Lobstermen and other marine businesses that depend on Portland’s bustling waterfront are reaching the boiling point over dwindling parking and rising traffic. Now they are petitioning the city to do something about it.
Keith Lane has been lobstering out of the Port of Portland since 1960. Now he docks his boat, the Kestrel, at Custom House Wharf, also the home to several other marine-related businesses and a handful of popular restaurants.
As Portland’s tourism and development economies have heated up over the last decade, he’s found it more difficult to maneuver, off and on the water.
“They keep allowing nonmarine development further and further down the wharves, and you can’t tie up next to a condominium, a lobster boat just can’t do it, and you can’t tie up next to a restaurant. You just can’t do it, and it’s pushing us out,” he says.
Zoning rules adopted a decade ago after a similar controversy aimed to balance tourism and other nonmarine uses with maintaining a robust working waterfront.
Nonmarine uses and related parking are, with a few exceptions, barred beyond 150 feet out on the piers. But now several new hotel and office projects are being proposed almost simultaneously for Commercial Street, which serves the wharves — including a hotel right on a wharf that would require rezoning.
More than 90 lobstermen and fishermen, including Lane, have responded with a petition calling for a halt to construction of any new offices, condominiums or hotels on the wharf-side of the street.
“We hear what the lobstermen are saying and the fishermen are saying, and in large part we agree in regards to the function of the street,” says city waterfront coordinator William Needelman.
Needelman acknowledges that rapid development has put the pressure on.
“Certainly the street has seen a great deal of growth in traffic of all types. We see more bait trucks than we used to. We see more pedestrians than we used to and there’s more just passenger traffic,” he says.
Needelman says that’s why the city is working on a parking study and has applied for funding for a full-scale traffic corridor assessment that takes all the competing uses into account. And he argues that striking a balance is essential to the survival of the aging piers themselves, whose owners need revenues from nonmarine uses for repair and maintenance.
Lane says he understands the issue, acknowledging that he pays a relatively modest $400 a month in dock fees. But he also says city officials aren’t giving enough consideration to the needs of a long-established industry.
“Uptown, I’m talking the leaders of this city. Their eyes glitter when they see a cruise ship come in and the street full of tourists. They’re rubbing their hands going, ‘Wow, what prosperity.’ They’re driving a 300- to 400-year-old business right out of the town,” he says.
City officials say they will consider the petition when they take up the next round of Commercial Street proposals.