Going for gold

The award for best question to the Land Use Regulation Commission in 1997 should have gone to the gentleman who asked whether he needed a permit to practice the hobby of gold dredging. LURC’s answer, put diplomatically, was, Let us get back to you, but it could have been excused for responding with, What the heck is gold dredging?

Turns out that gold dredging — actually, motorized recreational gold prospecting — is a more elaborate version of panning or sluicing for gold, only dredging comes with horsepower. Prospectors set up in a river a platform with a 5 or 8 or 11 hp engine to run a dredge and, on some, an air supply. Enthusiasts don wetsuits and spend hours at a time sucking up a river bed and sluicing the results in the search for flecks of gold. Not a profitable pursuit, but, apparently, an enjoyable one. Approximately 250 people in Maine are involved in it, which is most popular in western Maine rivers that tend to have more gravel than silt and have lots of spring runoff.

LURC in ’97 came up with a makeshift permit process for the hobby, essentially the permit needed for disturbing a river during construction, and its staff set to work to understand dredging. Next month, the commission is expected to decide whether the results of that work, in the form of a set of standards developed by the staff, are sufficient. If the commission approves the standards, they will go into effect in early August.

Chances are excellent that the standards will turn out not to be sufficient, given Maine’s inexperience with the hobby, but the commission should approve the staff’s plan anyway. It provides a good base for future rulemaking, it took into consideration comments from groups opposed to the plan and kept in perspective the scope of the potential problems. It is a reasonable, even commendable, first try.

The staff plan borrowed heavily from rules in California, where dredging has been popular for many years. It proposes to ban the hobby in rivers less than 4 feet across, in those with Atlantic salmon and within the state’s jurisdiction for the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. A rule requiring prospectors to return the riverbed to the approximate condition of when they started may be unique to Maine. Based on recommendations by Trout Unlimited, it would add Class AA waters to the ban list and shorten the dredging season, moving back the starting date from May 25 to June 15 to ensure ample time for spring spawning. The season would end Sept. 15.

Opponents of the LURC staff recommendations want the prospectors to get permits in addition to meeting these standards, to better keep track of who is doing the dredging and what the effects are. Their concerns are entirely understandable, and some form of record-keeping probably would be needed if the hobby grows. But the fact is that prospectors, in small numbers, have been on Maine rivers for years without anyone much noticing them. Before adding what is essentially a hurdle to reduce their numbers, LURC should have more evidence of actual environmental harm.

(The prospectors, for their part, argue that their hobby confers benefits to the environment by, for instance, capturing through their sluicing process toxins like liquid mercury, by releasing from the riverbed invertebrates to feed fish downstream and by loosening the bottom to improve spawning grounds for salmonoids.)

Given the relatively few people involved in the hobby, the rulemaking for gold dredging is unusually complicated. The LURC staff deserves credit for taking the issue this far, but might also emphasize the following points:

The rivers might belong to the public, but the land under them is the property of private landowners. And those landowners are responsible for the condition of the flora and fauna on their land — whether it is on a mountaintop or under three feet of water. Prospectors should always seek permission before using any river.

The people working the dredges may take up only a small portion of a remote river while practicing their hobby, but they need to remember that their footprint is large. In addition to environmental concerns, prospectors take up a lot of space because the engines on their platforms are noisy and therefore annoying to anyone nearby looking for a little peace and quiet. Maine has plenty of room for everyone, but only if courtesy precedes self-interest.

The LURC rules will almost certainly need revision if this hobby attracts significantly more people or new information about it emerges. Given the uncertainty of the effect of the dredging, it might be helpful for the commission to establish a formal date for reviewing the effectiveness of its rules and opening up the rules to public comment.