Water Fight

Faced with a growing problem with personal watercraft, a legislative task force several years ago heard hours of contentious debate and produced the Great Ponds Act. The act gave municipalities a way to petition the Legislature for local bans of the craft. The act worked fine for five years, but has since expired.

Recreating the legislation is unlikely. Despite the success of the act, the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee voted 11-2 to recommend that it not be reinstated. Members of the House of Representatives, which will consider the bill, LD 1675, as soon as today, would be wise to give this legislation another look.

The Great Ponds Act successfully reduced the number of complaints about motorized crafts, mostly personal watercraft, operating on the state’s inland waters. It did so by putting in place a consistent democratic process for considering requests from municipalities to regulate water bodies within their bounds. With the act’s expiration, individuals or towns can still ask legislators to push for such regulations, but they will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Given the act’s success, such a piecemeal approach does not make sense.

As Reps. Matt Dunlap and Ted Koffman write in Wednesday’s paper: “The Great Ponds statute once provided Maine town with an on-going cost-effective, democratic process for communities to regulate the use of motorized craft, including jet skis, on waters adjacent to their jurisdiction.”

Far from promoting Jet Ski bans, the act created a consistent process for considering such bans, a process that requires much public discussion. Before a proposal to ban or regulate personal watercraft on a Great Pond can be submitted to the Legislature, it must be discussed and voted on in a town meeting or similar forum. Once it reaches the Legislature, requests must meet the guidelines established in the act. The proposed rules would then be the subject of a public hearing at the State House. Rep. Dunlap, LD 1675’s sponsor, chair of the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee and a member of the committee that reviewed requests for Great Pond restrictions, said 50 municipalities succeeding in having new restrictions on watercraft approved. The number of complaints about such craft dropped by as much as 60 percent after the act was passed, he said.

Despite the act’s success, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is opposing its revival. A major IF&W argument is that the law is unfair to out-of-state property owners because they cannot vote at local town meetings. It is ironic that a Maine department is willing to put local year-round residents at a disadvantage by making it more difficult for them to enact restrictions for fear that a few out-of-state property owners will be upset.

Before the Great Ponds Act, complaints about jet skis took up a lot of lawmakers and IF&W’s time. Rep. Dunlap said he received 800 phone calls and 500 letters on personal watercraft before the act, many times more the correspondence he has received on much more important issues. The act put a good process in place. It worked and should be re-instated.