COHASSET — September 29, 2026 — Sewer Commission officers and a longtime harbor researcher told the Cohasset Select Board on Tuesday that the shellfish management plan the town signed with Scituate leaves Cohasset exposed, rejecting a town counsel statement, read aloud at the board’s harbor forum, that neither the plan nor the intermunicipal agreement behind it puts the town at risk of liability.
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Chair David Farrag read town counsel’s statement, posted days earlier, answering concerns that the June 2025 intermunicipal agreement with Scituate exposes Cohasset to liability tied to the harbor and the town’s wastewater treatment plant.
Counsel wrote that the town’s only new obligation was executing the conditional area management plan, or CAMP, which governs shellfishing in parts of Cohasset Harbor and requires only that the town notify the Division of Marine Fisheries of plant discharges, as existing permits already do. The agreement obliges Scituate to make aquaculture licensees hold Cohasset harmless and carry insurance, counsel wrote, and where the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act’s exemptions do not apply, liability is capped at $100,000.
Two Sewer Commissioners, Chair Bill McGowan and Paul Kierce, said the commission was never consulted on the agreements or asked to sign them. Kierce said anyone suing, whether from Scituate or the oyster farms, would pursue the plant’s contract operator and sewer ratepayers, and said Gulf River pollution far exceeds anything the plant releases, citing a past count of 12 or 13 open pipes from homes into the river.
Kierce said the commission recommended about a year and a half ago that the town gather CAMP agreements from three other towns with sewer plants on the water and was told a new draft would come to it for review. That never happened, he said. The commission is now working with the town manager and its contractor on policies and reporting needed to conform to the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, which the CAMP cites and which calls for continual compliance, not reports only after an adverse event. Who bears any added cost is unresolved, the member said.
The sharpest challenge came from Brian Host, a Gallatin, Tennessee, resident who has researched the harbor for more than 15 years and presented the forum’s history segment.
Absent a CAMP, there’s no approved growing area. Absent an approved growing area, there are no oysters. Absent oysters, there is no exposure.
— Brian Host 42:46
Host said the CAMP, signed by Cohasset in July 2025 and Scituate in April 2026, is a 2021 draft on a former governor’s letterhead, a format the Division of Marine Fisheries replaced with a standard form in 2023, and cites national shellfish regulations from 2019 that a 2023 revision superseded. Citing state tests at two Briggs Harbor stations, he reported fecal coliform scores of 71 and 80 in 2025 against a legal limit of 32, then 50 and 52, and said back-to-back failures require closure, yet the areas remain open. Host urged a current CAMP approved by the Sewer Commission and said the oyster farms may need to move to deeper water.
Tim Davis, a former Harbor Committee chair said Scituate shellfish interests sought a small farm in Briggs Harbor about six years ago, then published a chart showing 32 one-acre plots in Cohasset Harbor. Lina Goldberg asked whether the board had obtained a legal opinion of counsel before the agreement was executed. No board member answered the question on the record.
