It’s inappropriate for the Belfast City Council and Nordic to pressure the Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) to speed up its review of the Nordic factory farm proposal.

BEP is a volunteer citizen board, which has already spent hundreds of hours on this proposal.

Remember their 12-hour days of listening to testimony when they held hearings in town? Everyone is under stress in their lives these days, and adding stress on these folks is wrong.

By extension, the Council wants the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to also speed things up during what must be a stressful work environment for state workers. For Nordic, it’s all about themselves. The DEP, at taxpayer expense, has itself put thousands of hours into this project. 

As has been pointed out repeatedly, all of Nordic’s permit woes are by their own hand. There have been delays because of missed deadlines, incomplete applications, change of venue requests, spurious lawsuits against shoreland property owners, and a lack of required financial and environmental reports. In fact, the holdup now is that Nordic failed to provide the needed reports when the BEP was in town.

And what has Nordic done for the City? Taken up endless hours of the voluntary Planning Board that has had to wade through thousands of pages of the proposal, testimony, and documentation as well as sit through hours of hearings. On top of that, there have been hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars spent on staff time, legal fees, and little perks for Nordic. (City Hall could not give me an exact accounting of staff time and dollars spent on this proposal.) 

Nordic has added to the atmosphere of divisiveness in our community through its insults of opponents in local and international news. They blame all their troubles on the “handful” of opponents (sounds like the White House). 

And what are they doing for our community during the pandemic? Are they supporting any organizations carrying on under tough conditions? Our local businesses are going out of their way to be of service. Instead, Nordic says it is focusing its limited resources elsewhere.

At the Council meeting, Neal Harkness mused on how our community could now be reaping the rewards of the new fish factory if Nordic had permit approval earlier. But Harkness is mistaken: After three years of fundraising, Nordic is nowhere close to having the money to break ground. At the rate they’re going — $15 million for a $500-million Belfast facility plus a $400-million California one – it will be a decade before they are financially ready. Instead, the project is draining money from City coffers. How long do we have to put up with this fiasco?

Imagine what Belfast with its creative, can-do community spirit could have done over the past three years if all that money, time, and energy hadn’t been sucked up by Nordic. Time to move on.

Linda Buckmaster lives in Belfast