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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Colin Woodard, PPH staff writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/news" target="_blank">Maine Sunday Telegram news story</a> EUSTIS — On a Wednesday in April, Flagstaff Lake was draining away.When full, it is the state's fifth largest freshwater body, nurturing a local tourist economy and providing boating and swimming opportunities for thousands of residents and others visiting Maine.But on days like this -- when the dam owner opens the sluiceways of the Long Falls Dam to generate power farther downstream -- the lake begins to disappear, leaving behind thousands of acres of muddy and largely lifeless bottom. Docks are left high and dry and shorefront homes, camps and parks become isolated behind hundreds of yards of exposed, foul-smelling muck."They're killing our area up here," says Jay Wyman, a longtime selectman in Eustis, where many families moved in 1950 when the newly completed dam drowned their nearby hometowns of Flagstaff and Dead River.People in the Eustis region fought for nearly a decade to defend their livelihoods, property values and tax base by pressuring state authorities to require the dam owner to keep the lake fuller in summer and early fall as part of its federal relicensing, which comes up for review only three or four times each century.They'd sparred with the longtime owner, Florida Power & Light, from the hearing rooms of Augusta to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.By the summer of 2011, it looked like they would win -- until the state's top environmental official stepped in.That's when the state commissioner of environmental protection, Patricia Aho -- who just months before had been working as a lobbyist for the law firm which represented the Florida power company -- met with Matthew Manahan, who was FPL's attorney and Aho's former colleague at Pierce Atwood, the state's largest law firm. After the meeting, Aho's department quietly did exactly what FPL hoped it would: nothing.Despite detailed briefings from staff experts and a last-minute warning from the Attorney General's Office, the DEP quietly let the clock run out, missing a critical federal deadline to influence what happens at the dam for another quarter-century.Her spokeswoman would later claim it had been an oversight, suggesting staff had dropped the ball when, internal documents and interviews with former staff reveal, the ball had been taken from them and handed to Pierce Atwood's client for an easy layup.It is not an isolated incident.A seven-month Maine Sunday Telegram investigation has found that commissioner Aho has acted against a range of consumer protection, pollution reduction and climate preparedness laws she had previously tried but failed to stop from passing the Legislature as a lobbyist for chemical, drug, oil and automobile companies. Present and former department employees say they have been pressured not to vigorously implement or enforce these laws, which were long opposed by companies represented by the commissioner's former law firm.Gov. Paul LePage has pledged to make the state more business-friendly and to reduce red tape. But in many cases, the Department of Environmental Protection has been scuttling laws in ways that benefit Aho's old clients or those of past and present clients of another lobbyist embedded in his office: Ann Robinson, a top lobbyist at the Preti Flaherty law firm, who moonlights as the governor's regulatory reform adviser and has drafted and promoted policies that would benefit her clients.Internal documents and interviews with about two dozen current and former DEP employees reveal how the administration has systematically sedated some of Maine's environmental laws.Under LePage and Aho, the DEP has:• Stifled the Kid Safe Products Act -- a 2008 law to protect fetuses, babies and children from potentially damaging chemicals -- by blocking efforts to bring more chemicals under the law's jurisdiction. Many of the chemicals were produced by Aho's former lobbying clients, who fought similar laws in Connecticut, California and the state of Washington.• Recommended a rollback or elimination of certain recycling programs that are strongly opposed by Aho's and Robinson's corporate clients in the automotive, waste and bottled-water industries, who would suffer if successful Maine programs that make manufacturers responsible for certain products are replicated in other states.• Presided over a dramatic downturn in enforcement of laws affecting developers, with initial enforcement actions in the Land Division falling by 49 percent under the LePage administration. (See related story: "They're just not doing enforcement.") Before becoming commissioner, Aho unsuccessfully fought to weaken many of the laws at issue as the longtime lobbyist of the Maine Real Estate and Development Association, or MEREDA.• Purged information from the DEP's website and clamped down on its personnel, restricting their ability to communicate information to lawmakers, the public, policy staff, and one another. (See related story: "Sources describe a department under duress.")"In both enforcement and in what we communicate to the Legislature, it almost seems like the commissioner is still a lobbyist for the clients she represented before she came to office," says one current DEP employee, one of many interviewed for this story who did not want their names used for fear they would be fired.Aho agreed to one interview with the Telegram but declined subsequent requests. In the interview, conducted in late February, the commissioner was asked about perceived conflicts of interest in connection with her former Pierce Atwood clients. Aho said that while she had been a lobbyist, two years had passed since she joined the department and that these were all former clients. She emphasized that she has met all disclosure requirements."That's all out there, that's public documents," she said. The Attorney General's Office "walked through to me how to enforce those issues" when she was appointed deputy commissioner in February 2011, and she cited examples of times in which she had declared her past lobbying associations in public hearings.Robinson and Pierce Atwood managing partner Gloria Pinza did not respond to interview requests.Senate President Justin Alfond, D-Portland, said Wednesday he was concerned but not surprised by the investigation's findings. "It's crystal clear that this governor and this commissioner have biases against certain programs and initiatives, and they constantly slow things down, change interpretations, and make things as challenging as possible," he said.• THE MESSAGE: CROSSING SPECIAL INTERESTS HAS CONSEQUENCESMany of the nearly two dozen past and present DEP employees interviewed by the Telegram said they believed Aho was targeting diligent staffers at certain programs for isolation, elimination or reassignment, so their positions could be occupied with less knowledgeable replacements. (See related story: "Sources describe a department under duress.")Few were willing to talk on the record for fear of reprisals against themselves, their colleagues or present employers.Several cited the product recycling experts who they say were shut out of the creation of the department's report on product recycling programs. A two-time winner of the DEP commissioner's award was reassigned from leading efforts to educate businesses on energy efficiency to be a drain inspector, others noted.But most pointed to one case that is part of the public record: the reassignment of the key staffer responsible for implementing the Kid Safe Products Act.Andrea Lani, who had run the program since its inception and had been a technical expert at the department since 1999, was given the largely clerical task of compiling public records requests and was replaced by a less experienced employee.The reassignment occurred shortly after Lani had provided expert testimony to the Legislature on March 29, 2011, on the harmful effects of bisphenol-A, which was to be banned from baby bottles and sippy cups under the 2008 law. She did so as a private citizen and had taken time off to do so, as per policy at the department, which had recommended and shepherded the ban a few months earlier under Gov. John Baldacci. But her stance was counter to that of Aho, who had recently been appointed deputy commissioner.Lobbying disclosures show Aho had fought passage of the Kid Safe Products Act in 2008 on behalf of AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, the American Petroleum Institute and lead paint manufacturer Millennium Holdings. Just weeks before being appointed to the DEP, Aho was working as the principal lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, which has opposed the law.At the time of Lani's testimony, the governor's regulatory reform adviser, Preti Flaherty lobbyist Ann Robinson, was a registered lobbyist of one of the groups seeking to defeat the ban, the Toy Industry Association of America, even as she was helping draft and roll out the governor's regulatory reform agenda. Robinson had also fought the Kid Safe Products Act in 2008 on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, and drugmaker Merck, and the Toy Industry Association had hired her firm to lobby for passage of a 2011 bill that critics said would have effectively repealed the law.Two days after Lani gave her testimony, Aho ordered her investigated to see "whether she had improperly used state resources in developing her testimony," according to legal briefs filed in federal court. The investigation determined she had not violated any policies, but Lani was nonetheless reassigned to the records office shortly thereafter, leaving the Kid Safe Products Act in the hands of "a much less qualified individual who began working for the DEP in January 2011 at an entry-level clerical position," according to the brief.Lani sued Aho and another DEP official in federal court for allegedly having retaliated against her "in reckless disregard of her federal constitutional rights." The state paid $65,000 to Lani and her attorneys in an out-of-court settlement reached in April 2012. Under the terms of the agreement, none of the parties is allowed to discuss the case or disparage one another. Lani remains the department's public records coordinator.Several sources said the incident has had a chilling and lasting effect on staff."People including myself were horrified that something that blatant would be done to a staff person who was within their legal rights and very well-respected, bright, hardworking and caring," says biologist Barbara Welch, who resigned in January of this year and says she has filed harassment grievances against her supervisor, Samantha DePoy-Warren, a political appointee who was until recently the department's communications director. "We followed her case and were astounded by what happened to her.""It was startling," says Bob Birk, a landfill cleanup specialist who had accompanied Lani to the State House when she gave her BPA testimony and who retired from the DEP last September. "People felt they had to walk on eggs and literally keep their heads down."• THE TARGETS: ANY EMPLOYEES WHO DIDN'T 'WORK WITH INDUSTRY'DEP employees interviewed by the Telegram reported there have been few if any changes within the Air Quality Bureau, while the Land Division and the Remediation and Waste Management Bureau -- which has oversight over the Kid Safe Products Act and product recycling laws -- have borne the brunt of the staffing and policy changes.According to a detailed list of recommendations Preti Flaherty prepared for LePage in late December 2010, its industrial clients were satisfied with the air bureau but did not have "a great relationship" with the Waste Management Bureau. The firm's attorneys urged LePage to make a "serious effort" to rid the department of employees who didn't "work with industry" on enforcement issues."The areas of the department with the least disruptive change are those who work with traditional, highly regulated communities: water licensing and air licensing," says Malcolm Burson, who was DEP deputy policy director until November 2011. "They're going about business the way they always have gone about business.""But you get into toxics or to land and it's totally different," he says. "That's where the significant changes have taken place."Aho denied accusations that the staff changes were part of an organized effort to compel the departure or reassignment of particular individuals. "I think our department is doing great work, and I hope that doesn't get lost in the debate about if we are doing something differently," she said. "Yes, we're doing something differently, but to actually enhance the work that they're doing here and let them get out and be in touch with the environment perhaps more than in the other types and parts of their work."• THE STRATEGY: SEE LAWS BLOCKED, UNIMPLEMENTED, UNENFORCEDWith staff at targeted programs of the department on tight reins, Aho moved against laws she and Robinson had been unable to defeat at the State House. Some laws went unimplemented, while others went largely unenforced.Aho stopped the department's efforts to add additional toxic substances to the two already slated for regulation under the Kid Safe Products Act by the Baldacci administration. An already completed proposal to ban a family of toxic flame retardants was left in the files, where it has sat since LePage's election in 2010.She also sought to foil product recycling laws that keep mercury and lead out of the state's air, water and soil. At Pierce Atwood, the disclosures show, Aho had tried unsuccessfully to stop passage of the laws on behalf of mercury thermostat manufacturers, paper companies, automakers and other clients. (Maine is second only to California in the number of product categories covered by such laws, but a majority of states have at least one on the books.)With Aho at the helm, the DEP created a report to the Legislature recommending these programs be considered for termination based on evidence critics charged was flawed and one-sided. No new products have been proposed for the program under Aho and LePage.Aho's actions also benefited the owners of the Flagstaff dam -- Florida Power & Light and its NextEra Energy subsidiary -- who received a new federal license last summer containing water level rules it preferred. They will remain in effect until 2036. (In March of this year, FPL sold all 19 of its Maine dams to Brookfield Renewable Power, a subsidiary of a Canadian asset management group, for approximately $760 million.)• THE FLAGSTAFF LAKE EFFECT: HOW MAINERS LOST AN OPPORTUNITYBy the time Aho took over the department in the summer of 2011, the fight for Flagstaff Lake had been years in the making. But residents, negotiating with the company from a position of weakness, often came up short.In many summers over the past decade, the Florida energy company FPL dropped Flagstaff's water levels so low that by early August the local youth recreation program had to stop holding swimming lessons at the local beach and bused the children to a pool 20 miles away. Other residents reported foul odors wafting from the exposed lake bed and winds carrying silt and sand into a local elementary school and an elderly housing complex."You lose a couple feet here and people have to haul their boats," says Wyman, the longtime Eustis selectman. "You pull three or four feet and you get mud flats. They drain it out too much and you get sandstorms."The problems kick in when summertime lake levels fall below three feet from what's called "full pond," townspeople report. At 4.5 feet below full pond capacity -- the level the newly issued federal license allows in September -- the Eustis end of the lake becomes a mud flat, with only the old channel of the Dead River containing any water. When the Telegram visited in mid-April, the Eustis end of the lake looked much as the town described it in regulatory filings: "a nearly empty bathtub surrounded by a dark ring."For the past decade, Flagstaff-area residents had fought to get more stringent water level rules written into the dam's new license, which was up for renewal for the first time since the dam was built. The legal mechanism to do so was through the state DEP, which could impose such requirements under the federal Clean Water Act.As early as 2004, federal records show, the town had asked the DEP and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to ensure that the dam's new license require that the lake be kept at certain minimum levels in summer and early fall. That same year, the Board of Environmental Protection -- an independent body that reviews environmental regulations -- ruled that FPL's winter drawdowns were too severe and, to protect aquatic life, should be limited to less than 9 feet below full pond capacity, rather than the 24 feet allowed under the proposed license.There was a catch: DEP had to file paperwork by Nov. 15, 2011, or it would lose its seat at the table and, along with it, the means to modify the federal license, which FERC was otherwise ready to approve.Aho missed the deadline.Aho's spokeswoman, Depoy-Warren, later claimed the failure to file the paperwork had been an accident, "something that was lost sight of during the transition of leadership."But according to both internal documents and Dana Murch, the staffer who oversaw DEP's dam relicensing efforts for more than 30 years until September 2011, Aho and other key officials had all been fully and repeatedly informed about the dam and its deadlines.Murch said he personally briefed the commissioner and other senior managers face to face on the approaching Flagstaff deadline that summer. "She certainly knew what the regulatory options were and where the project file was," says Murch, who also highlighted the deadline in exit memos sent to staff.Aho was also briefed on the issue by FPL. Department schedules and correspondence acquired by the Conservation Law Foundation through a public records request showed that Aho met in her office Aug. 4, 2011, with FPL's attorney -- her former Pierce Atwood colleague Matthew Manahan -- and two FPL officials seeking to "update Pattie on the status of Flagstaff."DEP staff at various levels subsequently received reminders of the impending deadline, including one sent the day before to the staffer responsible for Flagstaff, Dawn Hallowell, by Assistant Attorney General Jan McClintock noting that if no action was "done by tomorrow, certification will be deemed waived by operation of law." Hallowell forwarded the email to her supervisor, land and water bureau director Michael Mullen, meaning that even at the last hour, key staff were aware of what was about to happen."I think it's disingenuous for the department to argue they did this in ignorance," says Jeff Reardon of Trout Unlimited, which had fought for tighter water level targets. "We could have gotten a better situation, and it's entirely possible Eustis and Stratton could have gotten a better summer target.""This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a balance between hydroelectric energy generation and environmental values," says Murch, the longtime DEP dam relicensing expert. "The legally proper way to have moved forward would have been to (do an) analysis to try to figure out what the appropriate new water standards would be to meet all needs and impacts. Find out how much environmental bang you get for each foot of water you don't draw down from the lake and what the negative impacts are.""They chose the sit-on-your-hands-and-do-nothing option," he adds.The result was something of a slam dunk for FPL and anyone else who owns the dam between now and 2036, when the new license expires, as it killed more stringent limits on drawdowns, both in summer and off-season."Once the state made that decision there was no longer any legally binding obligation on the federal agencies or the dam owners to listen to what anybody has to say in Eustis or any other community," says Sean Mahoney, executive vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation. "It all comes down to money: Having to do studies, having to do recreational things, having limits on what they can draw down affects how much power they can generate and how much money they can get for their shareholders.""By DEP waiving their authority, it gives the owner the best of all worlds: a non-appealable order that they needn't change or defend and they don't even have to pay for studies," Reardon says. "It's less expensive, more secure and gives them more authority."The governor appears fully supportive of Aho's handling of the issue. Asked whether LePage had any concerns about the DEP having waived its powers under the Clean Water Act at Flagstaff, the governor's communications director, Peter Steele, gave a one-sentence written response: "The Governor is confident that DEP is appropriately managing the delegated (Clean Water Act) program."Aho declined to be interviewed about Flagstaff and many other issues raised in this investigation. In mid-April, DePoy-Warren said DEP would not comment or respond to any further questions on this or other issues, saying she and Aho would "instead focus our efforts on the protection of our environment as the people of Maine expect us to do."Sidebar: HERE'S WHAT WE FOUNDA Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram investigation has found Patricia Aho, a former industrial and corporate lobbyist who became commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2011, has scuttled programs and fought against laws that were opposed by many of her former clients in the chemical, drug, oil, and real estate development industries. Under Aho, the DEP has:• Frozen the Kid Safe Products Act – a 2008 law to protect fetuses, babies and children from potentially damaging chemicals – by blocking efforts to bring more chemicals under the law’s jurisdiction, chemicals produced by Aho’s former lobbying clients.• Reduced enforcement actions by 49 percent against large developers and landowners. Aho had unsuccessfully fought to weaken many of the laws at issue as the longtime lobbyist of the Maine Real Estate and Development Association.• Fought to roll back recycling programs that are strongly opposed by former clients of Aho and a still-active lobbyist, Ann Robinson, the governor’s regulatory reform adviser.• Oversaw a purge of information from the DEP’s website and a clampdown on its personnel, restricting their ability to communicate relevant information to lawmakers, the public, policy staff and one another. `, assigning current date

