Legislators had a great idea back in 1987: Enclose the roughly 650 exposed municipal and state road salt and sand piles within 10 years, share the costs with locals and protect precious ground water from contamination.

Eleven years later, barely 200 sheds have been built. Some 352 municipal and 100 state piles continue to erode and seep. The program, with one foot in the Department of Environmental Protection and one in the Department of Transportation, has rules that are frustrating and confusing. In many places, the town mound has been covered, the state’s, right nearby, has not. Lawmakers and voters have gotten stingy; many communities have given up on reimbursement. Some clear environmental threats are not scheduled to be addressed for at least four years.

Nowhere is this muddle more apparent than in Rockport. The town was one of the first to build a shed, $80,000 worth, and has never been reimbursed for any part of it. Meanwhile, a substantially larger state pile sits in the rain, its impact made evident by the adjacent three-acre plot of dead trees.

Those dead trees are a big deal right now. They sit on a parcel the Community School District bought from MDOT a few years as part of the site for a new regional high school. The CSD needs to create, improve or enhance a few acres of wetlands to compensate for wetlands disruption that will occur during school construction. The perfect opportunity to restore life to a state-created wasteland, and to give students a real-world science lab, is at hand.

But it probably won’t happen. Despite the dead trees, despite a heavily contaminated well less than a half-mile mile away, the MDOT site is ranked at the lowest priority; it is not due to be covered until 2003.

It would make no sense for the CSD to clean this up if the source remains for five more years. Given that the Legislature has moved back the timetables for the entire salt shed project three times, it probably will remain longer than that.

Covering the pile, or moving it to a more suitable location (Rockport has offered to buy the DOT another piece of land), would seem to be logical solutions. But the DOT can’t spend any money on this low-priority pile now unless the DEP elevates its ranking on the priority list. The DEP is unlikely to do that since the DOT’s staff hydrogeologist has determined that the nearby well was contaminated by salt spread on the roads, not by the salt piled up.

This will not hold up the CSD project; the school district could meet its mitigation requirements by improving wetlands anywhere in the state. It could do it in Portland. It could do it in Meddybemps. It even could do it in Rockport if two state agencies would work together to correct an obvious problem.

The CSD has hired its own hydrogeologist to look into well contamination, hoping to trace the ground-water contamination back to the pile, which will cause the DEP to revise its priority list, which will allow the DOT to spend some of the money it has for environmental cleanup on this particular mess. Seems like a needlessly roundabout way to confirm what acres of dead trees already are saying.