Watermen who brave the bay and the storms of winter are fearful of something: Martin O’Malley.
Some of them think the governor is about to shut them out of the oyster harvest – and turn over the remaining oyster beds to corporate interests. What’s got them upset is something called the Oyster Spatial Management Plan.
Letters, phone calls and resolutions are zinging out of the 14 Maryland counties where watermen work, sounding the alarm that O’Malley’s up to something. They don’t know for sure what the something is – they just know they probably won’t like it.
The Kent County Commissioners wrote the governor Tuesday, stating, “It has been brought to our attention that your administration is about to announce that the state is ready to take the oyster industry in a completely new direction.”
The commissioners urged that O’Malley hold off any action by the Department of Natural Resources to give the counties time to find out what changes are proposed.
The Upper Shore Regional Council (USRC) and the Maryland Oysterman’s Association both have written to the governor, too, pleading for more information and seeking a delay in any changes.
“The Oysterman’s Association raised serious questions regarding the possible identification of productive oyster bars into sanctuaries as a strategy of the Oyster Spatial Management Plan,” wrote John Dillman, executive director of the USRC.
Suspicions that O’Malley wants to turn oyster management over to corporate interests with links to his administration have been building for months within the watermens’ community.
At the Kent Commissioners meeting Tuesday, Ron Fithian recounted going to a recent fund-raiser on Water Street that O’Malley also attended. Fithian said there were several watermen present who’d been hired to do the cooking.
And, he said, one of the governor’s contributors came up to the watermen and asked them to tell him where the oyster beds in the Chester River are – because, the man said, they would be coming up for lease and he intended to buy them.
Fithian, himself once a waterman, said this went down like a bad oyster.
Commissioner William Pickrum said he hoped O’Malley’s oyster plans won’t prove to be like his plans for the Upper Shore Mental Health Center – where, no matter how much local opposition, it gets shoved through “come hell or high water.”
Fithian, too, said the oyster plan seems to be “the same attitude as that for the Upper Shore Center – the human side is not there.”
Fithian said he worries the Oyster Management Plan is “one more failed policy” from the Department of Natural Resources. “Hundreds of millions have been spent studying oysters,” he noted, adding that all the money ever does is go pay the salaries “of people who make a living out of research.”
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