When the Lubec Shellfish Committee held its first meeting of the year Monday, members got right to work on a new conservation effort to support the clam
harvest.
Last year, the Board of Selectmen approved funding to establish a clam flat seeding program that is to place as many as 30,000 clams on three plots. The project is expected to launch in the spring with seeds purchased from the Downeast Institute.
Before then, Kyle Pepperman, the institute’s executive director, is set to give a presentation on clam ecology, flats management and best practices for seeding when the Shellfish Committee meets Feb. 2. We plan to cover that meeting and will keep you posted as the project develops.
We will also keep you posted on the continuing work in Washington County to untangle years of financial mismanagement, much of which is outlined in the 2022 audit that commissioners recently accepted.
According to the audit, accounting deficiencies include inadequate reconciliation of cash accounts, improper cash‑posting dates, lack of signature approval on invoices, the absence of an accounting policies and procedures manual and missing procedures to control the carryover of surplus funds from year to year.
All of the same warnings were raised in the 2021 audit and, before that, in 2020. They also appear in the 2020 audit for the county’s unorganized territories.
This week, we detail those deficiencies and what changes the county auditor recommends to improve these entrenched practices.
As we approach our third month of Monitor Local, we hope you are enjoying this newsletter.
We also hope you will consider applying for our new community reporting fellowship, focused on western and Downeast Maine.
We are interested in working with people who want to cover local news in their communities but need some journalism training to get started.
The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting is joining Journalism New England’s Career Lab on a three‑month local journalism program to provide hands‑on training for aspiring community reporting fellows who will contribute to The Maine Monitor’s Monitor Local coverage.
The training program will teach participants the foundations of journalism and give them the opportunity to work directly with an editor on reporting, interviewing, writing and story revisions.
Fellows will cover town council meetings, school budget debates, zoning discussions, tax deliberations and more. Their work may be published by Monitor Local and Journalism New England during the training period, with the potential for continued paid contributions to Monitor Local, which is distributed each Saturday in the Downeast Monitor and Western Maine Monitor newsletters.
This is a great opportunity for people who want to become more involved in their communities and help inform their neighbors about issues that matter to them.
More information about this program and a link to fill out an application are here.
We encourage you to share this newsletter with family members and friends. They can sign up on our website to have their own delivered each Saturday.
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