In an annual rite of summer that is both ancient and tiresome, the Maine wild blueberry industry’s need to irrigate is clashing with other users of the state’s lakes and ponds. Equally ancient and tiresome is the explanation that unusually dry weather this summer – or last summer or the summer before that – makes the heavy water withdrawals a temporary, though unfortunate, necessity.

The flashpoint this year, as in years gone by, is Schoodic Lake, in the heart of the Downeast blueberry region. The state’s two largest growers, Cherryfield Foods and Jasper Wyman & Son, draw water from the 389-acre lake; camp owners and others who use the lake for recreation say years of withdrawals have turned once-sparkling Schoodic into a murky, tepid, algae-infested bog. Both companies have been in compliance with their state water-withdrawal permits, both have pulled their pumps, but the murk remains.

This same scenario is played out anywhere in Maine where agriculture and others users must share water resources. And played out and played out.

If you could water crops with talk, Maine would be in perpetual mud season. In 1997, when the federal government agreed to a state conservation plan for Atlantic salmon in lieu of an Endangered Species Act listing, state and federal officials promised that significant progress on the water withdrawal issue was a top priority. The very next summer, the state plan’s first real test, crucial salmon rivers were drained and from that time on the scrapping of the state plan was inevitable.

In 1999, Gov. King promised a plan to significantly increase irrigation capacity with wells, storage ponds and impoundments by the end of that year. There may be such a plan to store the ample water that falls upon the state nine months of the year (roughly four feet), but the actual storage needed for the remaining three has yet to occur. To its credit, the blueberry industry has spent considerable money developing alternate sources and monitoring its water withdrawals, but, in the absence of any substantial state investment, it clearly is not enough.

The situation is not tiresome merely because it is ongoing, but because the same impediments to progress are left in place and the same mistakes keep getting made. It is often observed, for example, that part of the Schoodic problem is that half of the lake is under the jurisdiction of the Land Use Regulation Commission, which has water withdrawal rules, and the other half is under the Department of Environmental Protection, which does not. The answer to this hoary problem seems obvious, but apparently not to the political leaders who could solve it.

It would one thing if the low water levels in Schoodic and other lakes and ponds were delivering some kind of return on investment – that is, a robust blueberry crop. The fact that the expected harvest has plunged from a hearty 100-million pound estimate of a month ago to 60 million now – this while the withdrawals were taking place -ought to be evidence that what’s being done is not working.

The root of the entire problem, though, is that the agriculture industry and the responsible state officials have it backwards. Water for extensive irrigation is demanded nearly every summer, yet the occasional damp summer is viewed as the norm and the norm – hot, dry weather in July and August – as the exception. That’s pretty much why they call it summer. Rite?