Weak NECEC conservation plan deserves the pushback | Opinion

Sen. Stacy Brenner, D-Cumberland, lives in Scarborough and serves on the Environment and Natural Resources Committee. Sen. Henry Ingwersen, D-Cumberland, lives in Arundel and serves on the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee.

We commend the Board of Environmental Protection for standing up for mature forest
conservation when it recently told state regulators that more work needs to be done to ensure that Central Maine Power (CMP) mitigates the environmental damage caused by the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) transmission corridor.

At a mid-September meeting, the board voted unanimously to direct the Department of Environmental Protection to address its concerns with the NECEC conservation plan — particularly regarding protection of large blocks of mature forest, as required by the NECEC permit.

As Board Chair Bob Duchesne succinctly stated, “I’m not convinced there’s any mitigation whatsoever [provided by the NECEC plan].”

Last year, CMP provided the department with a mitigation plan involving a conservation easement on 50,000 acres of heavily cutover timberlands in Somerset County. The easement allows logging everywhere except in small riparian buffer areas and uses a “shifting mosaic” harvesting strategy that allows the very “mature forest” stands that NECEC is supposed to protect to be cut once they reach a height of 50 feet or taller. For most of the acreage, the trees won’t grow that tall until at least 2065.

Several of Maine’s leading environmental organizations appealed the department’s approval of the plan. They argued that it fails to meet the permit’s required conservation goals by allowing forest stands to be harvested before they reach full ecological maturity, by delaying mitigation for 40 or more years and by using a flawed definition of “mature forest” that could set a bad precedent for future conservation efforts.

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As participants in this proceeding, we are following the board’s actions and share the strong concerns that Maine people and organizations have raised about CMP’s plan. Along with other lawmakers, we filed comments on the draft plan last June and strongly oppose the current version.

The NECEC is the largest fragmenting structure ever permitted in Maine’s North Woods, cutting a 53-mile corridor through western Maine forestlands. Electricity has been flowing since January, and habitat disruption started when construction began in 2021 and will persist for the life of the project.

CMP’s plan requires Maine’s people and wildlife to wait decades before a so-called “mature forest” emerges. Even then, forest stands could be harvested once they reach a certain height, and no protection is provided for most of the older trees that still exist in the area.

We wish CMP had proposed a plan that met both the spirit and the letter of the permit. We wish CMP had used the conservation plan as an opportunity to build increased trust and confidence in their company.

That’s not what happened. Every environmental group that commented on the plan said it failed to meet the requirements; state agency experts voiced concerns that a bad precedent would be set by the “mature forest” definition; and now the board has voiced similar concerns.

During the September meeting, board member Steven Pelletier said, “There’s nothing in this plan that I felt comfortable with.” He also said, “I saw a number of things that were not just yellow flags, but red flags for me.”

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Red flags mean stop, go back and try again.

Although the board roundly rejected CMP’s plan, it still needs to make a final decision about how to fix it. As a guiding principle, it should require that CMP’s plan ensures that significant blocks of forestland are allowed to become the type of ecologically mature stands preferred by many Maine species, and that such stands are connected to facilitate wildlife movement.

The board seemed receptive to this idea. Board member Robert Marvinney observed that areas of older forest under CMP’s current plan may exist for only “a very brief period of time.”

Likewise, a good guiding principle for the board would be to ensure that the plan sets a precedent that Maine can be proud of — a precedent that holds CMP accountable for meeting the permit requirements to which it agreed.

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