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`Efforts to Reduce Risks to Kids Run into a Powerful Foe` post updated successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Colin Woodard, PPH staff writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/news" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald news story</a> AUGUSTA — Phthalates, a class of chemicals used to soften plastics, are everywhere: in skin lotions and shampoos, glue and detergent, food containers and hospital feeding tubes. They’re also almost certainly in you and everyone you know. Fortunately, they pass out of your body quickly and appear to do no harm – unless you’re a male fetus.Researchers believe that these chemicals could be wreaking havoc on the development of unborn boys’ genitals and reproductive systems with lasting consequences for the rest of their lives. The chemicals are known to block androgen, a key hormone that fosters male sexual development in the womb, which in turn can lead to undescended testicles, reduced penis size and poor fertility in adulthood.“If you can reduce the phthalates in moms, that’s definitely something we should do,” says Shanna Swan, a national expert on the chemicals who works at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.Which is why the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention included seven phthalates on its short list of the most pressing chemicals to consider for regulation under the Kid Safe Products Act, a 2008 law designed to phase out toxic chemicals in toys, car seats, sippy cups, and other children’s products. It wasn’t an easy list to make: the CDC culled 49 priority chemicals from 1,384 worrisome substances it had identified.Every chemical on the list has been found 1) to have been detected in humans, their homes or household products; and 2) to be either a carcinogen, neurotoxin or substance that harms hormone production, organs, or fetal or childhood development. In November, four of the phthalates on Maine’s list were banned from all consumer products by Denmark, and the European Union has banned three of them from children’s toys since 1999.“They’re all bad and they’re common,” says Mike Belliveau, executive director of the Maine-based Environmental Health Strategy Center, which advocates nationally for chemical policy reform and strongly supports the law. “Some are hormone-disrupting and some are cancer-causing and some are long-lived in the environment and the food web.”But Maine Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Patricia Aho – a chemical industry lobbyist who took the helm at the DEP in 2011 – has stalled efforts to regulate these substances, all of which are potentially harmful to children or to pregnancies.A seven-month investigation of the DEP by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram found that the department staff is under pressure not to vigorously implement or enforce certain laws opposed by the commissioner’s former lobbying clients. Documents and interviews with current and former staff members reveal a pattern of deference to industrial interests once represented by Aho when she worked for Pierce Atwood, the state’s largest law and lobbying firm, including producers of chemicals and products likely to run afoul of the new chemical law.Aho had fought to stop the Kid Safe Products Act from becoming law in 2008, when she was a lobbyist for AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, the American Petroleum Institute and lead paint maker Millennium Holdings, lobbying disclosures show. Just weeks before being appointed to the DEP, Aho was working as the principal lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, which also opposed the law and has sought to weaken it.She isn’t the only figure associated with Gov. Paul LePage’s administation to have represented corporate opponents of the law.Ann Robinson, the governor’s transition co-chair and informal regulatory reform adviser, is a lobbyist at Preti Flaherty, another large law firm. She fought the Kid Safe Products Act in 2008 on behalf of two clients – the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the drugmaker Merck – and her firm was hired by the Toy Industry Association of America to support passage of a 2011 bill that would have curtailed the law.Two other Preti lobbyists, Severin Beliveau and Bruce Gerrity, fought the law in 2008 on behalf of the Personal Care Products Council and the Toy Industry Association, respectively. Since taking office, Aho has worked to neuter these and other environmental regulations opposed by their current or former industry clients, while Robinson tried unsuccessfully to get the Legislature to overturn them.“All of us are concerned when it appears that business or the industry is getting the primary ear of the governor or the Legislature,” says Dr. Lani Graham, who served as the state’s top health official in Gov. John McKernan’s administration and is currently co-chair of the public health committee of the Maine Medical Association.“Unfortunately, it’s a common pattern that goes back many decades that targets any public health intervention that appears to interfere with business in any way,” she said.The law has the support of the Maine Medical Association, which represents the state’s physicians, saying it “strikes the right balance between business and public health interests.”The LePage administration tried and failed to get the Republican-controlled 125th Legislature in 2011 to effectively overturn the Kid Safe Products Act. Instead, it has pivoted to stopping the law in its tracks by refusing to apply it to additional suspected toxins, halting actions that would merely require manufacturers to reveal which of their children’s products contained them.In the two and a half years since Gov. Paul LePage took office, the DEP has failed to put forth a single new toxin to add to the two types regulated under the previous administration.Instead, it tried and failed to stop regulation of one of the two chemicals already regulated under the Kid Safe Products Act: bisphenol A, or BPA, which was to be banned from baby bottles and sippy cups. The substance is an endocrine disruptor that even at low doses interferes with the production of hormones in the body, with potentially serious consequences, according to scientific studies cited by the DEP when it called for the ban in 2010. LePage dismissed concerns about BPA, a common additive to plastics, saying “the worst case is some women may have little beards.”• THE STATES ACT: And ‘Maine is at the forefront’Maine has been out ahead of the rest of the country in regulating chemicals, but other states have followed its lead, making business more difficult for chemical manufacturers. “Maine is at the forefront on these issues and pushing the boundaries at the state level,” says Sarah Doll, the Oregon-based national director of Safer States, a national coalition pushing for more stringent regulation of chemicals in consumer products. “Other states – California, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington – have done parts, but Maine really has all the regulatory pieces lined up.”States have taken the lead because the relevant federal law – the Toxic Substances Control Act – is weak, requiring that regulators present “substantial evidence” of toxicity before banning a substance, rather than making manufacturers prove it is safe before it’s sold. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly recommended Congress change this, pointing out that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was unable to ban asbestos under those provisions. (Congress is considering a bill – the Safe Chemicals Act – that would reform the act, but passage is uncertain.)“Clearly the federal system is broken, and Maine is piloting some solutions,” says Doll. “There’s a lot of interest in it, so there’s going to be pushback.”• THE DEFENSE: ‘They just don’t have the staff’The LePage administration says the reason it has failed to name additional chemicals under the Kid Safe Products Act is because of a lack of means, not a lack of will. It says the DEP has limited staff to deploy on chemical issues and that those available have been tied up dealing with the results of a June 2012 petition by a coalition of environmental groups that ultimately led the BEP to require that BPA be banned from baby-food containers. (BPA had previously been banned for use in baby bottles and sippy cups, with the near-unanimous approval of the Republican-controlled 125th Legislature.)Aho and a department spokeswoman declined to be interviewed on the issue.LePage’s communications director, Peter Steele, said the department had been moving to implement the law. In 2011 it focused on “analytical work necessary to create the ‘chemicals of high concern’ list, which involved substantial staff resources” at the DEP, he said. In 2012 it had to collect data and contract analysis related to the citizens BPA petition. “This was a significant amount of staff resources for a program that has only one staff person,” he said.“If DEP doesn’t have to change the program again, the department is ready to focus on and implement the program to determine what are the next priority chemicals,” Steele added.The ranking Senate Republican on the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Tom Saviello of Wilton, also defends the department’s handling of the program. “They’ve spent 1,500 hours dealing with the BPA petition. How can they focus on something else? They just don’t have the staff,” he says. “I believe that we can protect children, but we need to do it with the resources we have.”Senate Majority Leader Seth Goodall, D-Richmond, disagrees, saying that naming additional chemicals for regulation should be a priority and noting that the legal changes made in 2011 make it easier for the DEP to identify those that are the most dangerous, as they allow the department to rely on work done by other governments.“Every administration has to make choices, but in my view trying to protect children from dangerous chemicals should be a top priority,” he said. “We should keep putting pressure on the agencies that do this public health work to take action.”To compel action, Goodall introduced legislation earlier this year – L.D. 1181 – that included a requirement that the department name two chemicals from the list of 49 every year, but that measure was dropped during negotiations with Republicans. The bill still requires manufacturers of the 49 chemicals on the high-concern list to report what products they are found in and is expected to be voted on in the House and Senate this week.The DEP manager who oversees the Kid Safe Products program, Melanie Loyzim, had testified to legislators that Goodall’s original language would have required the hiring of “at least” seven new full-time staff and amounted to “a big government program focused on churning out rules and processing paperwork, rather than engaging in meaningful analysis and informed decision-making.”• THE BRIEF: A ‘priority chemical’ remains unregulatedBut the department’s explanation fails to take into account why it didn’t take action on a family of chemicals for which most staff work had already been completed when the administration took office and whose manufacturers were among Commissioner Aho’s past lobbying clients.When LePage was preparing to take office in December 2010, DEP staff had already completed a detailed brief to designate brominated fire retardants – BFRs – as “priority chemicals,” in order to “send a signal to industry ... that they need to consider other methods of fire safety without posing hazards to children’s health.”Various BFRs, which are used in children’s blankets, clothes and toys, had already been identified as endocrine disruptors, carcinogens and reproductive toxins, according to the brief, which was to be submitted to the Board of Environmental Protection for its January 2011 meeting.The brief never made it to the meeting, or any of the more than two dozen BEP hearings that have been held since.LePage’s transition team – whose co-chairs included Robinson and the managing partner of Pierce Atwood, Gloria Pinza – asked the Baldacci administation to pull the BFR brief. They complied as a courtesy, according to Mark Hyland, who was director of the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management at the time.Once in office, the LePage administration never reintroduced the BFR paperwork. It could legally have done so at any time in its first year and a half in office, according to Belliveau, who tracked the program closely. Aho was in charge of the DEP for more than a year during this window, but the completed BFR paperwork sat dormant in her department’s files.Asked why the governor’s team killed the BFR brief, LePage’s communications director attempted to blame it on Baldacci’s team. “In 2010, prior to the LePage administration, DEP decided not to pursue the naming of (BFRs),” Steele said in a written statement. “We cannot speak for the former administration.” He did not respond to follow-up questions sent June 3.In 2007, Aho and her Pierce Atwood colleagues were lobbyists for the Dallas-based Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, an alliance of four chemical companies that produced BFRs, and fought against laws that restricted some of them.BFRs have recently been identified as a likely cause of the high rates of cancer in firefighters, who inhale them when fighting house fires. In a newly published study in the journal Chemosphere, Susan Shaw, director of the Blue Hill-based Marine Environmental Research Institute, found concentrations of BFRs in San Francisco firefighters’ blood at levels two to three times that of the general population, and in some cases hundreds of times greater.“We’re connecting the dots on why firefighters have such high rates of cancer and what chemicals are causing them,” says Shaw, “We should not be putting these toxic substances into furniture and television sets and certainly not in home and baby products.”Various BFRs that would have been covered by the proposed rule have been banned by the European Union from consumer electronics and other electrical equipment. A United Nations body, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, has voted for global bans on three of them.“These have been identified as priority chemicals all over the world, and the Maine DEP would not have been going out on a limb at all in identifying this class of toxic and harmful chemicals,” says Matt Prindiville, the Rockland-based associate director of the Product Policy Institute, a policy and advocacy organization that seeks to reduce the environmental effects of consumer products. “But instead they decided to cave in to the chemical industry.”• THE PERSONNEL SHIFT: Primary staffer is reassignedThe author of the BFR brief, Andrea Lani, fared little better.The LePage administration took early action against Lani, who was the primary staffer responsible for implementing the Kid Safe Products Act.She was reassigned to handle public records requests and replaced with a less-qualified employee in 2011, after she testified as a private citizen in favor of the ban on BPA. (Her story is told in more detail on Day 1 of the series.)Shortly after reassigning Lani, Aho also eliminated the half-time data management position for the program, even though it cost taxpayers nothing, as it was entirely funded by fees paid by chemical manufacturers, according to Belliveau, who criticized these decisions in a June 2011 letter to Aho.Aho also placed the program under the direct supervision of a political appointee, Ron Dyer, who was then the director of the DEP’s remediation and waste management bureau.Aho declined to comment, and previously wrote Belliveau that she would not discuss her personnel decisions.Other chemicals on the “high concern” list include familiar toxins such as formaldehyde, benzene and cadmium, and lesser-known substances such as the gasoline additive MTBE and four members of the paraben family, which are used as preservatives by the drug and cosmetics industries. It also includes three brominated fire retardants out of the more than 100 that would have been identified under the aborted submission created under the Baldacci administration.Like phthalates, parabens are endocrine disruptors found in a wide range of products, including baby shampoos, makeup and lotions, but they disrupt female rather than male hormones.“We know it binds to the estrogen receptors and that there are multiple animal studies documenting effects, but the epidemiology isn’t there yet to justify an outright ban,” says Deborah Rice, the toxicologist who compiled the 49-chemical list at the Maine CDC. “But the public has a right to know if it’s in stuff, that if they buy a cream for their baby, they can tell if it has parabens in it or not.”“These are not chemicals that were drawn out of a hat; they have been identified after exhaustive examination by toxicologists and physicians and the Endocrine Society and on and on,” says Graham, the former CDC director, of the 49 chemicals on the list. “It seems like common sense to me to at least get some protections from them for the next generation of Maine people.”Sidebar: HERE'S WHAT WE FOUNDA Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram investigation has found Patricia Aho, a former industrial and corporate lobbyist who became commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2011, has scuttled programs and fought against laws that were opposed by many of her former clients in the chemical, drug, oil, and real estate development industries. Under Aho, the DEP has:• Frozen the Kid Safe Products Act – a 2008 law to protect fetuses, babies and children from potentially damaging chemicals – by blocking efforts to bring more chemicals under the law’s jurisdiction, chemicals produced by Aho’s former lobbying clients.• Reduced enforcement actions by 49 percent against large developers and landowners. Aho had unsuccessfully fought to weaken many of the laws at issue as the longtime lobbyist of the Maine Real Estate and Development Association.• Fought to roll back recycling programs that are strongly opposed by former clients of Aho and a still-active lobbyist, Ann Robinson, the governor’s regulatory reform adviser.• Oversaw a purge of information from the DEP’s website and a clampdown on its personnel, restricting their ability to communicate relevant information to lawmakers, the public, policy staff and one another. `, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Colin Woodard, PPH staff writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/news" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald news story</a> AUGUSTA - Every change of administration brings a change in priorities, and in early 2011 staffers within the Department of Environmental Protection fully expected Gov. Paul LePage to direct them to reduce regulatory burdens on business. What actually happened shocked nearly everyone, including workers who had seen partisan transitions dating back to the Longley, Brennan and McKernan administrations of the 1970s and 1980s.The Telegram interviewed nearly two dozen current and former DEP employees with wide-ranging backgrounds, seniority and responsibilities. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation against themselves, their colleagues or their current employers.The interviews paint a picture of a department under siege, with staff experts under verbal orders to no longer initiate communications with the outside world or to provide technical information even to legislators. Some employees alleged that certain staffers have been targeted for elimination and, as one current employee put it, "are hounded and bullied out of office.""There was an immediate gag order put on staff and on staff's ability to freely interact with the public and talk about environmental concerns or to make requirements of people," says James Cassida, who was director of the DEP's Division of Land Resource Regulation when he left the department in August 2011. He says the policy was unprecedented."No staff other than a select few were allowed to speak to the Legislature in any shape or form, formal or informal," Cassida added, noting legislators typically request DEP experts to provide technical information on various issues."I was still allowed, but I was closely watched in terms of what I said. There were a couple of times where I was in front of a legislative committee and a legislator would ask me a question that I had a hard time answering in a way that fit into the parameters that I was allowed. And that was something I'd never experienced.""Historically, we'd provide both sides of a given regulatory issue to legislators, and they would make policy as they saw fit," says a current DEP staffer. "But the current commissioner is a lobbyist, and that approach is to tell only one side of the story: the client's side of the story."Most state employees interviewed said that once corporate lobbyist Patricia Aho became acting commissioner in June 2011, power was quickly and intensely concentrated in her hands and those of two other political appointees -- policy director Heather Parent and the then-communications director, Samantha DePoy-Warren -- and that decisions on complex technical matters are often made in secret and without input from in-house experts."Those three folks make all the decisions," one current staffer said. "A lot of draft regulations go up there and nothing happens. They just don't want anything going forward."(DePoy-Warren left the department last month and is now communications director at the Education Department.)"There's a total disregard for the expertise and experience of highly qualified staff," says Malcolm Burson, who resigned as the department's deputy policy director in November 2011 after Aho directed him to stop overseeing the creation of the state's climate adaptation strategy. "It all seems to be about maintaining total control."• THE FEAR OF REPRISAL: 'IT'S BAD FOR PUBLIC POLICY, AND ... WELL-BEING.'Aho disagrees with the notion that staff were being shut out of decisions, although she acknowledged that policy formulation was now being conducted by dedicated policy staff. Technical experts "are still involved," she said in a February interview. "They are still very much part of the whole process. The only difference is that the people who format the reports are different.""We are definitely involving the technical staff in the development of the substance," added Melanie Loyzim, director of the DEP's Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management. "The policy people have the knowledge of how to put together the reports."Many staffers who were interviewed said they believed certain individuals had been targeted for elimination, with their every move watched and their emails and phone records placed under regular surveillance, and subject to intimidating interactions with LePage's political appointees. Several said such targeted employees had been yelled at in front of co-workers by a senior manager, and subject to harassment and bullying.The Maine Sunday Telegram sought the department's response to these allegations, but Aho and the department spokeswoman refused to be interviewed."I had never seen or experienced the level of aggression against personnel that I experienced myself and others experienced," says Kevin Nelson, a 31-year veteran of the department who resigned from his position in the commissioner's office in January 2012. He says that after LePage took office, his new supervisor immediately declared all of his work -- which had previously been acceptable -- to be unsatisfactory. He was threatened with demotion and relocation. "I just felt the administration didn't want me around.""It's like the Khmer Rouge," said another current staffer. "Anyone with any knowledge is eliminated or worked to death."Senate President Justin Alfond, D-Portland, said Wednesday that numerous DEP employees had reached out to him relating similar information. "They said staff is being muzzled, that they aren't allowed to speak at public meetings, that there's outright harassment of longtime employees. It's made the DEP an outright hostile work environment," he said. "For people to be afraid of any sort of retaliation for doing their work and having it be based on science and best practices, that's a very difficult and dangerous situation for employees. It's bad for public policy, and it's bad for their well-being."• THE NOTEWORTHY EXODUS: 'THAT KNOWLEDGE BASE ... THAT'S GONE.'One result of the atmosphere has been a sizable exodus of some of the department's most experienced staff members. A database of personnel changes compiled by concerned staffers shows at least 85 of the department's approximately 400 staffers have left since LePage took office, taking with them more than 1,200 years of combined experience.While some of the department's graying work force may have retired anyway, many are said to have left under duress. Current and former staff members say that while there is always turnover from year to year and administration to administration, this time the losses are more severe, nearly double the rate under the Baldacci administration, according to the concerned staffers' data."That knowledge base that's been lost over the past couple of years -- a huge institutional knowledge of what DEP has done in the past and what's important to Maine from a natural resource perspective -- that's gone and we're never going to get that back," says Cassida. "It's inevitable that some of that knowledge was going to leave because they were reaching retirement, but for many other individuals they weren't even close to retirement."Aho said in February that the departures were largely based on retirement incentives and an aging work force. "I know there will always be questions about low staff morale; I don't know how to respond to that," she said. "I feel staff are doing a great job with the work they do and that we're continuing to make sure that they understand the importance of that work here in the state of Maine."• THE ABRIDGED SITE: PUBLIC DATA HAS BEEN 'DRAMATICALLY REDUCED'Accumulated knowledge has also disappeared from the department's website, following a December 2011 redesign spearheaded by DePoy-Warren.The website, Aho later boasted to legislators, once had more than 5,000 Web pages but was "reduced by 80 percent for better search results and usability." Tens of thousands of pages of reports and technical information vanished from the Web overnight, including the state's official climate change report, a database of boat pump-out facilities used by mariners and detailed water quality data used by federal and academic researchers."The DEP staff used to use the website to refer the business community to technical documents -- it was like a reference library," said Pete Didisheim of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. "The new site has created dead ends, eliminated from the public record many items that were there, and made life much more difficult for DEP staff," who have to manually locate many documents that were once available at a mouse click."I don't know if it's intentional, but it's dramatically reduced the amount of public information available to business and the public," Didisheim added.Aho says the goal was to remove large amounts of material to allow what remained to be more easily found through the website's search bar. "We removed information that had not been accessed for some time," Aho said in a late February interview with the Telegram, adding that she wanted the most sought-after documents to be easy to find. "We received thank-yous from people for making our website more usable and easy to navigate.""When you have a lot of stuff on your desk, it can be hard to find things," added DePoy-Warren. "Anything that was getting less than 40 hits a month was pulled from the site.""I don't think that decreasing the number of pages that people are visiting decreases transparency," she added.`, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Colin Woodard</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/news" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald news story</a> Enforcement actions against commercial-scale developers, landowners, and builders have declined dramatically under Gov. Paul LePage.Statistics acquired from the Department of Environmental Protection show that its Land Division -- which issues building and development permits -- issued 49 percent fewer violations in the first two years of the LePage administration than it had in the final two years of Gov. John Baldacci's administration.The division issued 74 notices of violation in 2009 and 71 in 2010. Under LePage the number fell to 42 in 2011 and just 29 in 2012. They are typically issued when property owners, builders or developers violate state laws by cutting down lakeside trees, dumping fill in ponds and wetlands, damaging streams with heavy equipment or building structures without permits.The number of consent agreements negotiated by the department -- the legally enforceable method by which significant violations are most often resolved -- have also fallen by nearly half. In the last two years of the Baldacci administration, 2009 and 2010, the land division recorded 26 and 23 agreements, respectively. Under LePage, the figures fell to 13 in 2011 and 14 last year.The administration says the decline is due to improved compliance, but critics charge that the administration has stopped vigorously enforcing key laws affecting large developers and real estate interests while reducing enforcement of existing projects."The governor has put the fox in charge of the henhouse, and they've had an aggressive agenda to really emasculate the DEP," says attorney Steve Hinchman, who has been involved in several suits against the department alleging a failure to enforce laws regulating present and proposed developments. "They're rubber-stamping developments and they're just not doing enforcement."DEP Commissioner Patricia Aho said that the downturn in the economy had reduced the amount of building and development activity over this period, resulting in a commensurate decline in enforcement. "We have not changed our direction of enforcement at all, but it begs the question of the size and complexity and amount of applications we are getting through the door," said Aho, who was the longtime lobbyist for the Maine Real Estate and Development Association, or MEREDA."Have you looked at how many applications we've had in? We're not getting a lot of Site Location and Development Act permits -- the large ones -- through the door, it's more permits by rules," a category for small projects, Aho asserted.But a review of the department's own statistics on permitting applications does not support this explanation.The number of Site Location Law permit applications -- those generally dealing with large developments -- has barely changed; there were 257 in 2009, 243 in 2010, 246 in 2011, and 235 in 2012. There was a similar trend in the number of applications received under the Natural Resources Protection Act: 507 in 2009, 586 in 2010, 532 in 2011, and 515 in 2012. Applications for smaller projects (under "permit by rule") saw a decline of just 10 percent between 2009-10 and 2011-12.A department spokeswoman, Samantha DePoy-Warren, later said the decline was rather due to a contractor certification program "that teaches erosion and sediment control best practices" and has resulted "in less violations because contractors are better educated" and more aware of both the "environmental and economic value of compliance."Aho declined subsequent interview requests.The governor's communications director, Peter Steele, echoed both explanations when asked about it recently. "Compliance is up, so enforcement is down," he said. "Other reasons are that the land division work has included fewer large-scale permits and more permits by rules; a sluggish economy means fewer permits, and DEP is focusing more of its work toward compliance, rather than enforcement.""The Governor is proud of DEP's strong enforcement and has worked hard to assure continued enforcement of all Maine's natural resource and environmental laws," Steele added.Aho has been commissioner for most of the period in question, and deputy commissioner before that. LePage's first DEP commissioner, Darryl Brown, had been a development consultant and was forced to step down in April 2011 after the Attorney General's Office determined his past work created conflicts of interest that disqualified him from holding the office. Aho became acting commissioner in June 2011, and permanent commissioner in October.Teco Brown, who was appointed by Darryl Brown and headed the Land and Water Bureau for the first half of 2011, also didn't have an explanation for the change in enforcement, which appears to have started while he was managing the bureau. But he said there was considerable pressure on the land division from regulated business interests."The pressures for change in the land side of things were the greatest," he said. "During the campaign for governor, there was quite a bit of verbalization about the fact the land bureau takes too long to issue permits and that just engendered a great amount of -- I guess you might call it hatred of the land bureau."Teco Brown said when he joined the department in early 2011, he and Darryl Brown shared a belief in improving efficiencies in permitting, up "to that fine edge where we were improving but not compromising." Brown, he said, was no radical. "He's a soil scientist and an environmentalist, and was not one to take the permitting process and throw it down the drain. He wanted to make it right.""I did feel a change when Darryl left and Aho came in," he added, "but I didn't have time to figure out where that change was going."Whatever the cause, the reduction in enforcement is likely to have pleased Aho's former lobbying client.She represented the Maine Real Estate & Development Association from 2007 to early 2011, opposing the tightening of laws and regulations on site location, big box stores, the cutting of shoreland trees, lead paint remediation and construction near vernal pools. (The group represents commercial-scale real estate developers, owners and construction and building firms.) After the LePage administration took office, MEREDA successfully championed the loosening of many of these same measures, especially those related to site location and vernal pools.LePage has sought to rein in a number of development-related laws and regulations. Preti Flaherty lobbying chief Ann Robinson -- who was co-chairwoman of LePage's transition team and a regulatory reform adviser thereafter -- in early 2011 compiled a color-coded regulatory reform binder for LePage's staff intended as an easy reference tool and checklist.The binder -- viewed through a public records request -- includes directives for the governor to issue compelling the DEP to weaken a number of development-related enforcement activities. DEP staff members were to be instructed to "discontinue expansions of enforcement" on rivers, streams and brooks, "investigate ways to reduce compensation and mitigation fees related to project development impacts," review culvert installation regulations to ensure they "are reasonable." Staff were also to abandon proposed rules on culverts, and "scenic impact" and "community character" standards.It's not clear how many of these actions were undertaken or if some of them may have contributed to the decline in enforcement numbers, and department spokeswoman DePoy-Warren declined to comment.Several large developers declined to comment on if and how enforcement had changed at the DEP. But an official at MEREDA said the way DEP handled enforcement had changed for the better from its point of view. "Anecdotally from the enforcement front there has been a little more flexibility," said attorney Gary Vogel, chairman of MEREDA's legislative committee. "At the DEP there really has been some significant changes just in the attitudes of the personnel and the way they deal with the development community."Vogel ascribed some of the change in attitude to the fact that the economy has been poor for several years. "I've found that when we get to the peak of the business cycle with a lot of development going on, that's when you start to see a lot of pushback ... and at the other end of the business cycle, there's a lot less of that because people understand how important development is when there's less to go around."Hinchman, by contrast, thinks part of the answer lies in personnel changes. The department has seen an exodus of experienced staff under LePage. (Read the sidebar, Page A8.)"They've chased out all the people who used to ask the hard questions when a project came in the door," Hinchman asserts. "The ones who turned a blind eye, they're the ones who got promoted." `, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Matt Byrne, PPH staff writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/news" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald news story</a> SOUTH PORTLAND — A citizens group opposed to the prospect of so-called tar-sands oil being pumped through South Portland has collected 3,779 signatures to place an ordinance on the ballot that would ban oil importation within city limits. The total is nearly four times the 950 signatures needed to bring the question before the city and the voters on the November ballot. The question would ask whether the city should enact a zoning change to restrict new development of petroleum-related industry on the waterfront.The city’s long-term plan calls for redevelopment of the largely industrialized waterfront, not further expansion of its current use, according to Robert Sellin, one of the organizers of the initiative.Currently, there is no proposal on the table to reverse the flow of the Portland-Montreal pipeline, which has shuttled crude oil to Canada for processing since the middle of the 20th century.Although a previous proposal to use the underground pipe to move tar-sands oil out of Alberta was abandoned, it has sparked enough interest and objection to spur the pre-emptive campaign.Proponents of the ordinance said that to ship tar sands from the South Portland waterfront, new equipment to handle and process the crude would have to be installed, including two smokestacks that would emit the gaseous and particulate byproducts of handling the tar-sands oil, preparing it to be loaded into tankers.The proposed ordinance would strictly define the unloading of crude for shipping north as the only permitted use in the waterfront zone. Supporters say the approach is backed up by case law and would stand up in court if oil companies challenge it.The Portland Pipeline Corp., which owns the pipeline, has said the ballot initiative unfairly targets a company that has consistently provided jobs and tax income for the city. `, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle">Group urging President Obama to increase regulations</h2> <h3 class="author"></h3> <a href="http://www.wmtw.com" target="_blank">WMTW news story</a> PORTLAND, Maine —During the summer season, Commercial Street is jammed with people who are buying Maine’s signature food – lobster.Some say carbon emissions could chase the lobsters away, but one lobsterman said there are bigger things to worry about with the driving force in the state’s seafood industry.“We love seafood and Vermont isn’t the best place to get that, so I’m stocking up the car and driving home,” Hannah Allen said.Representatives from Maine’s conservation, lobster, restaurant and tourism industries gathered Tuesday in Portland to call attention to the effects that global warming could have on Maine lobster.“In a way, it’s sort of a canary in the coal mine with respect to the effects of the changing climate,” said Rick Wahle of the University of Maine.The state is already seeing the effects of climate change in the Gulf of Maine and there is a push for public support of new environmental changes recently proposed by President Barack Obama. The president is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to work with states and industries to put new carbon pollution standards in place for power plants.“If we continue to see increasing temperatures, lobsters are more likely to stay out in deeper water or migrate east,” said John Ready of the Ready Seafood Company.Bill Coppersmith, who has been a lobsterman for 36 years, said he sees fuel prices as a bigger factor in driving the industry, and he’s not worried about global warming affecting his business.“I mean, the only thing that I’m worried about is these environmentalists turn around and come up with these cockamamie schemes and it drives the price of fossil fuel up and then people don’t come to Maine to visit them or it costs a lot of money to truck them out of here and then the price goes down on them.”The president’s initiative focuses on the carbon produced by power plants, not vehicle emissions.<a href="http://www.wmtw.com/news/maine/carbon-emissions-hurting-lobster-industry/-/8792012/20802074/-/hqevt8z/-/index.html">Watch full news video here.</a> `, assigning current date

