As a resident of Belfast, I am disappointed - but not surprised - to hear that Nordic Aquafarms filed a lawsuit against the City of Belfast on May 16, exactly one month after Nordic CEO Brenda Chandler and Nordic employee Ed Cotter spoke at the April 16 Belfast City Council meeting about what great neighbors Nordic had been and would be in the future.

I guess that seven-year romance is over.

And so, after coughing up more than $120,000 in legal bills defending Nordic Aquafarms, the City of Belfast will now spend more taxpayer dollars to defend itself from the very same Nordic Aquafarms.

Well, there is a way the city could pay for at least some of those legal bills. It could rescind its May 7 decision to waste $5,000 on revisiting the location of the Belfast-Northport town line, an utterly futile exercise the city undertook in an effort to salvage the ill-advised eminent domain action it took in order to take land from 43-year Belfast residents Judith Grace and Jeffrey Mabee, and hand it over to Nordic.

But the Belfast-Northport town line was firmly established by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in a February 16, 2023 ruling, and instead of wasting $5,000 on that nonsense, the city council could use those funds for the May 16 Nordic lawsuit.

Or the city council could simply throw the money out a city hall window. That way at least some Belfast residents would benefit.

Lawrence Reichard lives in Belfast