunteer with Sierra Club Maine

Canoeists take on Kenduskeag for 58th annual spring race

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 19, 2025

Trevor MacLean of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, racing bib No. 76, posted a time of 2 hours, 16 minutes and 21 seconds in a Kevlar kayak that he and a friend built just last week. By 2 p.m. on Saturday, no other finishers had beaten his time in the Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race. If he wins the overall race this year, it will be the 19th time. Last year, he posted a time of 2:20:00, his 18th win.

As Ellsworth embraces development, nearby towns push back

BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 21, 2025

The largest municipality in Hancock County, which has seen some of the most significant population increases in Maine over recent decades, continues to embrace development, even as some of its neighbors are guarding against it. The growth of middle-income housing in Ellsworth has been hot in recent years, as the costs of real estate and housing in Maine have increased dramatically. But, just as new retail dominated the city’s growth in the 1990s and 2000s, the local development landscape continues to evolve. Some of Ellsworth’s neighbors have been pushing back against large-scale growth. In the past year, Bar Harbor has put a temporary halt on all new transient lodging development, Lamoine has banned resorts and glampgrounds, and Blue Hill has rejected a proposal to subdivide a 38-acre blueberry barren into high-end house lots.

Future of Maine’s electric vehicle charging network in limbo as federal changes loom

MAINE MONITOR • April 20, 2025

If you’re driving an electric vehicle up I-95 or 295 these days, particularly in York or Cumberland counties, odds are you won’t have to travel far before hitting a public charging station. But head north and the stations taper off. Until recently, $5 billion in federal funding was set to change that, with a nationwide goal to build a network of public EV chargers along every 50 miles of designated roadway from Maine to California. The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program was brought to a halt by the Trump administration in February.

Facing new spruce budworm outbreak, Maine foresters look to history as a guide

MAINE MONITOR • April 19, 2025

Forty-five years ago a voracious insect called the spruce budworm was ravaging Maine’s North Woods, killing mountainsides of balsam fir and red spruce. Maine’s landowners rushed to harvest still-healthy trees. Thousands of acres of the North Woods were clear-cut and sprayed with herbicides to knock back brush and hardwood trees that would crowd out commercially valuable species. Dense forests were replaced with stripped tracts of land. Today, foresters and landowners are nervously tracking a renewed spruce budworm presence in the North Woods. The insects have already stripped hundreds of thousands of forest acres in Quebec and Ontario. Questions abound over how the state’s forests will fare in a world beset by climate change. Today, stands of late-stage and old-growth forest are few and scattered valuable trees are being cut by high-grading. Many of Maine’s woodlands hold a predominance of small trees with little commercial value, especially since the decline of the state’s paper and pulp industries. The forests are less resilient to disruptions and disease. The degradation of the timberlands has been exacerbated by widespread ownership changes. The best defense is to cultivate woodlands with a diversity of trees and reduce the concentration of fir and spruce, the budworms’ main target.

Farmers, seasonal businesses worry as immigration crackdown ramps up

MAINE MONITOR • April 19, 2025

Agricultural farmers, as well as wreath factories, restaurants, hotels, fisheries, and other Maine businesses have come to rely on the largely Latino migrant and year-round immigrant communities. As federal immigration officials ratchet up surveillance, advocates say many immigrants — even those who are documented — fear deportation, with more of them choosing to lay low, avoiding school or work. The Trump administration is considering eliminating, scaling back, or revoking some visas that employers have relied on to augment their work teams for decades. Trump has also revoked the visas of hundreds of international students and detained roughly a dozen others from college campuses across the US, often without any warning or recourse for appeals. The authors of Project 2025 have the H-2B non-agricultural temporary visa program in their sights, calling for the elimination of the visas that a host of industries depend on, from tourism and hospitality to restaurants and services at some national parks.

Gulf of Maine scallop fishery set to reopen Monday

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 18, 2025

A federal agency has passed the ruling needed to reopen federal scallop fishing in the Gulf of Maine, just under a week after it was forced to close because of delays in finalizing annual catch limits. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday afternoon that fishermen will be allowed to resume scalloping on Monday through the remainder of the season — which ends once a certain amount is caught. NOAA temporarily closed the regional fishery on April 12, the first midseason closure since regulations were put in place 16 years ago. It impacted those who fish for scallops in federal waters, 3 miles offshore in the northern Gulf of Maine region.

Sale of Dragon Products Completed

MIDCOAST VILLAGER • April 18, 2025

Heidelberg Materials North America has completed the acquisition of Giant Cement Holding Inc. and its subsidiaries that includes the Dragon cement plant in Thomaston. Dragon is Thomaston’s largest property taxpayer, paying more than $1 million to the town annually.

Burgum launches broad Interior reorganization

E&E NEWS • April 18, 2025

The Interior Department is moving forward with sweeping reorganization and consolidation efforts that will be overseen by a former member of the Elon Musk-led workforce reduction team. The plan would include consolidating communications, financial management, contracting, human resources, grants, civil rights and interactive technology. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order Thursday that confirmed most of those details. A conservation watchdog accused Burgum of handing over too much power and control for the reorganization to Hassen and DOGE. “If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “This order shows what it looks like when leaders abdicate their jobs and let unqualified outsiders fire thousands of civil servants who are working on behalf of all Americans and their public lands.”

Gov. Mills highlights importance of Canadian tourists in Maine

MAINE PUBLIC • April 19, 2025

The number of travelers crossing the Canadian border into Maine declined in March by 26% compared to the same month last year, furthering a dip that began with President Donald Trump's tariffs and threats of annexation. The data on border crossings into Maine comes from monthly U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports. In February, when the president first announced his tariffs against Canada and goals of annexing the country, there was a 15% decline from the previous year. The March data show an even steeper drop-off — about 60,000 fewer people coming through Maine border crossings. The figure is part of an overall drop at all northern border crossings of 900,000 travelers nationwide. State officials have warned that Canadian visitors are an important part of the state's tourism economy.

Judge pauses Maine lobster defamation suit pending appeal

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 15, 2025

A federal judge on Tuesday paused proceedings in a defamation lawsuit Maine lobstering groups brought against a California aquarium, staying the case until broad questions about how to interpret Maine libel law are answered by an appeals court. U.S. District Judge John Woodcock had ruled in February that the suit — brought by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association and a handful of lobstering businesses — could proceed after nearly two years in legal limbo. The groups sued the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation “for making false and defamatory statements about Maine lobster fishing practices and for misleading consumers and commercial lobster buyers about the integrity of the Maine lobster harvest” after the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program downgraded its rating for Maine lobster.