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`Shut Up and Take Your Arsenic` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle">Bald Mountain mining: take your sulfuric acid, too</h2> <h3 class="author">by Lance Tapley</h3> <a href="http://portland.thephoenix.com" target="_blank">Portland Phoenix news story</a> Like so many stories these days, this is a tale of corporate power.At the request of Maine’s largest landowner, J.D. Irving — of the Irving-family forestry, oil, shipbuilding, railroad, and news-media corporate empire of New Brunswick — the Republican-controlled Maine Legislature in 2012 rushed through a law requiring the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to write new, less-stringent mining rules for the whole state.Among other specific commands, the Legislature told the DEP to relax the regulations governing a mine’s water pollution (see sidebar, “A Little Language, A Big Difference”). Irving is interested in open-pit mining at Aroostook County’s Bald Mountain, part of its 1.2-million-acre Maine holdings.The idea of mining Bald Mountain is not new. It has been controversial for decades. In the middle of the beautiful North Woods, 12 miles southwest of the town of Portage, this small mountain (1465 feet in elevation) lies among the most-untouched lakes and streams in the state, the habitat of the increasingly rare native brook trout and the humans who fish for them.Bald Mountain is fundamentally controversial because much of the history of open-pit mines is of damaging the environment around them. Not surprisingly, the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), Trout Unlimited, Maine Audubon, and other environmental groups have been opposed to relaxing the rules to benefit mining development at the expense of water quality.The Bald Mountain saga began in 1977 when John S. Cummings, a Maine geologist, discovered an ore deposit at the mountain’s base. It contains copper and zinc and lesser amounts of gold and silver.Cummings, now 83 and retired to Texas, is proud of his discovery — “the only major metal deposit ever located in New England,” he says. “There’s nothing even close.” In an interview, he expresses disappointment that he hasn’t gotten what he feels is proper credit for it.Raising the alarm Cummings also feels he’s been ignored in another way. In his retirement he is trying to raise the alarm about a particular pollutant contained within the mountain: arsenic — the element fabled in history and literature as probably the world’s most notorious poison.Bald Mountain’s volcanic bedrock has very high arsenic content — “pervasive throughout the deposit,” Cummings says. In his tests at the site, he found arsenic levels in the rock up to 29,000 parts per million, mind-bogglingly high. Solids, of course, are not the same as liquids, but that’s 2.9 million times the level the federal Environmental Protection Agency considers safe for drinking water (10 parts per billion).Developing an open-pit mine, Cummings fears, could produce big environmental problems. In one of his many writings about the mountain, he describes it as an enormous, naturally occurring “toxic dump.”In mining the mountain, the arsenic would be pervasive in the “tailings,” the massive residue left after the small amount of valuable ore is separated from the rock that contains it in the complicated, on-site milling and chemical process employed once the rock is dug out.Tailings are often stored as a mixture of rock particles and water in a man-made pond supposedly sealed off from the groundwater. But at many mines in this country and around the world tailings have been a source of water pollution.In addition to the possibility of arsenic getting into the groundwater, the rocks in the ore’s geologic formation are largely sulfides — they have a lot of the element sulfur in them. When sulfide rock interacts with air and water, it produces sulfuric acid — battery acid. That’s another reason the tailings have to be kept from the rest of the environment.If the acidic water is uncontained, it not only can kill fish and other life directly: When it reacts with rock it causes dangerous chemicals — like arsenic and toxic metals — to leach out of the rock and into the water.The same process could happen with the “waste rock” that doesn’t go to the mine’s mill. It, too, would produce acid.“You just dig this stuff up and throw it on the ground,” but water and air “can migrate through the waste-rock piles easily,” says David Chambers, president of the Montana-based Center for Science in Public Participation and a mining expert whom the NRCM brought to Maine in April to talk to the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee.Acid drainage from a sulfide mine can go on for hundreds and thousands of years. There are mines in the United States that have produced acid-making waste that will have to be controlled, for all intents and purposes, forever — “perpetual-storage issues,” Chambers calls these mines.Of course, it’s impossible to guarantee protection forever.Hardly anti-mining Despite his criticism of an open-pit mine for Bald Mountain, Cummings is far from opposed to mining. He spent much of his career working for mining companies. He agrees with the critics of the current DEP mining rules that they too-severely restrict mining for metal — a “de facto ban,” he has written.He believes Bald Mountain could be mined in either of two ways that would minimize environmental risks. One way is underground, in shafts. If the mining is done underground, the rock can be gone after precisely, and the mine would produce far less waste because “you’re dealing with a fraction of the materials” compared to what is produced if you just dig a gigantic hole in the ground to get at the ore.But underground mining is more expensive than open-pit mining because of the equipment, skills, and care involved. It’s the rifle versus the shotgun approach, craftsmanship versus mass production, many miners employed versus a few.Cummings also thinks the “gossan,” the 30-to-70-foot-deep near-surface top layer of weathered bedrock, could be mined for gold and some silver. But that would be a small and less financially remunerative operation — comparable, he says, to digging out a gravel pit.In a letter Cummings wrote earlier this year to Democratic Representative Jeff McCabe, the House assistant majority leader, he estimated that 94 percent of the high-sulfide deposit at Bald Mountain would end up as tailings — more than 30 million tons.They would be full of arsenic. Cummings added: “No one has informed the public or the Legislature that the arsenic content” is so high.McCabe was sponsoring a bill in the legislative session that ended in June that would have largely retightened the mining rules. It was supported by the environmentalist community. With the Democrats now controlling the Legislature, McCabe convinced a majority of his fellow House members to vote for it.But he couldn’t get the bill through the Senate, where Democrat Troy Jackson, the assistant majority leader from Aroostook County’s village of Allagash, killed it with the help of a few other Democrats and almost-unanimous Republicans. Jackson’s argument was economic. Irving promised jobs to his poor part of the state.Bad history Nick Bennett, staff scientist for the NRCM, the state’s leading environmental organization, says he hasn’t seen evidence of a mine in North America that hasn’t caused water-quality problems.An NRCM white paper describes how the last two mines open in the state — the Callahan mine in Brooksville and the Kerramerican mine in Blue Hill, which each operated for a few years during the 1960s and 1970s — both left environmental messes when they stopped production.Federal and state taxpayers are still paying for the Callahan site cleanup 40 years after it shut down. On the federal “Superfund” list, it’s contaminated with PCBs, lead, arsenic, and other poisons. The estimates of how much the cleanup will cost run into the tens of millions of dollars.Doubts about mining Bald Mountain are also shared by Lindsay Newland Bowker, former environmental risk manager for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Bowker, who has retired to Stonington, has devoted herself aggressively to finding and reading the geologic and other studies related to Bald Mountain and has consulted with Cummings and other experts. Recently she plowed through four heavy boxes full of documents at the DEP’s basement in Augusta related to the previous interest in mining the mountain.At the time of his discovery, Cummings worked for Superior Mining. In the 1980s, Freeport Exploration, Chevron, and Boliden Resources investigated the mountain. In 1995, Black Hawk, a Canadian company, began looking at the gossan’s gold and silver.Irving has cited $25 million as how much was spent by these previous efforts to look at mining Bald Mountain. There were various reasons none of them led to a mine, but one reason was the expense of dealing with environmental protection.Bowker, like Cummings, has concluded open-pit mining wouldn’t protect the environment: “It presents a very high risk of irreversible damage to an entire water system.” She adds: “The only approach conceivable is shafts and tunnels,” but they might not be economically feasible.Irving responds Irving responded to Phoenix questions about the criticisms made of its Bald Mountain project in a lengthy email written by Mary Keith, its chief public-relations person.Her reply ignored questions about arsenic and acid. It was mostly a discourse on what an environmentally careful company Irving is. But she made a couple of revealing points.Jobs Although press reports have commonly used 700 as the number of jobs the mine would create, Keith used the phrase 700 “direct and indirect” jobs.“Indirect jobs” is an economist’s fuzzy term that could mean anything from someone who works for a company supplying equipment to the mine to a new employee at a sandwich shop serving some of the miners. It’s hard to measure.It turns out that a direct-jobs number was given in a Bangor Daily News story in 2012. The chief promoter of the bill to relax the mining rules, then-Eagle Lake Democratic Representative John Martin, was quoted as saying there would be 300 direct jobs.(Martin, the longtime, scandal-tinged Speaker of the House, happened to owe $250,000 to an Irving-family company at the time, according to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. He was defeated in the last election.)Martin referred to 300 jobs, but in the 1980s an economic-impact study of mining the whole mountain in an open-pit operation stated that only 200 employees would be needed. So the jobs number is, at best, uncertain.That’s not the only uncertainty.The big uncertainty Assuming Irving gets what it wants from the mining rules now being rewritten, how sure is it that Irving actually will mine Bald Mountain?In Keith’s email, she used many conditional phrases: “should the project proceed”; “should we move forward”; “there is no forecasted start date at this time”; the company will “determine the feasibility of mining gold, silver, and copper.”A reasonable assumption, then, would be that the Legislature weakened the mining laws covering all of Maine merely because J.D. Irving entertained the possibility of developing a single spot: Bald Mountain.That is a tribute to the power of a big corporation. It’s also a comment on the Legislature.A little language, a big difference Environmental groups have several problems with the weakening of the mining law that occurred in 2012. For one, the new law’s language has the possibility that a cleanup will be paid for depend to some extent on the financial strength of a mining company — rather than on a sum of money deposited in a trust fund separate from the company, as the current rules require.The chief problem, though, begins with the difference between the following two pieces of legal language.Current regulations: “A site shall not cause a discharge of pollutants into groundwaters of the State without a license or that violates the groundwater classification . . .”The 2012 change in the law: “. . . discharges to groundwater from activities permitted under this article may occur within a mining area, but such discharges may not result in contamination of groundwater beyond each mining area.”In other words, the simple prohibition of contamination of the groundwater will be changed in the new rules to allow contamination of the “mining area.” So what’s the “mining area”? Here’s the law on that:“‘Mining area’ means an area of land described in a permit application and approved by the department, including but not limited to land from which earth material is removed in connection with mining, the lands on which material from that mining is stored or deposited, the lands on which beneficiating or treatment facilities, including groundwater and surface water management treatment systems, are located or the lands on which water reservoirs used in a mining operation are located.” (“Beneficiating” means separating the valuable ore from the rest of the rock.)The NRCM’s Nick Bennett says: “It could allow contamination of groundwater over a potentially very large area. It’s a recipe for disaster.”Once contamination begins within the allowed area, how is it going to be prevented from spreading, since water under the ground is connected? “Once acid drainage starts, it’s virtually impossible to stop,” says David Chambers. “It’s going to move. This is especially true in mountainous areas.”What “mining area” means may be spelled out more when the regulations are finalized by the DEP later this year. “But statute trumps the rules,” Bennett notes.And he and other environmentalists are not feeling cheery about the DEP’s rewriting of the rules, given that the department works for pro-corporation Governor Paul LePage, a Republican; given that the DEP is led by former corporate lobbyist Patricia Aho; and given that the DEP hired North Jackson, of Michigan, a company with close ties to the mining industry, to consult on the regulations.The regulations, however, will have to be approved in 2014 first by the Board of Environmental Protection, an independent group of citizens, and then by the Legislature. So this story — even if it is about vast corporate power — is far from over. The Bald Mountain saga will continue.`, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle">A Maine couple is teaching others about sustainable living through an immersive apprenticeship program.</h2> <h3 class="author">By Kaitlin Schroeder, Staff Writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com" target="_blank">Portland Phoenix news story</a> TEMPLE - Ashley Hardy said ever since she learned to make a wooden spoon at a Koviashuvik Living School class, she's been eager to learn more about natural living.Over the past year, ever since her first class at the school, she's replaced her paper towels with cloth, learned to can food and built a composting toilet."Once you start, you crave more, and you realize this is what life is," she said.Chris and Ashirah Knapp, who live deep in backwoods Temple on a nearly self-sustaining homestead, have recently accepted Hardy, 24, as the latest apprentice at the school.After years of living off the land in backwoods Temple, the Knapps decided to teach the next generation of nature lovers to make use of their environment through an immersive apprenticeship program at their school.Four years and 20 apprentices later, the program has evolved to include a diverse curriculum, a formal application process with a two-day trial period, and a newly built hut to house the apprentices.Hardy lives with her husband, Andrew Hardy, who is an officer in the Wilton Police Department, in Farmington, where she works on a dairy farm next door. She said it wasn't until she started taking classes that she truly started to appreciate sustainable living off the surrounding land.On the second day of her apprenticeship, before climbing up onto the roof of a under-construction outhouse to attach shingles, Hardy said there is something meditative about working with the land."Even though you're working hard, you're able to feel peace and give thanks for the gifts you get from the earth," she said.The Knapps were trained to provide for themselves from the land around them by apprenticing in their late teenage years and into their early 20s with Ray Reitze, master Maine guide at Earthways School of Wilderness Living in Canaan.He said the apprenticeship program is not for training the next North Pond hermit or for promoting isolationism.The Knapps said that while they live in a cellphone dead zone with no electricity, they are not trying to escape other people or the modern world. Rather, they said they are trying adopt a self-sustaining life and make of use of the earth.Ashirah Knapp said they don't expect most people who come for a class or even as an apprentice to adopt a life on their far end of the self-sustaining spectrum."There are pieces of what we do that they might bring back and incorporate into their life," she said.Apprentices can learn any of a broad array of life skills, which, depending on the season, include how to make a stove from a bucket, build a composting toilet, grow a garden, preserve food and weave baskets.Apprentices don't get paid or pay a fee for the educational opportunity. They sustain themselves by helping out around the farm.Hardy is only at the school three days a week for her two-month training, while more typical apprentices live there full time.Hardy said the school is an inviting place to learn new skills. She said people come in unfamiliar with the lifestyle, but the Knapps are patient teachers.Hardy said one of her favorite aspects of the apprenticeship is learning to appreciate the environment as a gift from God."I feel for me that this is where He has put me and I feel closer to Him," she said.Chris Knapp said the apprenticeship program has gradually grown into a formal process.To get accepted into the program, prospective apprentices need to first visit Koviashuvik and work with the Knapps for two nights and three days. After that, they need to provide two written recommendations and write a short essay explaining why they would be a good fit at the school.Apprentices work on Koviashuvik projects six days a week, with an eight-week minimum stay.Apprentices live in a dwelling adapted from the traditional Cree earth lodge. The lodge is insulated with sod, has windows and a skylight, and a small stove for heating and cooking.During Hardy's fall apprenticeship, she said she'll be learning to harvest acorns and apples, preserve food, build things such the outhouse, and crafts.Hardy said she hopes to pass on the skills to the next generation of her family."I definitely want to be able to teach my kids some of these things. I think it's vital to get kids involved in this type of stuff," she said.`, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">North Cairn</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com" target="_blank">Maine Sunday Telegram news story</a> Working in Acadia National Park one recent morning, Sarah Nelson, a biological geochemist at the University of Maine, stood with her five assistants in boots and waders and jabbed at the sediment on the bottom of Hodgdon and Seal Cove ponds with long-handled nets.Their target was dragonfly larvae, and the samples they took to a lab on campus would be identified, analyzed and finally incinerated.In the ash they would measure concentrations of mercury, a toxic heavy metal that can wreak havoc on the environment and human health.For researchers like Nelson, the dragonfly is not just an elegant insect with a voracious appetite for mosquito larvae. It’s also a “sentinel” species, a stand-in for humans that provides clues to potentially harmful environmental conditions we otherwise might not notice.Fifty years have passed since Rachel Carson first coined the term, but as human impacts on the planet multiply, scientists say it’s still a critical concept for understanding changes in the environment.“Long-term ecological research (on sentinel species) is absolutely required,” said H. Bruce Rinker, director of scientific advancement at the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham. “In order for us to understand us, we need to look at other species.”The study of sentinel species goes back a long time, arguably to ancient times when the art of augury was practiced. By examining the entrails of certain animals, it was thought, the fate of emperors or the outcomes of battles could be predicted.The classic sentinel species – at least in America – harks back to the mines of the 19th century. The expression “canary in the coal mine” – once employed to describe the process of releasing a small yellow bird into mine shafts to gauge air quality and the safety of miners – has become a linguistic fixture to illustrate how the fate of one species may portend the circumstances faced by others.A miner who watched a canary flutter off and fall or head into a tunnel without returning knew not to enter the darkness himself. If the level of toxic gases – usually, carbon monoxide – could kill a bird, the theory held, they could hurt a man, too, or even kill.“When the canary can no longer breathe, (it’s) a harbinger of human death,” said Patrick Keenan, outreach director at the Gorham institute.Over time, as scientific investigation has evolved, the canary has been joined by many other species that are monitored for an increasing number and range of reasons, including to predict humans’ safety.Scientists from state agencies, academic institutions and research laboratories in Maine are studying tiny copepods, certain fish species and larger crustaceans in the ocean, freshwater fish and migratory birds in ponds, loons on inland lakes, moose and bears in the North Woods.Researchers say many of these studies start on a shoestring and run long-term, their modest funding bolstered by a robust commitment of time and energy from students and volunteer citizen scientists.The years of monitoring, data collection and scientific inquiry in Maine have begun to pay off in hard facts and sobering realities:• Mercury has spread almost everywhere, sparking international debate and multinational treaties dealing with the pollution.• Lead – once the poster poison of children in older buildings in inner cities – is still the leading cause of death in adult loons, claiming more than one-third of North American loon populations.• Plastic waste, which is virtually indestructible, has become a commonplace pollutant in oceans all over the planet.• Creatures that span the ecological chasms between very different ecosystems are in peril from human-induced climate change and its ripple effect on the water column and food web of the seas. Nelson, the UMaine professor studying dragonflies, doesn’t need a lot of high-tech equipment to do sentinel species work. The critical tools are waders, nets, plastic sample bags, hand lenses and field guides.Yet the findings and implications of her work are anything but simple.Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that poses a special threat to health, especially for children, nursing mothers and pregnant women.Dragonflies represent an intermediate step between other classes of animals, filling a gap in existing data and bridging other research on mercury contamination in birds, fish and water.Her dragonfly studies take the monitoring of mercury to new levels, looking at forests and wetlands, both here and in areas across the country. Involving researchers, educators and citizen scientists, her work has been extended beyond Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island to 25 national parks across the country.She hopes her work will yield valuable information about mercury in the food chain and in watersheds.“Mercury research is relatively new,” Nelson said. “But we’ve learned a lot already. We’re getting better at predicting mercury in the water.”Now, the focus needs to be adjusted slightly, to see clearly how the food web has been – and is being – affected by the toxin.Monitoring of sentinel species like the dragonfly is more complex now, because environmental, industrial and pollution factors have proliferated at an astonishing rate over the last half century, said Keenan, at the Gorham biological institute. And more intricate, complicated interactions are being uncovered all the time.“We’ve advanced in terms of our research and ecology,” he said. That progress and sophistication are likely to yield more sentinel studies, not fewer.As the number and complexity of sentinel studies grows, scientists are making efforts to integrate the resulting data into meaningful patterns.One major undertaking is focused on bringing together many research efforts by creating a network to collect data and assess environmental change on a continental scale.First approved for National Science Foundation funding in 2006, the National Ecological Observatory Network was granted $434 million to establish a network of 20 permanent monitoring stations to collect climate, environmental and biological data on a continuing basis. The network also includes 40 temporary land sites and 46 aquatic locations, said Lily Whiteman, senior public affairs officer for NSF.A new observatory is being built as part of the network, and it will sample sentinel terrestrial and aquatic species at 106 locations across the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.The network’s projects will sample sentinel organisms such as microorganisms, mosquitoes, ground beetles, deer mice, fish, birds, plants, and aquatic invertebrates in an attempt to understand and forecast the impacts of climate change, land-use transitions and even invasive species, Whiteman said.Scientists will be watching how these animals fare in and affect various ecosystems across wide geographic territories, enabling them to make comparisons from one part of the continent to another. “It’s a very 21st century approach to ecology,” said Andrew Pershing, research scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland and a professor in the School of Marine Science at the University of Maine in Orono. Without it, researchers are left to wring out every last bit of information they can find in a relatively limited ecosystem.Being able to collate and interpret information that spans a continent and its oceans would represent a big step in a more comprehensive understanding of complex issues such as climate change, ocean acidification and various kinds of pollution.But at a certain scale, the attempt to observe, collect and monitor information becomes “too big to grasp,” said Erika Latty, associate professor of botany at Unity College. Limiting the scope of the research to a sentinel species can actually enlarge understanding.Consequently, researchers are paying attention to what befalls many creatures at the bottom – as well as nearer the top – of the food chain for signs of widespread change or ripple effects that might ultimately pose potential risks – or means of rescue – for humans.One such bottom-of-the-food-chain creature is the marine copepod, Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny crustacean. It’s considered a sentinel species in the Gulf of Maine, because so many other fish and sea animals feed on it.It is a conduit from single-celled algae to larger fish and marine mammals, said Pershing, at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. It is an essential bridge in the Gulf of Maine’s productivity, providing more than three-quarters of the diet of forage fish and sustaining much of the food web in the open waters off Maine.It thus plays a critical role in the health of herring, sand lance, mackerel and the North Atlantic right whale.Jeff Runge, biological oceanographer of the University of Maine and Gulf of Maine Research Institute, has investigated the copepod’s abundance and distribution patterns to learn more about what makes the species so successful here. Marine researchers, along with fishermen, have observed that numbers of the crustacean vary significantly in inshore versus offshore waters, and from year to year, but scientists do not yet fully understand why. But the vast amount of data that have been collected, going back to the 1960s, Pershing said, may disclose patterns or causes that researchers otherwise might not be able to discern.“We’re still figuring out how to use that information,” said Pershing. But early indications link water temperatures, salinity and productivity in these populations.Paralleling this research in the Gulf of Maine, French scientists, using satellite data and climate-ocean models, predict that the warming of surface waters will shift the copepod north of the Gulf of Maine by 2050. No one yet knows whether the species will disappear from the area, as these models predict, or whether they will persist, sustained by cold water currents from the north.But one thing is certain: Any changes in this creature’s numbers, distribution or health in the ecosystem could impact the entire food web that depends on it.“Things are seldom changing in a linear manner,” said William “Barney” Balch, a biological oceanographer and senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay. Balch studies phytoplankton, microscopic photosynthetic organisms that live just below the surface of both salt- and fresh water. In his work, “sentinel species are those that indicate a threshold change.”Phytoplankton blooms, for example, have raised concern about what effect climate change is having on the traditionally colder waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic.“When we see blooms of things, usually those are indicating a change in the environment or a pathogen,” Balch said. “And the frequency of blooming has gone up lately.”As the number and kinds of studied species increases and broaden, “these little individual species begin to reverberate,” said Rinker, the Gorham institute director. Layer upon layer of data produces a more comprehensive picture of how the environment is faring under human pressure, and how humans may be affected tomorrow by what we’re doing today, he said.The warnings coming from the animals seem clear enough, said Rinker. “All over the world we’ve been warning people: Something dark is coming our way.” Sensing that, he said, makes continued research on individual species ever more critical.`, assigning current date

