Shellfish commission weighs its options
Waterford-East Lyme group mulling proposed nursery in Niantic River
Waterford — The effort to find an appropriate location in the Niantic River for a proposed shellfish nursery began anew Thursday night — under increased scrutiny from Waterford and East Lyme residents — at a joint meeting of three commissions in Waterford’s community center.
Members of the Waterford-East Lyme Shellfish commission and the two harbor management commissions in East Lyme and Waterford, who have worked in relative obscurity for years, were asked to introduce themselves to a room full of residents of the two towns — mostly from Waterford — who have developed a sudden interest in the regulations governing activity in the river since the details of the proposal became public.
“There’s more people here than in the last 20 years combined,” said Eric Kanter, who said he has been a member of the shellfish commission for nearly all of those 20 years.
The members of the various commissions said their names — quietly at first, then louder when one audience member complained he was hard of hearing — and opined on the safety and environmental effects of shellfishing in the river, suddenly thrust into the public spotlight.
The Waterford-East Lyme Shellfish Commission developed an agreement last year that would have allowed Tim Londregan, who grows shellfish
in the Niantic Bay, to use more than six acres of space in the Niantic River to grow juvenile shellfish before moving them into the Niantic Bay.
Londregan, with the support of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the Department of Agriculture and shellfish experts with Connecticut Sea Grant, has argued his business would improve the ecological health of a river that’s yielded inconsistent shellfish crops for years.
The commission also last year created a parcel — distinct from six designated shellfishing areas approved in 2002 that it could temporarily lease to prospective commercial shellfish farmers — to accommodate Londregan’s needs.
But the commission rescinded its agreement with Londregan at a meeting in November, after Mago Point and Niantic residents and business owners complained that Londregan’s proposal could be unsafe for boaters and have adverse effects on the river, tourism to Mago Point and Niantic and the “character” of the river.
The agreement was never vetted by town officials, by the Waterford Harbor Management Commission or in a public hearing, and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers letter to abutters of the project was the first time many local residents heard of Londregan’s proposal, sparking a backlash.
Town Attorney Robert Avena suggested Londregan and the Waterford-East Lyme Shellfish Commission start their process over, and on Thursday that commission, along with representatives from the harbor commissions in Waterford and East Lyme, went back to the drawing board.
They met to review the merits of the six areas in the Niantic River approved for commercial shellfishing leases in 2002: one along the north side of the Niantic River bridge, three off the eastern Mago Point shore of the river, one off the Niantic shore near Perimeter Road and a final area close to the northernmost end of the river just south of the Route 1 bridge. They handed out maps of the different areas.
“They’ve been in existence for over 15 years as possible areas where aquaculture can occur in the river,” Avena said during a lengthy introduction to Thursday’s meeting.
The meeting also served as something of a kumbaya moment between the members of the three commissions, who acknowledged a lack of communication in the past and took several minutes at some points to express their interest in improved communication in the future.
Avena, the commissions’ members and Waterford’s deputy harbor master alternated between addressing the gathered audience and each other, laying out the past two decades of history of shellfishing activity, recreational boating, pollution and development in and around the river.
They also bemoaned a lack of communication between the town commissions and the various state and federal agencies before which Londregan has applications pending.
“This whole thing has been a comedy of errors,” shellfish commission member Patrick Kelly said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers postponed a public hearing last month that it had scheduled for Thursday to discuss Londregan’s permit per the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
It was not until an hour into the meeting that the commissioners began to discuss the possible merits of some of the six approved shellfishing areas, wondering aloud — while Londregan sat in the front row — whether any of them might be appropriate for his proposal.
Bob Derosa, a member of Waterford’s Harbor Commission, made his opinion clear, passing out pictures of an unidentified oyster farm he printed from an unknown website and bringing in a three-foot piece of steel rebar, which he held as he spoke.
“It’s a recreational river, it’s not an industrial river,” he said.
Others, like shellfish commission member Lawrence Tytla, urged the commissions to consider Londregan’s proposal as a possible boon to the river, which has lost the biological diversity and consistency that it once had.
“It’s really a resource,” he said. “Getting shellfish from the river, having them available is really something that benefits everybody.”
Nearly 30 minutes into the public comment portion of the meeting, as the clock on the wall drew close to 9 p.m., a 22-year old named Taras Pleskun introduced himself as a friend of Londregan and a graduate of the University of Rhode Island’s aquaculture program, then launched into an emotional, nearly romantic defense of building a local shellfishing industry.
He listed the origins of oysters and other shellfish he had eaten in his life: Norwegian, Australian, Filipino, Indonesian and French.
“I can tell you this: they’ve got nothing on a New England oyster,” he said. “Ours are prime and clean, and I can vouch for that. We have something really good here that we can hold in our hands and show our kids ... and there’s something American about that.”
The room broke into applause.