Wearisome WUMP

Back in 1997, when the federal government accepted a state conservation plan for Atlantic salmon in lieu of an Endangered Species Act listing, it was clear the impact of agricultural irrigation on salmon habitat was among the most crucial problems to be addressed.

Two years later, the King administration promised a plan to increase irrigation capacity without damaging that habitat. One year after that, the federal government yanked the state plan and imposed the ESA listing, with a lack of significant progress on the irrigation issue a major factor.

This week, the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission approved a Water Use Management Plan, or WUMP, developed under the guidance of the State Planning Office, for the watersheds of Washington County, the place where the integrity of salmon habitat and the needs of the blueberry industry for irrigation are most in conflict. Anyone looking forward to reading a document that combines technical minutia and broad generalities will enjoy these 95 pages. Anyone expecting significant progress will be disappointed.

The WUMP is not so much a plan as it is a plan to plan. It calls for plans to plan for an encyclopedic range of water-use matters: to monitor flows in the Narraguagus, Pleasant and Machias rivers; to implement flow-monitoring strategies; to assess salmon habitat impacts; to integrate water withdrawal needs into state policies and to eliminate conflicting regulations; to assist farmers in water management; to research blueberry water needs. Not to do these things, mind you,

but to plan to do them.

At several points, the WUMP’s juxtaposition of exceedingly fine data and broad generalities is jarring. The document claims that the amount of land used for blueberry cultivation in these watersheds is known down to the square foot, the amount of water needed for irrigation to the gallon. Yet, for all that, there is no data on which specific blueberry fields are best suited for the two options to surface-water withdrawal – wells and impoundments. Beneath the veneer of numbers, charts and graphs, one statement betrays the shallowness: The basis for the data on blueberry irrigation needs “is solely from growers who have come forward on their own. No systematic grower survey was conducted.”

Maine government is in the habit, to put it charitably, of mistaking studying a problem for actually solving it. Sometimes, a grumbling public accepts this inertia.

This time, given that the region in question is one of the state’s poorest, it is unacceptable. Still, say this for the WUMP – it clearly identifies the problem. And it looks exactly as it did back in 1997.