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Deirdra Flemming, PPH staff writer</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald news story</a> The land-holding organization managing Roxanne Quimby’s land beside Baxter State Park is opening 40,000 acres to hunting this week, marking a stark change in the policy that upset hunters and guides the past decade.Sportsmen overwhelmingly voiced gratitude at the change in policy over access to the land owned by Elliotsville Plantation Inc. However, the strong opposition to a federally run national park, which is Quimby’s dream, remains in northern Maine.Lucas St. Clair, Quimby’s son and the president of the plantation board, said in a press release the intention is to “make good on our commitments to expand public access and ensure that these recreational activities are allowed from now on.”However, St. Clair went further in an interview, saying the new access policy is a “dress rehearsal” for the kind of “National Park Service unit” the plantation actually is putting together in northern Maine, where hunting and motorized recreation would be allowed.“The goal is to draft legislation to make sure everything that is put into place stays in place, and that it is absolutely clear what’s allowed. The idea is to allow hunting and snowmobiling. And I know it can happen because I’ve seen (national parks) where it does,” St. Clair said.However, guides and sportsmen who expressed gratitude also had deep reservations about the future.The tradition in northern Maine, where large forest companies own vast tracks of timberland, is to leave land open for recreation, and allow fishermen, hunters, boaters and hikers access to the northern forestland.When Quimby started acquiring land there and formed the landholding company in 2002, “No Hunting” signs went up.“It touched a nerve,” said Patten ATV club president Garth Glidden.However, starting this week within Elliotsville Plantation, 40,000 acres will offer improved access. On the land, now called “Katahdin Woods and Waters,” logging roads will be upgraded and grouse and deer habitat will be improved to make “world-class hunting,” St. Clair said.The 40,000 acres sits east of the East Branch of the Penobscot River near Shin Pond, Patten, Staceyville and on lands southwest of Baxter State Park.Glidden said the new policy will have a major impact, as more ATV riders along the land surrounding Baxter State Park travel between small, rural towns there.“It will bring a lot of recreation into the communities, to Patten and Shin Pond and Sherman Station. Before this, we had no way to get to Shin Pond. I think it helps out the community quite a bit,” Glidden said.However, sportsmen also see the change in policy as one with an uncertain future because of the looming prospect of a national park.Maine Professional Guides Association director Don Kleiner appreciated the new open-door policy, but voiced uncertainty at future policies.“It seems like someone is listening,” Kleiner said. “They essentially locked hunting out of their land and it had an impact on a number of businesses. Since Lucas has taken over, to his credit, he’s done a good job reaching out to people.“But the whole federal presence still makes us all nervous. Part of the perception is that the feds are an insatiable beast looking to expand their holding and influence, and further restrict activities. The devil is in the detail.”Hunting guide Joe Christianson, who lost his bear bait sites when Quimby acquired the plantation land, feels that uncertainty.At Matagamon Wilderness Camps near Patten, Christianson caters to about 50 bear hunters and as many deer hunters in the fall. He also guides for fishing in the spring and serves summer tourists, but hunters make up 60 percent of his annual business, he said.The fear of a national park that would close land to hunting is real for him.“It’s a really good thing they opened it. I can’t imagine anyone is saying anything negative,” Christianson said. “It is hard telling if they do get the national park what’s going to happen. Then it will be out of their hands. Then everything is subject to change.”Bob Meyers, executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association, said a national park with a no-hunting and no-snowmobile policy, put simply, would change the face of the culture in northern Maine.He said for snowmobilers, who were written into the plantation management plan last winter, that remains a big concern.“Every time land that was previously closed is open to people of Maine (the landowner) should be commended. It’s the Maine tradition,” Meyers said. “But I don’t see it as a game-changer.”However, plantation spokesman David Farmer said a national park plan, at the moment, looks at turning roughly 70,000 to 75,000 acres into a traditional national park, where hunting and snowmobiling and ATVs would be prohibited; and another half of some 150,000 acres going to a “national recreation area,” where such uses would be allowed.St. Clair said the park would be created with legislation in Congress, and he will make certain the legislation maintains a level of access for all outdoor users for years to come.St. Clair said the new land access policy at the “Katahdin Woods and Waters” property is a real example of what’s ahead.“I realize the reservations around the federal government, but Maine has little experience with publicly owned land. Under 5 percent of the land in Maine is publicly owned. And we only have three National Park Service units and they’re unusual,” St. Clair said.Those three National Park Service units — Acadia National Park, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, and the Appalachian Trail — offer limited insights into the variety of national parks that exist, because they are unusual in their size or dimensions, Lucas said.Both the Allagash and the Appalachian Trail are narrow travel corridors, and Acadia is small compared to other national parks that also see as many as 2.5 million visitors annually.St. Clair said there also are 70 national park units out of a total of 401 across the country where hunting and snowmobiling are allowed, and Maine could have another unit where such activities were allowed if the enabling legislation specified it.For now, St. Clair said he is focused on listening to more people and groups in northern Maine as the plantation land is used and enjoyed by more outdoors people.“I don’t feel (right now) like having national support is as important as having vocal support in the Katahdin region. By opening up access the plan is to make this as appealing to as many people there as possible,” St. Clair said.<a href="/issue_nationalpark.asp">View maps, photographs, and more</a>. `, assigning current date

