BANGOR – With less than three months left for comment on proposed revisions to the state’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway Management Plan, disagreement remained Tuesday as to whether minor tweaking or substantial changes are needed.

How to balance recreational and commercial uses while maintaining the wilderness nature in and around the Allagash River remains a contentious issue for the 23-member advisory council looking at revisions to the 1999 plan.

“The whole idea is to bury the hatchet on a very old, long-standing issue,” David Soucy, director of the state’s Bureau of Parks and Lands, said after the committee’s daylong meeting at Bangor’s Ramada Inn on Tuesday.

The proposed revisions call for eliminating some access points to the river and establishing a review process for man-made structures that don’t fit in with the wild designation of the area. Resisting the temptation to make changes throughout the 1999 plan, Soucy said the review process that began two years ago is focused more narrowly on how the federal Wild and Scenic River Act applies to man-made structures in the Allagash – such as dams and bridges – and acceptable uses of the river.

The panel had hoped to complete its review by now, but the state had agreed to a three-month extension on gathering public comment at the request of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. The new deadline to provide additional comment is March 2, 2006.

Soucy said he still expects any changes likely will be more in line with tweaking what is already done rather than performing a major overhaul.

“I don’t think we’re open for a major rewrite,” he said Tuesday.

But not everyone on the advisory council agreed with that assessment.

“I would say [the state] would have to do more than just tweak [the plan] to make us comfortable,” Patrick Strauch, executive director of the Maine Forest Products Council, said after the meeting. The forest products council represents logging, sawmill and paper manufacturing interests that own or operate on more than 3 million acres in the Allagash River region.

The river bisects a significant part of the working forest in northern Maine, and Strauch said any changes could have an impact on the industry. Particularly disconcerting, he said, is wording in the plan that could give outside interests the ability to dictate whether an infrastructure, such as a bridge, should be fixed or removed. Losing a bridge could seriously affect a logging operation or hamper delivery of pulpwood to mills.

Strauch said it is also unclear whether replacing planks on a bridge, for example, would kick in a review process that could delay repairs for years or deny them altogether. Such delays aren’t unthinkable considering the council took 45 minutes Tuesday to discuss whether a 3-foot-high weather station should be replaced or belonged there in the first place, Strauch said.

Karen Woodsum, director of the Sierra Club Maine Woods Program, didn’t attend Tuesday’s meeting, but when contacted later said that no single group would have as much sway as Strauch was suggesting. Ultimately, it’s the state that must act as steward for the river, she said.

“We believe this is the best management plan, that this is in the best interest of the river,” Woodsum said of the proposed revisions.

Gary Pelletier of Cross Lake, whose family has lived in the Allagash region for generations, said the plan revisions are good overall, but he faults it for going too far in some cases. He said it appeases environmental groups at the expense of local people who use the river for recreation or who make a living from it.

One revision, for example, calls for closing an access point at Cunliffe Campsite for environmental reasons with no regard to the local people who use it, Pelletier contended.

“This river was made public for the public and not just a certain group of people,” he said.

Soucy said the revisions are about compromise and that a 2003 agreement with groups from the region already had hashed out and identified what access points could be closed. He said though the access point at Cunliffe is to be closed, two other nearby access points will remain open. By closing the Cunliffe access point, the state is reducing dust, noise and other activities that detract from the wilderness characteristic of the river, Soucy said.

Woodsum agreed with Soucy that interested parties already had consented to the changes in 2003. She said it seemed now that some were trying to backtrack.

She said that the plan’s revisions reflect hard work and compromise that is in the best interest of the river and those who use it.

“It’s balancing all these interests, and that’s a tricky job,” she said.

The revised plan can be viewed at the Bureau of Parks and Lands’ Web site at: www.maine.gov/doc/parks/