By Janet Krenn
Ed Mullis of B&C Seafood fishes for scallops and would prefer to land his catch in his hometown of Newport News. Fishing regulations, however, limit the number of days he can be at sea to 35. Travel to the fishing grounds takes one day out and one day back.
“That travel comes off of our days at sea,” he says. If he spends a day traveling back to Newport News, “We’re penalized with our fishing effort.” So he lands his catch up north in ports like New Bedford, Massachusetts, but he worries that landing elsewhere puts strain on the dockside community back home, the welders, mechanics, ice vendors, and others who rely on ships offloading at their location to make a living. Those water-dependent industries are just a couple examples of who makes up the working waterfront. For Mullis, however, working waterfronts aren’t just industries.
“Working waterfronts are people,” he said to the other 140-plus attendees at the Working Waterfronts Workshop last Wednesday. The Workshop, hosted at Virginia Institute of Marine Science and remotely accessed at the Eastern Shore Community College, attracted members of Virginia’s commercial and recreational businesses, lawyers, planners, zoning administrators, and agencies all concerned about the loss of access and infrastructure for water-based businesses.
Federal regulations is only part of the challenge for working waterfronts. Local ordinances, confusing jurisdictional lines, and increasing costs of business are straining seafood and recreational operations that depend on the water. It’s a complicated web of challenges that make it difficult for businesses to identify where to begin to start solving them.
As one attendee stated during open discussion, “Part of the problem is knowing what is the problem.” (Emphasis added)
Gathering feedback on what issues businesses and communities see and ideas for addressing those problems was one of the goals of the meeting, said Virginia’s Coastal Zone Management Program (CZM) Manager Laura McKay, whose organization led in planning the event. Virginia CZM, their partners, and Virginia’s coastal localities are half-way through a five-year process to develop a plan to help preserve working waterfronts. While the first couple of years focused on defining what working waterfronts are and raising awareness, McKay told the audience, “We’re now looking for localities interested in being a pioneer.”
The pioneers would work with Virginia CZM to pilot-test some of the suggestions made at the workshop and policy tools that have been compiled by the national working waterfronts movement. These include strategies for taxing, zoning, financing, or regulating working waterfronts, which can be found on the National Working Waterfronts Network Website (www.wateraccusus.com).
The working waterfronts issue came to the foreground back in 2007, when Virginia Sea Grant and Virginia CZM joined forces to host the first workshop. Out of that meeting came a definition that captured the importance of waterfronts to recreational and commercial businesses. Since then, the issue gained momentum on a national level. National conferences in 2010 and 2013 have drawn researchers, extension agents, community leaders, and planners to compare notes on waterfront challenges from across the nation and form a national working waterfronts coalition. The group launched the National Working Waterfronts Network website as a social network and resource sharing site in 2013.
“We’ve come a long way,” Tom Murray told the crowd at Wednesday’s meeting. Murray has been involved in the issue since the beginning. Murray, Marine Resource Economist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Extension Partner with Virginia Sea Grant, has been working on the issue since the beginning. From organizing meetings on the national and local levels, to helping planning district commissions inventory their working waterfronts infrastructure in Maryland and Virginia. “But we still have a long way to go.”
The next step in the journey is testing out some solutions with a volunteer community.
