Commercial fishermen, state environmental officials and a wind farm developer are at loggerheads over how much direct financial relief fishermen should get if they lose West Ocean City’s fish houses to a proposed wind farm maintenance facility.
County Administrator Weston Young harshly criticized efforts put forth by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) so far in the process, calling it “extremely frustrating.”
“If you ask DNR, they don’t have a plan. There’s no plan,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting of the County Commissioners. “It’s full speed ahead with US Wind’s operations and maintenance facility on top of where the two fish houses are. There’s no plan right now to help the commercial fisherman.
“So, our conversations with DNR, frankly, have been a waste of time,” Young added, “because they don’t seem to want to touch that. They keep trying to look to the county to solve that for them – and we’re not the ones creating the problem.”
DNR and developer US Wind last summer signed a letter of intent to develop a compensation package, called a “Fishing Community Resilience Fund,” for those in the industry who would be hurt by the construction of a proposed wind farm located about 11 miles off the Atlantic coast. This agreement is for fishermen who stand to lose fishing grounds, and is unrelated to the West Ocean City fishing houses.
Hold fast watermen, no amount of money is worth losing your livelihood over. Don’t let the wind people take over the fish docks. That land should be unavailable to us wind at any price.