STONINGTON – For the past three decades, the Stonington Conservation Commission has managed the 29-acre Holt Pond Marsh as a nature preserve. It’s a place where residents and visitors can walk along a trail to view the wildlife.

For the past six years, however, the area has been beleaguered by all-terrain vehicles whose riders have widened and rutted the walking trail and driven across the marsh surface, leaving wide circles of dug-up ground behind.

Members of the commission have been frustrated in their efforts to discourage use of the trail by ATVs, according to Diane Walker, who chairs the commission.

“We tried signs. Those were destroyed repeatedly,” she said. “We got signs from the state that showed an ATV with a red line through. Those were destroyed as well.”

The commission even worked with a group of high school students to create natural barriers to keep ATVs off the trail.

“They just made a new path around them,” Walker said Tuesday.

Damage to public and private property is just one aspect of the problem ATVs pose on Deer-Isle-Stonington, according to Stonington Town Manager Richard Avery. Probably half of the ATVs in town are not registered, and many are being operated illegally on the public roadways.

“It happens a lot,” Avery said. “It’s troubling when you’re traveling at 50 mph and an ATV goes buzzing past you.”

No matter what the infraction, Avery said, little seems to be done about it.

“There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of enforcement,” he said.

The problem, of course, is not solely a local one.

Many communities around the state are facing similar pressures from ATV users. The problem is acknowledged by state officials and by ATV proponents, both of whom say those pressures are likely to increase.

“It’s certainly not a problem that is particular to that area,” said Mark Latti, spokesman for the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “As the popularity of ATVs grows, so do the number of problems.”

DIF&W’s Maine Warden Service is charged with enforcement of ATV regulations in off-road situations, although Latti noted that if the vehicles are being operated on public ways, any law enforcement agency can intervene.

Control of such vehicles, however, is not the main concern of the wardens, he said.

“The Legislature has told us to concentrate on the maintenance of fish and wildlife resources as our number one priority,” Latti said. “Recreational vehicle enforcement is not our primary responsibility as defined by the Legislature two years ago.”

The department tries to work with local groups and towns, he said, “but with just 95 wardens around the state, there’s only so much we can do.”

That does not mean that the department has ignored the issue. The Maine Warden Service has cooperated with several communities in an effort to ease the problems caused by ATVs. In Sanford, for example, wardens cooperated with the Police Department to obtain grant money to set up local road checks.

The combined effort of wardens in the woods, local police on the roads and a plane in the air helped to eliminate some of the problem of ATVs operating on private property Latti said.

The department also works with local ATV clubs to present educational programs on the proper operation of such vehicles, although he admitted it is difficult to measure how effective those are.

“The ATV riders are where snowmobile riders were 20 to 30 years ago,” Latti said. “The snowmobilers worked with landowners to develop an area to ride in. ATV riders need to do the same before all the land is posted against them.”

Posting land is the worst thing that could happen, according to Maurice Sargent, president of ATVMaine, a coalition of local ATV clubs around the state which has urged stricter enforcement of existing rules as well as a cooperative efforts between private land owners and local ATV riders.

“The bigger we get, the more we need to work with landowners to find solutions that everybody can live with,” Sargent said Tuesday.

The problem, he said, is that ATV owners need a place to ride. If they have a trail, they’ll use it, “but if there’s no trail, they’re going to ride somewhere, and that’s wrong.”

New regulations are not the answer, Sargent said. He believes there are enough regulations to protect landowners, but also said that enforcement is a problem. His organization has advocated for higher ATV registration fees that could be used for increased enforcement of existing regulations.

That does not solve the problem of where ATV riders will ride.

“If we can give them a trail in an area where they have minimum impact on the land and the landowners, there’s a better chance of controlling it so that it doesn’t cause a lot of problems,” he said.

ATVMaine, working through its local clubs, has helped to reach agreements with landowners around the state that provide trails for ATV riders.

Five local ATV clubs in central Maine, for example, worked together with International Paper Co. to establish 400 miles of legal trails on IP land. That was two years ago, he said, and so far, it has been working well.

The same process can work with landowners with smaller tracts, and other local clubs around the state have been able to negotiate similar, though smaller scale, trail agreements, he said.

The particular difficulty in areas such as Stonington, he said, is that there is no organized club there.

“There’s nobody to talk to down there,” he said. “If anyone down there could talk to an ATV rider and get them interested in starting a club, we could help them get going.”