June 11, 2025 — Last Tuesday, multiple New Jersey fishermen and other groups — including Belford Seafood Co-op in Middletown — sued U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum for his sudden reversal to allow construction on Empire Wind farm to proceed.
You can read the lawsuit here.
Empire Wind will be a very large (80,000 acres of ocean) wind farm 19 miles off Long Branch, a distance too far out for turbines to be visible from shore. Empire Wind is owned by Norwegian renewable energy company Equinor, which has a contract with New York state to provide electricity to homes on Long Island.
On April 16, Burgum issued a halt-work order to Empire Wind, citing President Trump’s ban on all new offshore wind development, which Trump announced on his very first day in office.
But then just one month later, on May 20, the Trump administration reversed course and lifted the order. Reuters reported last week Equinor was allowed to proceed because of a deal Burgum and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reached where she agreed to allow canceled plans for a natural gas pipeline in New York state to be revived. In return, Empire Wind could resume work it already started, which includes laying rock on the sea floor.
The June 3 lawsuit seeks to have the stop-work order reinstated. In addition to Belford Seafood Co-op, many familiar Jersey Shore names and commercial fishing companies signed on, including:
Clean Ocean Action (the same group that hosts beach clean-ups every spring); Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach; the “Miss Belmar” fishing and sightseeing boat, which docks in Neptune under Captain Alan Shinn; Lund’s Fisheries in Cape May and Seaside Park Mayor John Peterson, a Republican.
Commercial fishermen in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Long Island also joined the lawsuit.
The lawsuit sues the United States of America, Interior Secretary Burgum, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, under acting director Walter Cruickshank, Equinor and the kingdom of Norway.