Maine citizens and businesses have spent a fortune in recent years cleaning up its rivers, lakes and coastal waters, from constructing municipal waste water treatment plants to replacing faulty septic systems to controlling the disposal of waste produced by agricultural animals. Yet every summer a good-sized city is created on the Maine coast, a city whose sewer is the ocean.

It is estimated that more than 56,000 boats can be found along the Maine coast, of which one-third are large enough to have some type of marine toilet, from chemical-treatment devices to mere holding tanks. There is nothing to prevent these chemicals or raw sewage from being dumped overboard and an 11-year-old law requiring coastal marinas to provide pump-out facilities has been largely ignored — of the 300 yacht clubs and marinas in the state, only 20 have pump-outs.

One of the most sorely needed bills before the Legislature this session would put an end to this unacceptable situation. LD 2375, An Act to Rid Maine’s Waters of Ocean Vessel Sewage, sponsored by Sen. John Nutting of Androscoggin, sets up a series of steps that should lead to a discharge-free Maine coast within the next five years.

The bill gives the state Department of Environmental Protection one year, until January 2001, to review the availability of pumpout stations, to apply for federal grant money and to develop a plan for the construction, renovation and maintenance of those facilities, with 90-percent grants for publically owned marinas and 75 percent for commercial. By 2005, the DEP will have applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for designation of the 50 most significant Maine bays and harbors as “no discharge zones” and will present to the Legislature a plan to extend that designation to the entire Maine coast.

Rhode Island took this course in 1998. Already, that state has recieved more than $1 million in federal funds, which has been given out as $15,000 grants toward $20,000 construction projects. And already, Rhode Island has seen a substantial increase in clam flats open for digging.

Maine has worked hard to re-open its clam flats, yet despite all the treatment plants, septic improvements, even a law banning the dumping of sewage from motor homes, boat discharge remains legal and more than 200,000 acres of flats remain closed. L.D. 2375 is important, long-overdue legislation that addresses issues of public health, economic development and basic fairness. It has received the unanimous endorsement of the Committee on Natural Resources and — although it would be nice to see that five-year timetable shortened by a year or two — it deserves the same support from all lawmakers.