On a recent weekday afternoon, fishermen sat around a large table at the New Bedford Port Authority, learning to fill out an online form that could entitle them to financial compensation from a company that some fishermen have treated as their sworn enemy.
Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind developer, is constructing a 62-turbine wind farm in the federal waters south of New Bedford, the nation’s most lucrative fishing port. Uncertainty around whether it’s safe to fish inside offshore wind farms have soured many fishermen to the industry, even as wind developers offer new sources of income to fishermen willing to take on surveying, navigation and safety work.
At the meeting at the port authority, a recently retired fisherman consulting for Vineyard Wind acknowledged this tension upfront.
“I know how a lot of people feel about offshore wind,” said Fred Mattera. “Believe me, if I could click my heels and it’ll all go away, I’d be clicking my heels like you can’t imagine.”
“But it’s not,” Mattera said.
In his new role, Mattera is helping former colleagues sign up for direct payments from a compensatory mitigation fund Vineyard Wind set up for fishermen affected by wind development. It is among the first of what could soon be more than a dozen compensation funds privately administered by offshore wind developers, all with different criteria for qualifying and unique formulas for calculating compensation.
The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is planning for 3,411 turbines across 2.4 million acres of federally managed ocean. BOEM requires developers to set aside funds to mitigate their impact on the fishing industry. But it has offered only loose guidance on how developers should disburse this money. The agency said it currently lacks the legal authority to hold funds from offshore wind developers and distribute them to fishermen.
The Vineyard Wind 1 project area, a 98-square mile stretch of ocean that begins 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, is not a major fishing ground for the New Bedford fleet. The port makes most of its income on scallops; the project area is more popular among fishermen who catch flounders, squid and clams.
Mike Calnan, the captain and owner of a dragger called the Rhiley Donn, said it’s the cumulative impact of dozens of offshore wind farms that is more daunting than potentially losing access to the Vineyard Wind 1 area.
Calnan said he appreciates Vineyard Wind’s offer to compensate fishermen upfront, without requiring them to demonstrate financial losses within a confined area. Another wind developer, Orsted, will require that level of proof to qualify for a separate fisheries compensation fund for the South Fork wind farm under construction nearby.
For Vineyard Wind’s program, Calnan and other fishermen will only need to prove they’ve finished inside the Vineyard Wind 1 project area during three of the last six years.
“It looks like they’re putting in a good effort towards making some amends with the areas that they’re ruining,” Calnan said.
The specific amounts fishermen will receive from Vineyard Wind have not been decided yet. Payments will be based on a fraction of each fishermen’s average annual income, to be calculated at a later date by an accounting firm, de maximis, that Vineyard Wind hired as the fund’s third-party administrator.
“It was really challenging to try to figure out because we all know the data that’s out there to show how much people make in different areas doesn’t really exist,” Vineyard Wind fisheries manager Crista Bank told fishermen at the New Bedford Port Authority.
“This is just the first compensation program,” Bank said. “By no means is this a perfect one.”
The payments are supposed to last until the recipient retires or the wind farm is disassembled, whichever comes first. The three pools of money Vineyard Wind set aside for fishermen in the northeast — $19.1 million for fishermen in Massachusetts, $4.2 for fishermen in Rhode Island and $3.3 million for fishermen in other states — is meant to last for the life of the program.
The checks go to boat owners only, though fund administrators said they are encouraging boat owners to share the money with their crews. The program may eventually expand to include shoreside businesses that service fishing vessels and seafood processing facilities.
But to start receiving checks this year, fishermen must be willing to sign a waiver that many in the industry eye with suspicion, which would waive their rights to sue Vineyard Wind for additional damages related to the loss of fishing income. Some have characterized the waiver as a way for the developer to pay a smaller sum upfront to avoid bigger liabilities down the road.
“A lot of people are saying please do not sign that waiver because you’re going to be impacted in the future in ways you can’t even see yet,” said John Haran, a well-known figure in New Bedford’s fishing industry, who handles regulatory work for a large group of groundfish vessels.
Other critics say it’s not realistic to expect independent boat owners to successfully navigate a heavily bureaucratic system based on the boundaries of wind farms — lines in the water that meant little to the fishermen prior to the industry’s emergence.
“The challenge with this sort of one off mitigation programs for individual projects is the burden that it puts on the fishermen to determine what developer they need to pursue for mitigation or loss,” said Gordon Carr, director of the New Bedford Port Authority.
Fishermen are stuck with this patchwork of private funds, in part, because Congress hasn’t set anything else up yet. While oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico pay into a federal fisheries mitigation fund, there’s no equivalent yet for the offshore wind industry.
There are bills in Congress seeking to set one up — including the COLLABORATE Act filed by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and another bill filed by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Seth Moulton — but Carr said he is not counting on the bills to win the bipartisan support they need to pass.
“It becomes a new appropriation by Congress at that point,” Carr said, “and we all know how difficult those are.”
Instead, a coalition of East Coast states are taking matters into their own hands.
Led by the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, an independent advocacy group, 11 states are planning a unified regional fund to replace the emerging patchwork of fisheries compensation funds set up by developers.
Kris Ohleth, executive director for the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, said the nation’s current approach to fisheries compensation is “complex, confusing and expensive.”
“So kind of all the things that we really wouldn’t want a fishing compensation program to be,” Ohleth said.
Several major wind developers have already endorsed the regional fund.
“Pretty much no one wants to continue to set up program after program,” Ohleth said. “Not only is it very costly – you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to set it up – but it’s very time consuming.”
The 11-state coalition would pool the various funds wind developers set aside for fishermen on the East Coast. It began reviewing applications this week for an administrator tasked with designing a unified claims process. According to procurement documents, the states are anticipating it’ll take at least two years to design this new model for compensating fishermen.