Wildlife refuges in Maine feeling federal budget pinch

OLD TOWN – Tom Comish is running practically a one-man show these days at Sunkhaze Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

It stretches about 100 miles north to south. Four employees used to help Comish manage the land, tend the trails and protect an area that is home to some 200 bird species and a peat bog up to 18 feet deep in places.

But there is not enough money to pay them anymore.

“I just can’t do a whole lot,” said Comish, the refuge’s director. “Some jobs need more than one set of hands.”

The refuge includes some 330 acres in Benton, an additional 55 acres in Unity and the 1,068-acre Carlton Pond Waterfowl Production Area in Waldo County.

Boardwalks that were built at the Sunkhaze refuge in 1996 are beginning to deteriorate, and Comish has no funds or staff to help repair them.

Other federal refuges in Maine are finding themselves in a similar situation, and it doesn’t look like things are going to get any better.

Without additional funding, Maine’s national wildlife refuges may not have enough money for adequate staffing, site management, research or even for fuel in the coming budget year.

Money for the 2004 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, was only recently allocated, according to Dick Dyer, regional program supervisor in Amherst, Mass., for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the refuges.

“That’s problematic in and of itself,” Dyer said. “We don’t know specific budget figures for ’05,” which starts Oct. 1. But he anticipates a $1.5 million shortfall in the 2005 operational budget for the Northeast region alone.

“And ’06 is probably going to be worse,” he said. “I’ve been with the service 28 years, and I’m looking at probably the toughest budget concerns I’ve seen.”

In Down East Maine, Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge is a major stopping point for migratory birds – and tourists.

“There’s a lot of politics involved,” said Bob Peyton, deputy director. “One thing that’s very important that we need to get across to everybody is that we’re going to be hurting as a system.”

Limited funding is nothing new for the staff that manages Maine’s approximately 50,000 acres of refuge lands. Moosehorn has lost three employees in the past year because of funding shortages and the need to satisfy higher priorities. The three had helped to manage and maintain the refuge property and programs, a task that is now left up to Peyton.

As employees are shifted to higher-priority refuges in the system, 15 percent to 20 percent of the refuge posts in the Northeast remain vacant.

“This type of scenario has been occurring to the refuge system for many years,” Comish said. “Thus, the amount of money which can be used to manage any given refuge becomes less every year.”

This results in funds being taken from other areas of refuges’ service budgets, such as travel, seasonal staff and general operations. The priority level of a refuge is determined by looking at the size of the refuge, the nature of the programs that go on there and the history of the site, Dyer said.

“What we try to do is determine where the greatest wildlife need is, where can we get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of wildlife conservation,” Dyer said.