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`Quimby's Foundation Opens Maine Land to Hunters` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">David Sharp, Associated Press writer</h3> <a href="http://www.sfgate.com" target="_blank">Associated Press news story</a> PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A foundation created by philanthropist <a href="/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fscience&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Roxanne+Quimby%22">Roxanne Quimby</a> that once banned snowmobiles and hunting is now allowing both on large parcels of land as it seeks to build support for her proposal for a national park.Starting this week, Quimby's foundation is removing "No Hunting" signs from about 40,000 acres east of the Penobscot River's East Branch and on another parcel of land between Greenville and Brownville Junction. It's part of an effort to increase recreational activities on a total of 100,000 acres of the privately held land.Her son, an avid hunter, hiker and fisherman, is now leading Quimby's effort, and he said he's listening to local residents who want to ensure that they can still use her land for recreation."With today's announcement, we are making good on our commitments to expand public access and ensure that these recreational activities are allowed from now on," <a href="/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fscience&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Lucas+St.+Clair%22">Lucas St. Clair</a> said Monday.The announcement by <a href="/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fscience&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Elliotsville+Plantation%22">Elliotsville Plantation</a> Inc. marked a dramatic turnaround from just a few years ago when the conservation-minded founder of Burt's Bees cosmetics outraged some sportsmen by purchasing more than 100,000 acres of land and banning hunters, loggers, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles."No one could have imagined when Roxanne Quimby states accumulating land that 40,000 acres of her land would be opening to hunting," said <a href="/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fscience&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22George+Smith%22">George Smith</a>, former executive director of the Sportsman's <a href="/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=news%2Fscience&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Alliance+of+Maine%22">Alliance of Maine</a> who was once one of Quimby's loudest critics.Quimby wants to give tens of thousands of acres next to Baxter State Park to the federal government to create new national park double the size of Maine's Acadia National Park.While there's no formal proposal, her foundation envisions a national park of up to 75,000 acres abutting the east side of the Baxter State Park for fishing, hiking, paddling and wildlife watching and a national recreation area roughly the same size across from the Penobscot River's East Branch on which snowmobiling, hunting and other traditional outdoors activities will be allowed.But first the foundation has to win support from residents who've been suspicious of Quimby's motives.The hunting east of the river's east branch is a big part of that."This is just another step in building trust. We've talked about this for a long time. We've talked about a national recreation area that would allow hunting. Now we're taking the next step and allowing hunting. We're opening it up," St. Clair said in a telephone interview from northern Maine.Other types of recreation are also being opened on 60,000 acres of land west of the river. Those include upgrades of logging roads to create an 18-mile loop road for public access. And the foundation has reopened an ATV trail near Shin Pond and Patten and is working closely with snowmobile clubs to guarantee permanent access.The project announced Monday has been dubbed Katahdin Woods & Waters. It includes a program to provide information to visitors from Lunksoos Camps while also making upgrades to recreational opportunities on the property, including clearing new hiking trails and installing signs.<a href="/issue_nationalpark.asp">View map, photographs, and more</a>.`, assigning current date

