By agreeing last week to reopen the 1999 management plan to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, Maine and the National Park Service are returning to basics. The ensuing debate is likely to be loud and prolonged, but in the end it should be preferable to the chronic complaining and scheming that has characterized the disagreement over the use of this priceless state resource.

The agreement last week came after the state failed to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to replace the old Churchill Dam with a modern concrete version in 1998. Overlooking the need for federal consent, in hindsight, shouldn’t have been a surprise. The memorandum of agreement that reopens the management plan is “generally consistent with the preservation of outstanding resource values under the state Allagash statute and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (WSRA).”

But then it gets to the real point a couple of paragraphs later, when it says the state will “[d]evelop recommendations for additions to the 1999 Management Plan on how the WSRA and federal guidelines on WSRA rivers should be interpreted and applied to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, specifically dams, bridges, and buildings and the type of and number of access points, with the understanding that a number of vehicle access points will remain and that access in some areas of the waterway will be less than 500 feet.”

That single sentence could be worth years of public hearings. It is a reminder that the ’99 plan, which took decades to appear and was hotly debated when approved, forgot too often that Maine agreed to certain federal guidelines that would help determine the course of the way the river is treated. This is what conservationists have been saying all along. But just so no conservationist feels too good about the agreement, the final clause of the sentence makes it clear that the major issue in contention – convenient access – is not nearly settled. The question of how many access points should be allowed (Two? Ten?) or even how many there are currently (Ten? Fourteen?) was helpfully narrowed in the agreement to “a number,” which should keep all those hearings going until late at night.

The ’99 management plan, the first in the history of the Allagash, required seven rewrites over three years. Though it contains 130 separate strategies in nine areas, all anyone wanted to know at the time was whether John’s Bridge would be officially opened, officially closed or something in between. The plan chose open, producing much of the conservationists’ energy to inspect the waterway more closely, which in turn produced the discovery of the missing dam permit. The agreement uses some of its most careful wording about access at the bridge. It says, “Any development of the access at the proposed Churchill Lake canoe access site, T9R12 (aka John’s Bridge)” will be set well back from the river. Will there be development or won’t there?

Park Service officials were smart enough to let Maine wrestle with the details of managing the Allagash. The debate will be intense, but if all sides enter it in the spirit of making the Allagash a more valuable place for Maine, the result should be a stronger document – eventually.