JONESPORT, Maine — The Planning Board on Tuesday gave its final approval to Kingfish to build a $110 million fish farm at Natt Point, but the company needs to raise more money and deal with ongoing appeals before construction begins.
The board met for more than an hour at the town office and decided to add two more water testing sites to Kingfish’s permit, giving the company six overall. In addition to the testing sites imposed by Jonesport, the state will require Kingfish to regularly monitor water quality at four sites in Chandler and Englishman bays to make sure discharges from the land-based fish farm don’t produce too much nitrogen.
“This is it,” Megan Sorby, project manager for Kingfish Maine, said after the board’s unanimous vote to approve the project. “We are hopeful construction will start next year.”
But pending and expected appeals could affect when the building project gets underway.
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has approved other aspects of the project, including allowing the company to install intake and discharge pipes through a wetland. Although there were appeals of the approval, the state Board of Environmental Protection denied them.
Kingfish also has approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to extend intake and discharge pipes out into Chandler Bay.
Protect Downeast, a group that has raised objections about the fish farm’s potential impact on the surrounding marine environment, has appealed the state approvals to Washington County Superior Court. Both the state approvals for Kingfish under the Natural Resources Protection Act and the Site Location of Development Act are being challenged, Sorby said.
Sorby said the company likely will wait for those appeals to be decided before starting construction at the 94-acre site. She also said, without providing details, that the company will look to raise more money from investors before building gets underway.
The company already is growing its broodstock at the University of Maine Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research in Franklin, and will need 18 to 24 months of construction before it is ready to move those fish to the fish farm, and then another nine to 12 months before the fish are ready to harvest, Sorby said. Overall, full construction of the fish farm is expected to take three years.
Elizabeth Boepple, a Portland attorney representing Protect Downeast, said Tuesday that the group also plans to appeal the Planning Board approval to the town’s appeals board on the grounds that the town has not imposed adequate conditions on the building permit to protect the water quality of Chandler Bay.
The group wants Kingfish to pay for independent water quality monitoring, environmental modeling and assessments; independent ongoing assessments of the farm’s impact on nearby eelgrass; and monitoring of discharge into Chandler Bay during the gradual build-up of fish production. It wasn’t immediately clear how this differed from what the town required with its approval.
If Jonesport’s appeals board upholds the Planning oard approval, then that appeal also might end up in Superior Court, she said.
“We don’t have any expectation that the Jonesport Board of Appeals will be the endgame here,” Boepple said. “We’re prepared to go to the next stage if that is necessary.”