Lawmakers OK alewives bill

AUGUSTA – An amended bill to allow sea-run alewives back into a part of the St. Croix River received approval in both houses of the Legislature last week.

On Friday, LD 1957 was headed for the governor’s desk for a signature.

Members of the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee last Wednesday voted in support of a revised bill that would reopen the Woodland dam to sea-run alewives.

Sen. Kevin Raye, R-Perry, said Friday that after weighing the testimony, the committee rejected the original bill and approved the compromise.

The bill as originally proposed would have allowed alewives, also known as river herring, beyond both the Woodland and Grand Falls dams for the first time since 1995. But the amended version was regarded as a good first step given the controversy over reintroducing alewives into the St. Croix watershed.

Opening the fishway for alewives at the Woodland dam goes into effect May 1.

Environmental groups favored the original bill; the Passamaquoddy Tribe and local guides liked the revised version. The guides and tribe argued that sea-run alewives posed a threat to the region’s prized smallmouth bass and landlocked salmon, which are key to the local economy. But biologists and conservation groups said the species co-exist in other Maine lakes and rivers.

Nick Bennett of the Natural Resources Council of Maine said Monday he didn’t like the compromise bill. “It only opens up about 1 percent of the habitat as opposed to 30 percent of the St. Croix historic alewife habitat,” he said.

Bennett said the bill was a “tiny, tiny first step.”

Asked what the next step would be, Bennett said he did not know.

Bennett said alewives were needed in the river. “We can’t expect to get a return of groundfish like cod, haddock, pollock to anything resembling historic levels unless we return our river herring, because that is what the fish ate. It hurts commercial fishing all the way around that we are purposely keeping alewives out of the St. Croix,” Bennett said.

Lee Sochasky, executive director of the St. Croix International Waterway Commission, which has oversight of the St. Croix River, supported the compromise bill. “Alewives maintained a small but viable population when they were limited to the Woodland Flowage in the 1990s and can now do so again,” she said last week. “We are pleased to see bipartisan support for reopening the Woodland fishway in 2008. It’s been a good compromise on a difficult issue.”

Neither Tom Squiers of the Department of Marine Resources nor John Burrows of the Atlantic Salmon Federation returned telephone calls seeking comment Monday.

For a while it looked as if the original alewife bill would be pushed through the Legislature, but a call from Indian Township tribal Chief William Nicholas to Gov. John Baldacci last month forced the compromise.

Nicholas rejected the claim that alewives existed above the Woodland dam. “There is no scientific information that shows that beyond Grand Falls dam that alewives were ever up above there,” he said. He said the tribe was not opposed to the opening of the Woodland dam where alewives historically have been, but everything else was off the table.

Dave Tobey, a Grand Lake Stream guide who also serves on the board of the Maine Professional Guides Association, said sport fishing is a $5.5 million business Down East and urged caution with anything that would hurt the industry.

“Do you know statewide that the total sport fishing industry is worth $15.5 million … one-third of the state’s sport fishing industry comes from these waters, so shouldn’t people be cautious as to what they do?” he asked. “In the poorest county in the state, shouldn’t we have a safety net here and do this cautiously and not just pass a bill that could hurt us and could take forever to recover?”

But Bennett said there was no evidence alewives would hurt the local fishing industry. “We’ve got alewives in many lakes where there is excellent smallmouth bass fishing and excellent landlocked salmon fishing,” he said.

The battle over the migration patterns of alewives has gone on for years and has involved people from both sides of the border. The river serves as a boundary line between the United States and Canada.

Under the compromise bill hammered out in Augusta last week, the Maine Department of Marine Resources and the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife must develop a river herring management plan before any decision is made to allow alewives beyond Grand Falls.

“But it actually has to allow the fish to come back,” said the Natural Resources Council of Maine spokesman. “One way to sort of bury an issue is to ask people to work on a plan for a while.”

Chief Nicholas said he supported a management plan and the tribe plans to have a say in it. “The tribe’s jurisdiction relating to those waters is very clear,” Nicholas said. “[Under state law] it is very clear that the tribe has exclusive jurisdiction within their tribal territory relating to fish and game and everything else.”