The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lamont signs bill to boost shellfish industry
Gov. Ned Lamont signed legislation granting tax breaks to the state’s shellfishermen on Friday, hailing the effort as a vital boost to one of Connecticut’s most recognizable industries.
“We’re the Napa Valley of oysters — we have the best oysters in the world,” Lamont said at a bill signing ceremony at the Birdseye Street Boat Launch in Stratford.
The bill allows fishermen and other aquaculture operators to have their beds underneath Long Island Sound taxed similarly to farmland under a decadesold state law that provides more favorable assessments to farmers. More controversially for some shoreline towns, the bill also extended the favorable tax assessments to waterfront properties used by fisherman and shellstock shippers.
Despite concerns raised by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities about the loss of local tax revenue, lawmakers passed the bill with bi-partisan majorities in June.
“This is a growing and thriving industry and has been over the past number of years,” said state Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford,
the co-chair of the Environment Committee. “But arguably, nobody has been harder hit during the pandemic than this industry.”
The shellfishing industry in Connecticut generates more than $30 million in annual sales and employs more than 300 people, according to Lamont’s office.
Jimmy Bloom, the principal harvester for Copps
Island Oysters in Norwalk, said restaurant closures took away 90 percent of his fleet’s customer base during the height of the pandemic.
“We were pretty much completely shut down at the beginning of the pandemic,” Bloom said. “Since then, as things have started to open, we have slowly started to bounce back.”
In addition to tax breaks, the bill Lamont signed on Friday also expands the Department of Agriculture’s restoration program for state-owned shellfishing beds and requires the Connecticut Seafood Development Council to include members representing the shellfish, commercial marine fish, lobster and seaweed aquaculture industries.
“What this bill does is it says agriculture and aquaculture are the same thing,” Lamont said. “They’re all about using our natural resources in the best way possible to benefit the most people possible and that can be on land or at sea, and we treat both the exact same.”
Randy Collins, a lobbyist for the Conference of Municipalities, said this week that extending tax breaks intended for farmland to include expensive waterfront properties could have serious implications for shoreline towns with a large shellfishing presence — especially if property used by distributors is included along with traditional aquaculture properties.
A fiscal impact assessment prepared on the bill during the session did not estimate the total size of the tax breaks, though it stated local revenues would not be impacted until fiscal year 2023.
“Why is it that the municipalities are the ones that foot the bill for this state priority?” Collins said.
Cohen said last month that lawmakers would return to the issue in future sessions, to clarify that the tax breaks are meant for waterfront property used exclusively by fishermen, and not shellstock shippers that only buy and ship aquaculture products.
Lauren Gauthier, the special projects manager at Copps Island Oysters, said access to waterfront property is as essential to fishermen as are traditional farm buildings that fall under the existing tax breaks. The difference, she noted, is the price of waterfront property in “beautiful coastal Connecticut.”
“The fact is working waterfront property is so hard to come by that it is difficult to do business and it’s difficult to enter the industry,” Gauthier said. “So by providing this parity and these updates, you actually help more people become aquaculturists.”
Stratford Mayor Laura Hoydick, who was among the officials who spoke at the bill signing, praised the measure, calling it “something that is going to improve not only our shoreline, but the state of Connecticut.”
There are more than 70,000 acres of cultivated shellfish beds along the Connecticut shoreline, according to Lamont’s office. Major centers of the shellfishing industry in the state include Norwalk, Stratford, Guilford, Branford and Stonington.