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`A Couple of Quimby Zingers are Real Eye-openers` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">V. Paul Reynolds</h3> <a href="http://www.sunjournal.com" target="_blank">Sun Journal news story</a> Hold the phone! Stop the tape! Roxanne Quimby is doing what?She — or at least the organization that represents her and her vast land holdings — is opening 40,000 acres of her Maine woodlands to hunting this fall! That's right. According to Quimby's son, Lucas St. Clair, who heads up Elliotsville Plantation, Inc., in his mother's behalf, the no-trespassing and no-hunting signs are coming down. Hunter's will be welcome this fall on some Quimby land. This is big news, for a number of reasons.Back in 2004, when the Human Society of the United States (HSUS) and the Wildlife Association of Maine (WAM) tried to eliminate bear hunting with the statewide bear referendum, Roxanne Quimby supported the anti-hunting initiative financially. At the time, I had an email conversation with Mrs. Quimby about her anti-hunting stance. There was no changing her mind. She was unequivocally opposed to all forms of recreational hunting. Her personal beliefs made their way into her land-use policies as well.So what is going on?St. Clair told me that a while back a decision was made to cool the rhetoric and try to find some common ground with rural Mainers when it comes to Quimby's quest for a National Park in this state."We have not abandoned our efforts for a National Park," said St. Clair, "but are determined to find out what Mainers want and how best to pursue it." St. Clair believes in compromise. "Part of our land can be for a National park and part for a designated recreational area that accommodates all forms of traditional use," he reasons. Quimby has an able and attractive ambassador in her son, Lucas. A pragmatist with personal charm, he grew up in Maine hunting and fishing with his sportsman father, Roxanne's ex-husband."Do you ever have frank discussions with your mother about her anti-hunting zeal?" I asked him. "Yes," he said,"she has her views and I have mine."David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine (SAM) remains skeptical."Nothing has really changed," he says," except maybe the packaging and the public relations. Quimby still wants to create a national park, which will not be good for Maine."Trahan believes that Quimby sees the next planned bear referendum as a way to undermine the bear guiding business and thereby neutralize significant political opposition to her park dream."What is EPI's position on the next bear referendum?" I asked St. Clair. "Will your mother be donating money this time around?"His response: "There have also been questions raised about EPI’s position on a proposed referendum to ban the hunting of bears with bait, traps and dogs. Our position is simple: We believe that the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is the entity best positioned to use sound science to make decisions about how to manage wildlife populations through the setting of hunting seasons and methods of take. Maine has one of the most successful bear management programs in the country. The biologists and scientists at the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife have proven their expertise and their ability to continue to apply this expertise should not be hindered by legislation or referendums. Therefore EPI will not support this referendum."Read that carefully, again. It says that EPI (Quimby's land management group) will not support the bear referendum!To review. We have two zingers, news-wise: 1. Roxanne Quimby is opening 40,000 acres of her land to hunting this fall, and 2. Her organization will not support the bear referendum.In the months and years ahead, Lucas St. Clair will pull out all the stops to win us over to his conviction, that Maine can have both a National park and a viable timber industry, that they are not mutually exclusive.Time will tell. Meanwhile, you have to hand it to the guy. He sures knows how to get our attention. And with action, not just words. <a href="/issue_nationalpark.asp">Map, photographs, and more information here</a>.`, assigning current date

