November 26, 2018 — Walter Cruickshank, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, provided some details to an otherwise ambiguous map the agency released last week for potential offshore wind sites along the New York Bight Call area.
The map featured four sections of land off the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey and included shaded areas deemed as “primary recommendations” and “secondary recommendations.”
The labels left commissioners at the Port Authority confused.
“There’s secondary and primary leases,” Port Director Ed Washburn said at last week’s meeting. “We’re not exactly sure what secondary or primary means other than one they prefer over the other. We don’t know exactly why.”
In an interview with The Standard-Times earlier this week, Cruickshank elaborated on the map.
“It’s not a decision yet,” he said “But it’s things we want to get some feedback on before we make a decision on what areas we’ll conduct the environmental analysis on.”
The idea of primary and secondary areas, Cruickshank said, was to elicit discussion from stakeholders. However, they also represented areas where BOEM felt the least conflict existed among fishermen, wind developers, the Department of Defense, environmentalists and others claiming any kind of value in the areas.
The conflicts that arose in the areas not shaded at all, Cruickshank said, were too large to overcome.
“Any area you pick is still going to have some conflicts,” Cruickshank said. “This was the primary sort of our view where there might be some ability to manage conflict and move forward.”