AUGUSTA – A task force has begun reviewing Maine’s groundwater regulations to determine whether additional safeguards are needed to ensure the state’s world-famous water supply remains both clean and abundant.

Representatives of the bottling industry, public utilities, agricultural operations and various state agencies gathered in Augusta Tuesday for the second meeting in a year-long process to review and potentially update Maine’s groundwater extraction regulations.

Legislators created the work group earlier this year in response to growing demand for – and concern about – groundwater supplies statewide.

Debate over Maine’s aquifers has only intensified in recent months thanks, in large part, to a proposed ballot referendum to tax the largest bottled water companies.

The referendum movement has prompted Poland Spring to temporarily shelve plans to seek a third bottling plant that could employ several hundred people.

An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the roughly 24 trillion gallons of precipitation the state receives annually trickles through the soil to become groundwater.”This year I believe [the precipitation] is a lot more than that, and we’re not done yet,” said Robert Marvinney, a state geologist with Maine Geological Survey, who helped lead the discussion Tuesday.

Public water utilities consumed about 8 billion gallons of groundwater between 2003 and 2004, followed by the bottled water industry at 450 million gallons, irrigation at 350 million gallons and snowmaking operations at 250 million gallons, according to figures from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Marvinney and other presenters said Maine’s aquifers are different from those in Western states facing dramatic drops in groundwater levels and even water shortages.

Water sometimes takes hundreds or even thousands of years to accumulate in Western aquifers, which are often located in layered bedrock.

Water found in the typical gravel or fractured bedrock aquifers in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire has been found to be anywhere from less than 1 year old to 50 years old.

That means Maine’s ground water circulates and replenishes much faster than in other states, said hydrologist Martha Nielsen with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Resources Division Maine District Office, who had been invited to speak to the panel.

That’s not to say that Maine should become complacent about its water usage, Nielsen cautioned.

“In Massachusetts, they did not take a preventative approach and this is what happened,” Nielsen said while pointing to a slide of an Ipswich, Mass., stream that has dried up due to groundwater overdraw.

Concerned about the sustainability of the natural resource in Maine, a group called H2O for ME has proposed taxing water bottlers about 20 cents per gallon for every gallon after the first 500,000 extracted each year.

In September, the group submitted just a few hundred petition signatures over the 50,519 needed to force a statewide vote on the measure in November 2006. State election officials are still reviewing the signatures to ensure that enough are valid to meet the referendum threshold.

The initiative has caused Poland Spring to temporarily suspend plans to add a third Maine bottling plant to its existing facilities in Poland and Hollis.

Annual sales for the company that employs 550 people in Maine have soared in the past five years from $406 million to $624 million. Company officials estimate the proposed tax would amount to close to $100 million a year and exceed its annual profits.

With such issues in mind, the state’s task force will examine the issue of groundwater replenishment as well as possible additional standards to ensure that wells in Maine – whether commercial, public or private – do not adversely impact water quality or the ecosystem.

“Maine has abundant resources. However, we need to manage them well and not squander those resources,” said David Bell, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine and an agricultural representative on the panel.

Another panel member, Thomas Brennan, the northeast natural resources manager of bottler Poland Spring, said he would like to see a consistent set of regulations used across the myriad of Maine agencies that regulate groundwater supplies.

Brennan said he hopes the task force’s work will also help change what he sees as misinformation in the public about the impact of water-intensive operations in Maine.

Several of the members said they were optimistic about the group’s potential impact on the debate over groundwater usage in Maine.

The panel is expected to deliver its findings to the Legislature next November.