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`Testimony in Opposition to Maine DEP Proposed` post created successfully

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: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Pete Didisheim, Advocacy Director</h3> <a href="http://www.nrcm.org/project_cleanair.asp" target="_blank">NRCM testimony</a> Good afternoon. My name is Pete Didisheim. I am the Advocacy Director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine and I appreciate the opportunity to testify in opposition to DEP’s proposal that Maine be exempted from certain air pollution control requirements established by the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments for the 13 states that comprise the Ozone Transport Region (OTR). Along with others who will testify today, NRCM appreciates that DEP is holding this public hearing on proposals that raise significant questions about Maine’s involvement in regional air pollution control strategies that have benefited the people of Maine.DEP is making two requests to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The first involves nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution—a major ozone precursor; the second involves volatile organic compounds (VOCs)—which also are ozone precursors, but which also can be toxic pollutants that pose a range of direct risks to public health. NRCM has both process concerns and substance concerns with these proposals. With regard to process, we are concerned that neither the NOx waiver nor VOC opt-out proposals were revealed in a transparent way to the public. DEP submitted the NOx waiver request to EPA on October 13, 2012 without any notification to the public. Public notice for the VOC proposal was not much better; it was very difficult for anyone to learn about it. As documented further in Attachment A, we believe that the public notice process for major changes like these is broken and should be revised so that interested parties have more of an opportunity to participate. Moving on to the substance, NRCM opposes the proposed VOC revision and the statewide NOx waiver because we believe Maine has more to lose than to gain through these proposed rollbacks. Existing Ozone Standard Not Protecting Maine People NRCM believes it is a mistake for Maine to seek relief from the OTR’s regulations on ozone precursors at a time when we know that the existing federal ozone standard is not sufficiently protective of public health. DEP is requesting opt-outs from the OTR ozone requirements based on the 2008 8-hour ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS), which is set at 75 ppb. However, EPA has concluded that the standard should be revised to a lower level. Based on extensive review of the science, EPA’s Clean Air Act Advisory Council unanimously recommended a new 8-hour average ozone standard within the range of 60 and 70 ppb. And the recommendation was not made just once. Rather, this important EPA science advisory board has communicated its unanimous position for a stronger ozone standard to the EPA Administrator four times over the past decade, in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010. The body of science shows that the current ozone standard is not protecting children, senior citizens, and people with respiratory ailments such as asthma. This is particularly relevant for Maine, which has both some of the highest asthma rates in the country and the highest average age of residents of any state. These two factors—Maine’s high asthma rates and aging population—should make the Maine DEP extra cautious about proposing a weakening of air pollution control requirements on facilities based on an ozone standard that isn’t currently protecting these population subgroups. By every indication, EPA is moving forward with a rulemaking to change the 8-hour ozone standard to 70 ppb. According to 2010 to 2012 data, two monitoring sites in Maine would exceed a level of 70 ppb , which would put many York County, Hancock County, and possibly other Maine counties back into non-attainment. With this in mind, NRCM believes that it is not sound policy to opt out of NOx and VOC controls that could be important elements of Maine’s strategy to regulate ozone precursors under a stronger federal ozone standard. Any permits granted during a period of waivers would result in increased in-state emissions without the benefit of offsets, making it more difficult to secure emission reductions in the future. Maine Has More to Lose than GainThe Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 created the multi-state Ozone Transport Region, with specific requirements for regional controls on air pollution that crosses state borders. For major new pollution sources in the OTR states, emissions of VOCs and NOx are subject to a 1.15 emission offset requirement. Through this mechanism, the OTR states have reduced emissions as their economies have expanded. This has been particularly important for Maine, because so much of our pollution blows into the state from upwind. Since 1990, Maine has adopted a “clean hands” strategy when it comes to OTR. We have abided by the OTR requirements while also insisting that upwind states reduce pollution that ends up jeopardizing the health of Maine people. Because Maine is at the end of the tailpipe, we have the most to gain (and we have gained a lot) through this multi-state approach. We also have the most to lose if it were to fall apart. Over the past 20 years, air quality has improved throughout the OTR states, including in Maine. We still experience too many high ozone days; and, as mentioned earlier, some Maine counties would not be in attainment of a new, more protective ozone standard. However, Maine’s air quality has improved in no small part due to the OTR. More importantly, other states have done much more to reduce their emissions over the past 20 years than has Maine. As the attached figures show (see figures 1 and 2 below), nearly every state in the 13-state OTR has reduced its NOx and VOCs by a higher rate relative to its 1990 baseline than has Maine. These data, covering the period 1990 to 2008, show that upwind states have shouldered a more significant burden to reduce air pollution than Maine has, and this is all to the good for Maine’s air quality—because we depend on those states reducing the pollution that comes to Maine. If the ozone standard is changed to 70 ppb, we will depend on the actions of upwind states even more than we do today. If a warming climate increases the formation of ozone, creating more high ozone days, then we will depend on the actions of upwind states more than we do today. Maine has received very significant benefits through the OTR without much burden, but now we seem to be saying through DEP’s proposals that we don’t care about regional air pollution strategies any longer. We want out. This is a mistake that could come back to bite us if it leads to an unraveling of the OTR. The argument has been made that these exemptions are necessary so that Maine’s paper mills do not have to purchase offsets if they convert to natural gas for energy. However, this claim is not convincing. Verso’s Bucksport Mill was not required to purchase offsets during its conversion to natural gas, nor should any other such conversion since natural gas releases fewer emissions than oil. Others have made vague and unsubstantiated claims that Maine’s OTR obligations have cost Maine jobs. Any such assertion needs to be documented and weighed against the huge economic benefits of cleaner air, including through reduced emergency room visits for those with asthma and reduced premature deaths for those with respiratory difficulties. One final point: DEP is asking EPA to “temporarily remove the regulatory provisions” for VOCs, but fails to explain what is meant by “temporarily.” As a result, it is totally unclear what DEP is asking for. Is this offset intended to be basically permanent, but DEP felt ambivalent about making that point clear? Is it just for a period of time to squeak a few permits through? What does DEP envision would be the mechanism for reverting back to the OTR requirements? And how would this offset, if granted, be superceded by a new EPA ozone standard, if and/or when, that standard is imposed? Conclusion Maine has long held the appropriate position that we need “clean hands” when it comes to calling on upwind states to reduce air pollution that can cause public health threats for Maine people. It is in this context that DEP’s request to terminate application of the new source review requirements for any major new or modified stationary sources of ozone precursors anywhere in Maine is troubling and could set a precedent that undermines regional air pollution control strategies. This DEP proposal violates the concept of a level playing field that has been a cornerstone of clean air policy throughout the region. Because Maine has a large population of elderly residents and very high incidences of asthma, particularly in our children, Maine policy makers have a strong interest in continuing to reduce ozone pollution. The ozone standard used in DEP’s technical analysis is not sufficiently protective of public health, so now is not the time to relax our approach to in-state VOC and NOx controls. We urge the DEP to withdraw this request to relax air pollution control requirements on major new facilities and plant modifications in Maine. <a href="/project_cleanair.asp">View additional materials in support of this testimony.</a>`, assigning current date

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`Environmentalists Decry Proposal to Loosen Maine Smog Rules; Paper Mill Officials Say Change Will Spur Job Creation` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Mario Moretto</h3> <a href="http://bangordailynews.com" target="_blank">Bangor Daily News news story</a> AUGUSTA, Maine — Business groups squared off against environmentalists and health experts Tuesday during a hearing on a plan by the state Department of Environmental Protection to exempt Maine from some anti-smog regulations.The change would ease the process of industries seeking to develop or expand in Maine by removing a requirement that they buy expensive emission offset credits. Maine is already meeting emission standards under the federal Clean Air Act. Also, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency supports the proposal and has said that the plan will not allow for any additional pollution from Maine businesses.Several people who testified against the proposal said that wasn’t good enough, namely because they believe federal ozone standards do too little to promote public health, while representatives from Maine’s pulp and paper industry say the changes are necessary to spur business development and job creation.Since 1990, Maine has been part of an “Ozone Transport Region” that reaches from Maryland through the Pine Tree State. In an effort to prevent a net increase in pollution levels, industries within the region that emit smog-creating nitrous oxides or volatile organic compounds are required to purchase emission credits from defunct entities.In the early 1990s, Maine’s coastal counties from York to Hancock exceeded federal ozone standards. But throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Maine’s air quality improved, according to Mark Cone, director of the Bureau of Air Quality.By 2008, under the strictest standards ever for ozone standards, the entire state of Maine had fallen under federal ozone attainment limits, Cone said. Even when monitoring sites in Maine showed ozone levels exceeding the limit, the pollution could be traced to sources in other states, he said.The DEP has requested the federal government grant the entire state a waiver, allowing Maine to opt out of the requirement that businesses purchase emission offset credits. The federal Clean Air Act allows parts of the Ozone Transport Region to opt out of the requirement, as long as they continue to meet federal clean air standards and aren’t contributing to the nonattainment of other areas.Ed Miller, senior vice president for public policy at the American Lung Association, said an ozone level of 60-70 parts per billion is necessary to promote the public health. If that were the standard used by the federal government, he said, much of Maine would be placed in nonattainment.“Maine’s air is not as healthy as it should or could be. In some cases, ozone levels are as high as possible without triggering the EPA’s nonattainment status,” he said. “We do not believe Maine people want to live in the unhealthiest environment allowed by law.”Ivy Frignoca of the Conservation Law Foundation said ozone is also a danger to the environment by damaging vegetation, reducing crop yields, stunting tree growth and increasing the susceptibility of plants to disease. She said the state should wait until more current data is available before seeking to change the rules.“The state is basing its exemption request on 2008 data, and we’re currently awaiting publication of the 2011 national emissions inventory,” she said. “It makes sense to wait.”Cone said that because Maine is meeting all the federal standards, the credit-purchasing requirement is an unfair burden on the economy.In Maine, major industry means pulp and paper. Representatives from that sector, including spokesmen from several of the state’s remaining mills, were the only members of the public to testify in support of the DEP’s proposed rule change, which they said was necessary to spur growth in the industry and make Maine more competitive.Dixon Pike, a lobbyist for the Maine Pulp and Paper Association, said the proposal would ease that burden. He said the offset credit requirement deters mills and other businesses from investing in Maine.“The science makes it very clear that the proposal is justified. We’re not jeopardizing environmental protection or risking the environment by this proposal,” he said. ”But we are removing some potential hurdles for investment by the mills and other facilities in the state.”“The consequences of additional costs to obtain emissions offsets are not hypothetical,” said Ken Gallant, environmental manager for Verso’s Androscoggin paper mill in Jay. “Having to purchase offsets for a project can wipe out any potential return on investment.”The EPA will continue taking public comment on Maine’s waiver request until Oct. 3.`, assigning current date

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`Maine Gets Feedback on Anti-smog Rules Proposal` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">AP</h3> <a href="http://necn.com" target="_blank">Associated Press news story</a> AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Maine's environmental department is hearing from the public on a proposal to weaken some air-quality restrictions in Maine.The Department of Environmental Protection held a public hearing Tuesday. It's seeking federal approval to allow new or newly upgraded industrial polluters to be exempt from federal Clean Air Act measures designed to reduce ground-level ozone.Environmental groups like the Natural Resources Council of Maine say the proposal is short-sighted and will cause health problems for Maine residents.But officials from the state's paper mills say the regulations are unnecessary and that removing them will help businesses.Republican Gov. Paul LePage says similar exemptions were sought by former Democratic Gov. John Baldacci and Independent Gov. Angus King.Members of the public can submit comments to the department until Sept. 20.`, assigning current date

