City officials in Belfast are defending their decision to remove a beaver dam last week in the face of public criticism over a lack of transparency and potential harm to the environment.
Over the course of several days last week, the city’s Public Works Department removed the beaver dam located near the Belfast Soup Kitchen on Belmont Avenue. The dam was causing flooding at the soup kitchen’s parking lot and threatening to overwhelm a wastewater pump station and wash out two culverts and a section of Belmont Avenue, said City Manager Erin Herbig.
For Alexis Cornelius, who owns the property beside the soup kitchen, the city’s move was “devastating”.
The beavers have helped create a wetland on her property that is a lush oasis in a sea of sprawl. It’s full of birds, muskrats, turtles and birds, and home to two beavers, she said.
“It’s not so much me I’m worried about, it’s the animals,” she said Wednesday. “It baffles me that they could just drain it and not worry about the wetlands.”
Cornelius said she got no notice that the city planned to remove the beaver dam and was shocked to see the wetland drained to its muddy bottom.
She said the city and state regulators have not been forthcoming with information about the situation.
“How have they responded? They haven’t,” she said.
Upset by the dam removal, Cornelius wrote a Facebook post that read, “Now the pond is basically gone. It’s turned into a muddy mess… and we’ve been told the beavers may be TRAPPED next week.”
The city could have tried other options to address flooding without destroying the habitat, she wrote.
“Instead, this feels rushed—and now all that wildlife is paying the price,” she wrote.
The post drew more than 250 comments, many critical of the city’s actions, as well as an article from a local writer on Substack.
At Belfast’s City Council meeting on Tuesday, Councilor Neal Harkness brought up the public conversation, saying, “There’s a lot of talk going around by people who don’t know anything about particular subjects on social media.”
He continued, saying sarcastically, “We’re blessed by having these people who become experts on any issue that comes up. So we’ve got some people that are now experts on beaver dams and culverts.”
In response, Herbig laid out the city’s concerns about flooding and damage to infrastructure and said the work was permitted by the state.
“Sometimes when wildlife and infrastructure come right next door to each other, plans need to be put into place to do our best to resolve the scenario,” she said.
Keel Kemper, a regional wildlife biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife confirmed that the city had permission to remove the dam, saying “that is a long-standing problem that we’ve known about for years.”
One year, he said, beavers used two-by-fours they’d taken from a local lumberyard to build a dam.
Kemper said the beavers have not been removed from the site, but they still might be. In highly visible locations like the wetland beside the soup kitchen, game wardens typically live trap beavers and take them to a state wildlife management area.
“Every beaver generally has a fan club,” he said Wednesday.
He said the city likely could have done better at communicating with the public and landowners.
“You have some landowners that love the beaver. You have others that don’t like the beaver,” he said. “We always try to encourage people to seek collaboration with their neighbors and tell them why they’re doing it.”
While Kemper said the city’s removal of the beaver dam was necessary, he also called beavers “the MVP of the wildlife world.” They can turn a small stream into a shallow wetland that benefits a host of other species.
“He has the ability to alter habitat to the benefit of everything else,” he said.
But he said beaver populations have grown enormously since legal protections went into place and trapping declined. That’s led to more human-wildlife conflicts.
Cornelius said now that the wetland is drained, she worries that the once beautiful spot will start to stink and degrade.
“It’s completely terrible,” she said.
Cornelius says she’d be willing to use her own money to figure out drainage mechanisms that would protect infrastructure and let the beavers and other wildlife remain.
“I don’t care if I have to put money into it,” she said. “I want to put the pond back and have the beavers back.”
