By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
Officials in Portland and South Portland are discussing a major dredging project for Portland Harbor as a possible means of boosting a waning working waterfront.
“The problem is we can’t have a working waterfront if we don’t have any water,” said Joe Schmader, president of Gowen Marine in Portland. “It gets worse every year and I’ve been on the waterfront since 1968.”
Kip Reynolds, co-owner of South Port Marine in South Portland, said it’s important the  waterfront stay viable.
“Maine as a whole has chosen the marine and boat industry as one of their key economic industries,” Reynolds said. “It just gets more difficult all the time.”
Portland Harbor’s private piers provide $100,000 in tax revenue per year, but the buildup of sediment and stormwater runoff has made it difficult for boats to navigate around the piers and wharves, affecting waterfront businesses, Portland Harbor Commission Chairman Jon Kachmar said, addressing Portland Community Chamber members last week.  
Many of the smaller pier owners cannot afford to dredge their shorelines, largely because of an expensive permitting process that requires the material to be tested for contaminants and biological organisms before dredging can begin. For an individual pier owner, testing required by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Environmental Protection Agency can cost between $80,000 and $100,000, Kachmar said. Testing dictates whether the material can be disposed at sea or upland and used as fill. Upland disposal can cost up to $20 per cubic yard of material, Kachmar said.  
A dredge committee – a subcommittee of the Waterfront Alliance – is exploring a proposal to build an alternative disposal site that would eliminate the need for testing.
“What we’re anticipating is pier owners would pay the dredging cost - literally the picking up the muck and putting it onto the barge,” said Kachmar. “Our next primary objective is to identify what the actual dredge needs are and get a better idea of the actual amounts in the private pier areas. We have conceptually developed a funding proposal that would have the pier owner pay their fair share.”
Kachmar said the hope is to “piggyback” the local effort with the federal dredging of the harbor’s main shipping channel, planned for 2010. Up to 700,000 cubic yards of material will be removed from the federal channel and disposed at sea, a process conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers every 10 years. Kachmar estimates between 200,000 to 300,000 cubic yards of additional material need to be removed from the harbor’s shoreline.
The major expense will be developing an alternative disposal site and there are currently no local, state or federal dollars available for the project, Kachmar said. An engineered confined aquatic disposal (CAD) cell or a pit dug below the sea floor, filled with the contaminated sediments and capped with a clean layer of sand, could cost between $3 and $5 million to build, but would likely be sufficient to meet all of the harbor’s dredging needs, Kachmar said. The method has proven successful in Boston, Mass. and Providence, R.I. and because the sediment by definition tends to sink, caps are proving unnecessary, he said.
Kachmar said a possible location for the CAD cell could be in the federal channel, probably somewhere between Spring Point Light and the Casco Bay Bridge.  
There needs to be local support for the proposal before approaching congressional delegates for federal earmarks, Kachmar said.
“We are headed there,” he said. “Why we haven’t been there I think, is we just haven’t had the wherewithal from the municipalities.”
Portland Mayor Ed Suslovic said both cities need to approach the process in lock step.
“If we both go to D.C. and say, ‘This is our number one priority,’ it makes the whole process go a whole lot better,” Suslovic said.
He also said revenues generated from the renovation of the Maine State Pier should go toward working waterfront initiatives.
“It would be safe to say that there are locations along the South Portland side that will want to look at what opportunities will present themselves if one of the proposals works out to be cost effective to do it,” said South Portland Transportation and Waterfront Director Tom Meyers.
Mike Soucy of Port Harbor Marine in South Portland said his pier does have a sediment problem, but it’s largely due to backwash from tug boats pulling large tankers to Portland Pipeline Corporation. Portland Pipeline has already paid to dredge, he said.
“I will have to dredge my property at some point,” Soucy said. “It’s going to affect everybody on the harbor.”
Reynolds, who owned a marine construction company, dredged his shoreline in 1997 and said the permitting process has become more complicated and more expensive since then.
“We have some street runoff that dumps into our facility, but we also had a lot of damage from the Patriots’ Day storm,” Reynolds said. “We’re looking at doing some additional dredging in here and just starting the permitting process now.”
Kachmar said Sprague Energy officials are also exploring their options, although dredging is currently just the cost of doing business for them.
“We are still in the planning phase and the issue has come up with some of the oil terminals that they would like the option,” he said. “They’re certainly interested and it really has to do with how much material we have harbor-wide and how much disposal space we have.”