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`Maine Health Advocates, Industry Reps Spar over Ozone Proposal` post created successfully

`State Biologists Tracking Endangered Turtles in Southern Maine` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Aislinn Sarnacki, Bangor Daily News outdoor writer</h3> <a href="http://actoutwithaislinn.bangordailynews.com" target="_blank">Bangor Daily News post</a> State biologists have captured more than 40 Blanding’s turtles this summer in an effort to better understand the dynamic between the endangered species and growing suburban areas in southern Maine, according to a recent press release by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.The trapping effort is part of a two-year study in Maine and four other northeastern states to develop a management plan that will afford protections for the endangered turtle, while also accommodating the development needs of an expanding population in urban areas. The study is supported by a Competitive State Wildlife Grant.This work, including a genetic assessment facilitated through Dr. Judith Rhymer at the University of Maine, began in the spring of 2012 and is scheduled to be completed at the end of the year. To date, Maine biologists have systematically surveyed 18 Blanding’s turtle sites spanning 12 towns and obtained almost 60 genetic samples for population analysis.Biologists believe that Blanding’s turtles are being negatively affected as their habitat becomes more fragmented due to urban development.Blanding’s turtles are easy to identify, with their yellow throat and helmet-shared shell. They are semi-aquatic, preferring small, shallow wetlands in southern Maine, including pocket swamps and vernal pools. Undeveloped fields and upland forests surrounding these wetlands provide habitat for nesting, aestivating (a period of summer inactivity) and movements between wetlands.Blanding’s turtles can live upwards of 70 years, but they don’t begin reproducing until 14-18 years of age. They also have a low hatching success, which makes survival of adults especially important.When biologists capture Blanding’s turtles at a site, they file a series of notches on the outer edge of the turtles’ shells so that the turtle can be identified at a later date. The technique is used to determine a Blanding’s turtle’s movements, how it uses its habitat and where it nests.In order to catch turtles, biologists deploy a baited, hoop-style netted trap that allows turtles to enter but, due to its funnel-shape ends, is difficult to escape. Biologists set these traps in marshy areas, along pond banks and other likely areas and check the traps every two days.Captured turtles are weighed, measured and photographed. Their age is determined if possible; general health is noted (missing or injured limbs); and females are checked for eggs. The data collected is submitted into a regional database that will be processed during the winter months.This year, biologists have visited 11 different sites this year to help determine the range of Blanding’s turtles in the state; and they found turtles at seven of the sites.In addition to sampling and tracking of Blanding’s turtles, DIF&W is taking other measures to help the endangered Blanding’s turtle. Road mortality becomes an ever-increasing threat for turtles. DIF&W, along with the assistance of MaineDOT, has installed temporary yellow warning signs in strategic locations to alert motorists to the presence of turtles on the roadway. DIF&W, MaineDOT and Maine Audubon are also conducting a wildlife road watch, which reports sightings of both alive and dead turtles. Data collected will help target future projects, such as signage and fencing.In addition to sampling and tracking of Blanding’s turtles, DIF&W is taking other measures to help the endangered Blanding’s turtle. Road mortality becomes an ever-increasing threat for turtles. DIF&W, along with the assistance of MaineDOT, The Nature Conservancy and local towns, has installed temporary yellow warning signs in strategic locations to alert motorists to the presence of turtles on the roadway. DIF&W, MaineDOT and Maine Audubon are also conducting a wildlife road watch, which reports sightings of both alive and dead turtles. Data collected will help target future projects, such as signage and fencing. `, assigning current date

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`A Small Group in Maine Takes on a Big Tar Sands Pipeline Plan` post created successfully

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`Diamond in the Rough: Our Visit to the Proposed New National Park and Recreation Area for Maine` post created successfully

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`Official or Not, Roxanne Quimbyâs Park Vision Taking Shape` post created successfully

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`Portland-Montreal Pipe Line Faces Dual Threat from Canada` post created successfully

`EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants` post created successfully

`Obama Issues New Plan to Cut Carbon Pollution from New Power Plants and Address Climate Change in Maine and the Rest of the Nation` post created successfully

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`Maine Coyotes: Dangerous Wild Pests or Important Members of the Ecosystem?` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Abigail Curtis, BDN Staff</h3> <a href="http://bangordailynews.com" target="_blank">Bangor Daily News news story</a> <div class="p402_premium">LINCOLNVILLE, Maine — After Wendy Rolerson McCusker let her pet border collie outside last Friday morning, she said she suddenly heard the dog’s bark turn from territorial to terrified.It was the coyotes, McCusker said she thought before running onto the deck to try to scare the growling, yipping wild canines off with her shouts.“It was really scary. I thought they were going to kill her,” the Youngtown Road woman recounted a week after the incident. “My voice didn’t scare them … I thought I was just going to listen to her get mauled to death.”Luckily, McCusker thought fast and rang the doorbell, which lured in her pet but not the coyotes. Her dog came home with a little limp but no other damage. Yet it was enough to make McCusker want to warn others about her experience with the wild animals, which have long lived in the woods of Lincolnville and many other parts of Maine.“They’ve always been around,” she said. “They just seem more aggressive now. We’re not going to have outdoor cats. That’s basically just coyote food … I don’t want to kill the coyotes. But I don’t want my cat, dog or child to be killed, either.”Geri Vistein of Brunswick, a Maine wildlife biologist who educates people about coyotes, said that while this kind of thinking is not uncommon, it’s based more in fear than fact. Having worked with California-based <a class="c5" href="http://www.projectcoyote.org/index.html" target="_blank">Project Coyote</a>, she is passionate in her desire to educate, inform and help humans learn how to live near coyotes.“People see coyotes as acting aggressive when they’re just being curious,” she said. “What it can do is build and build and build and create a bit of a hysteria. Sadly to say, this hysteria leads to killing them.”According to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, at least 12,000 coyotes live in Maine. The medium-sized canines expanded their range into the state in the 1930s, after the demise of the wolves, which used to be the area’s largest canine predator.“These intelligent and adaptable animals now occupy almost every conceivable habitat type, from open agricultural country to dense forest to downtown urban areas,” the <a class="c5" href="http://www.maine.gov/ifw/wildlife/human/lww_information/coyotes.html" target="_blank">department’s coyote fact sheet</a> states. “Despite ever-continued human encroachment and efforts to eliminate coyotes, the species has maintained its numbers. The coyote’s tenacity tries the patience of some and the admiration of others.”Coyotes are opportunistic scavengers that eat small animals like snowshoe hare, mice, rats and squirrels, as well as grass, fruits and berries during the summer and fall, according to the department. They generally hunt at night and occasionally kill domestic cats, dogs and other wild predators that might compete with them for food or threaten their den and pups.Vistein said that coyotes are important in the ecosystem, but they are so new to Maine that most people don’t know how to live with them.“I speak to many of our farmers here in Maine who want coyotes on their farm. They understand how valuable they are,” she said.She said coyotes are highly social and intelligent. They live in family groups in a distinct territory, hunting rodents and other small animals and leaving people alone. But people should be aware that coyotes and domestic pets do not mix, Vistein said. She recommends keeping cats inside and staying close to dogs when they are outside.“Wild carnivores are saying you need to be responsible for your domestic animals,” Vistein said. “You never want your dog to interact with coyotes, ever. You don’t want that interaction to even start.”Another recent human and coyote interaction in the midcoast took place at dusk this summer in a wooded area in the rural town of Union, where a family lived in a camper while building a new house. Jackie Johnson said that she and her 13-year-old daughter were sitting in their screen room outside the camper with their bulldog when they heard howling behind them. Then another, chirping cry and another howl. Altogether, there were four coyotes sounding off around the camper and screen room.The family figured the coyotes were attracted by the smell of the food they had grilled for dinner, and weren’t scared off by the Christmas lights up outside or the sound of the generator. They waited for about 15 minutes then snuck back into the camper for the night.“We were definitely surrounded,” Johnson said. “They were really close. I thought it was pretty awesome. My daughter was pretty scared.”John DePue, a furbearer and small mammal biologist at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, said last week that it’s hard to know if the coyote population is growing or if people just perceive that it is, as the animals move into more areas close to humans. He also emphasized that other animals can be responsible for disappearing house cats, including fishers, bobcats, raccoons, owls and dogs at large. He encouraged people to stop feeding their domestic pets outside.“You’re basically luring animals in close to your house,” he said.If people have an immediate concern about a coyote, they are asked to contact the Maine Warden Service at 800-452-4664.</div>`, assigning current date

`Protecting Wildlife,Healthy Forests` post created successfully

`Birding: Time is Approaching to Catch a :Look at a Pipit` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle"></h2> <h3 class="author">Herb Wilson, columnist</h3> <a href="http://www.pressherald.com/life/outdoors/time-is-approaching-to-catch-a-look-at-" target="_blank">Portland Press Herald column</a> Fall is the best time to see one of Maine's rarest breeding birds, the American Pipit. The only place in Maine where these ground-dwelling birds nest is on the Tablelands leading up to Baxter Peak on Mt. Katahdin. Seeing these unusual breeders on a hike up Mt. Katahdin is a welcome bonus to a hiker with a birding interest.American Pipits do have a broad breeding distribution across North America, mostly in areas that are inhospitable for these insect-feeders in the winter. They nest across the North American tundra, in most parts of Alaska, and along the crests of the Rocky Mountains and Cascade Mountains, nesting as far south as Arizona. They also nest broadly in Newfoundland. Migrating American Pipits pass through Maine in significant numbers.American Pipits belong to the bird family called the Motacillidae, a family that also includes wagtails (much more common in the Eastern Hemisphere). All motacillids spend most of their time on the ground foraging for insects, spiders and even freshwater snails and crustaceans.The Motacillidae includes about 65 species of birds. Forty are classified as pipits, which are more cosmopolitan than their wagtail relatives. Most pipits are found in the Old World but also occur in North America, New Zealand and other oceanic islands.Pipits are generally inconspicuous birds whose brown, buff and gray plumage provides great camouflage against stony ground. The bill is pointed as one expects for an insect-eater but not as fine as the bill of a New World warbler. The breast of most species is streaked, affording yet more camouflage.The American Pipit can be distinguished from other ground-dwelling songbirds by its habit of bobbing its tail as it walks. The outer tail feathers are white and are conspicuous in flight. The call of a pipit, often given in flight, is (you guessed it) a two-noted sound described as "pip-it". Here is a link with sound files: <a href="http://tinyurl.com/m4ssm6a">http://tinyurl.com/m4ssm6a</a>Before 1989, North American field guides gave the name of our pipit as Water Pipit, which showed a broad distribution throughout North America and Eurasia. But the American Ornithologists Union Check-list Committee split the North American forms from the Eurasian forms, elevating our birds to a separate species -- the American Pipit -- restricted to the New World.So how do you see an American Pipit short of hiking Katahdin or visiting the Arctic tundra in the summer? Migrating American Pipits often occur along beaches, so areas like Reid State Park can be productive. They also occur in agricultural fields, particularly in those where farmers spread manure. As their former name suggests, American Pipits often forage in wet fields and near freshwater water bodies. American Pipits will wade into shallow water after aquatic invertebrates.American Pipits are social creatures during migration, so seeing a solitary individual is unusual. Scanning fields for pipits will often yield Horned Larks and Lapland Longspurs, two other passage migrants that are mainly ground-dwelling birds.If you get a close look at an American Pipit, take a look at the claws on its toes. Those claws are exceptionally long, particularly the one on the hind toe. This characteristic of long toenails occurs convergently in other groups of birds that spend a lot of time walking on the ground. Horned Larks show similar long toenails.The long claws may aid American Pipits in walking on snow, but deep snow cover will usually push these birds south as the weather in northern areas deteriorates. American Pipits winter along the southern tier of states from California to Florida. Along the east coast, some pipits will winter as far north as coastal Virginia. The Mediterranean climate of the west coast of North America permits American Pipits to overwinter as far north as western Washington and even southwestern British Columbia.`, assigning current date

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`Health of Maineâs Lakes Vital to âQuality of Place,â Health and the Economy` post created successfully

`Protection Sought for Bats Decimated by White-nose Syndrome` post created successfully

: unrecognized date format `<h2 class="subtitle">An environmental group says the northern long-eared bat could be named to the federal endangered species list.</h2> <h3 class="author">The Associated Press</h3> <a href="http://www.kjonline.com" target="_blank">Kennebec Journal news story</a> MONTPELIER, Vt. – A Vermont environmental group says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to protect a once-common species of bat through the Endangered Species Act.The Richmond-based Center for Biological Diversity says the service has proposed granting Endangered Species Act protection to the northern long-eared bat, a species that has been devastated by the disease known as white-nose syndromeBut the service declined to recommend protection for the eastern small-footed bat.Regional officials of the Fish and Wildlife Service were closed Tuesday as part of the federal government shutdown.The Center for Biological Diversity’s Mollie Matteson says the proposal to protect the northern long-eared bat comes “not a moment too soon.”White-nose has spread to 22 states and parts of Canada. Scientists estimate nearly 7 million bats have died.`, assigning current date

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`Habitat for Humanityâs First Solar House Completed in Maine` post created successfully

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`Maine Firefighters' Toxic Exposure to be Subject of Study` post created successfully

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