In Wake Of Vote On Fertilizer Ban, Town Pitches New Regulations

Nantucket voted to ban fertilizer from the island last week, with the sole exception of farmland, following an intense debate at the 2022 Town Meeting surrounding the connection between the bright green lawns of island properties and the declining health of Nantucket Harbor’s eelgrass.

It remains to be seen whether the proposed ban, which will be submitted to the state as a home rule petition, has any chance of passage in Boston.

But the town’s Health and Natural Resources Departments jumped right back into the controversial topic on Wednesday, proposing a series of amendments to bolster the town’s fertilizer regulations that were approved back in 2012. With the town's municipal attorney and others asserting that the ban is unlikely to pass muster with the state, the new regulations were brought forward as a fallback plan that would allow the town to still address the growing concerns around harbor and fertilizer runoff.

The topic of enforcement of those regulations - current and future - dominated the discussion. There were 800 inspections of commercial fertilizer applicators on Nantucket conducted by the town’s Health Department in the four years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Health Director Roberto Santamaria said.

Yet those 800 inspections resulted in just one enforcement action. The rest were issued warnings or no action was taken.

"The regulations, though effective, rely on self policing and self reliance," Santamaria said. "It's really the honor code is what it ends up being...It is hard to catch people as they do it. Once they’re on private property, we can’t cross that.”

While the new regulations wouldn’t address that aspect of enforcement specifically, they would allow the Health and Natural Resources departments to better monitor and track the fertilizer applications being done around the island, and, potentially, make it easier to hold people accountable to the regulations.

The proposed amendments include:

• New reporting requirements to track what was spread, when, how much, and where.
• New inspections of locations where licensed companies are storing or stockpiling fertilizer
• Shorten the term of the town’s fertilizer applicator license from three years to one.
• New requirements for vendors to mark products for BMP (Nantucket Best Management Practices) compliance in the store.

“This would allow us to request the records or have them filed on a yearly basis to have something to check against,” said Jeff Carlson, the town’s Natural Resources Director. “To have a check and balance and curtail any dishonest reporting, also trying to provide the ability for stockpiles of product at places of business to be inspected as a requirement of licensure. To say we want to see what you have, we want to see it’s leaving...and compare reports to see if you said you started with 200 pounds, and you applied 160 pounds,, we should still see 40 pounds. Why is there only 10 pounds left on the lot, where is the rest? And try to be able to track it that way.”

Carlson and Santamaria added that they would also like to take a new approach to outreach regarding the fertilizer regulations, both to commercial applicators and homeowners, while enhancing its relationship with the UMass Extension Nutrient Management program, and empowering a new town position that will be focused in part on education and outreach around fertilizer regulations.

“We really want to follow good science and good principles,” Carlson said. “ We don’t want to regulate for the sake of regulation.”

The amendments proposed by Carlson and Santamaria on Wednesday must go to the Board of Health for review, followed by the Nantucket Planning & Economic Development Commission, and if endorsed by those bodies, be submitted to the state and UMass for final sign-off.

Bringing the regulations forward now, Carlson added, will allow the town to get the ball rolling on addressing the fertilizer issue, even as the ban passed by Town Meeting works its way through the legislative process.

"We wanted to wait for Town Meeting, to see the result of that, but more importantly from our end, we want to be prepared either way," Carlson said. "If it continues at the state house, we'll be prepared, if not, to provide a better program here to address those concerns."

The petition to ban fertilizer was originally sponsored by the town’s Natural Resources Department hatchery technician Joe Minella. The debate at Town Meeting elicited impassioned pleas from environmental advocates and scallopers alike for its passage. They believe that runoff of fertilizer from green island lawns is loading the harbor with nutrients like nitrogen that cause excessive algae blooms and choke out the eel grass, which is critical habitat for Nantucket’s bay scallops. The island’s scallop fishery hit a near record low this year in bushels landed.

The Finance Committee had attempted to amend the article from a ban on fertilizer - which Town Counsel John Giorgio said had a slim to no chance of passing at the State House - to a simple request to the state to give Nantucket two years to develop new regulations in conjunction with UMass.