By the time Nordic Aquafarms announced this month that it was pulling the plug on its $500 million salmon farm in Belfast, the decision felt almost inevitable.
Over seven years, the company had invested millions in the project, which had received necessary permits and once enjoyed enthusiastic support from city officials for the economic benefits it could have brought.
But the fish farm also faced fierce opposition from local landowners and environmental activists, culminating in a string of legal defeats in recent years that had closed off any obvious path forward.
For Judith Grace and Jeffrey Mabee, the local couple who played a key role in stopping the project, Nordic’s departure feels less like victory than an inevitable step in a bitter, David-and-Goliath fight they wish could have been avoided in the first place.
While some supporters of the project have viewed Grace and Mabee as standing in the way of the city’s economic development, the couple has long argued that Nordic was, in essence, trying to steal their land to push its operation through — and the courts ultimately agreed with them.
“They changed our lives very significantly,” Mabee said during a recent interview at their home. “The private property, the constitutional rights, were just swept under the rug.”
The couple’s home sits at the mouth of the Little River, overlooking intertidal land that was critical to Nordic’s proposed salmon farm because it’s where the company needed to install the pipes that would carry water for its fish tanks to and from Penobscot Bay.
After announcing its project in 2018, Nordic made plans to run its pipeline across land owned by Grace and Mabee’s neighbors two houses to the north, Richard and Janet Eckrote. But opponents unearthed deeds showing that through an unusual land sale in the 1940s, the mudflats at the Eckrotes’ shoreline remained part of the property now owned by Grace and Mabee. The couple sued to prevent Nordic from trespassing with its pipeline, and in February 2023, Maine’s highest court ultimately decided the case in favor of them and a group called Friends of Harriet L. Hartley Conservation Area to which they had granted a conservation easement.
Separately, Nordic had also convinced the city to use eminent domain to help secure access to the intertidal zone for the fish farm, which councilors supported based on the tax revenue, jobs and investment it would bring. But later in 2023, a Waldo County Superior Court justice remanded the eminent domain decision back to the city, which vacated it last April. Since then, the city also commissioned a survey of its border that affirmed earlier findings that some of the land it had tried to secure through eminent domain were outside its boundary.
Despite those victories, Mabee and Grace — now ages 75 and 80, respectively — aren’t exactly jumping for joy about Nordic’s announcement that it’s finally abandoning the project they’ve spent years fighting.
In the interview, they said that they are exhausted after the project disrupted many of their big life plans. Around the time it was announced, they’d been getting ready to put their waterfront home of 30 years on the market, downsize into a smaller property and use the money from the sale as a retirement fund following long careers as mental health counselors. They hoped to spend less time on the upkeep of their home and more of it with their kids and on travel.
But ultimately, Mabee and Grace decided they couldn’t sell their home, in part because of their own concerns about the environmental impacts of Nordic’s proposal, as well as the broader questions the development raised about the deed on their property. And since they wouldn’t be getting the money from the sale of their home, they also decided to delay their retirements.
They worry that the ongoing stress from their legal and other challenges has contributed to health issues they each suffered in recent years. They also resent the way that some supporters of Nordic’s project have portrayed them as NIMBYs, or not-in-my-backyard activists. They gratefully noted that their attorney, Kim Ervin Tucker, has done much of her work at a low rate.
“They made us out to be wealthy out-of-staters, summer people,” Grace said. “Never were we called environmentalists. Would we have turned down $1.3 million for our house if we weren’t environmentalists, if this hadn’t been about the environment?”
Mabee said that he has sometimes dreaded heading downtown out of fear he’d be ridiculed or confronted.
“Suddenly, I was in conflict with some of my friends, and many acquaintances,” Mabee said. “There were some pretty strong breaks between me and some of those people, which is really sad.”
Much as they’d like to start enjoying their golden years, they said they’re not ready to drop their guard yet. A number of outstanding lawsuits and other matters still have not been resolved in the Nordic case.
But even though Mabee and Grace are still consumed by Nordic’s project, one thing has become clear: it’s the multinational company that’s packing its bags.
“The moral of the story is, if you are going to propose building a half-billion-dollar project, don’t propose to construct it on land you do not own and have not [obtained] rights to use,” their attorney, Tucker, said in an email. “Nordic’s error was assuming that, because my clients are elderly and of modest means, they would not have the resources to fight Nordic taking their land. Nordic, its lawyers and allies, were wrong.”