By Jeff Clark
The river
widely
considered Senator Edmund Muskie's inspiration for his landmark
Clean Water
Act of 1972 is the only river in Maine that has never met even
the minimum
standards set by the act. Muskie grew up in Rumford in an era when
paper and
textile mills treated the Androscoggin River as an open industrial
sewer,
but he never lived to see it cleaned up the way other Maine rivers
were.
The other great irony is that the dirtiest river in Maine has
never
attracted the kind of public advocacy so common to the Kennebec,
the
Penobscot, and other rivers and lakes. For decades the Androscoggin
River
valley has been a blank spot on the map of environmental activism
in the
state.
That changed in May, when more than 100 members and supporters
of the newly
formed Androscoggin River Alliance overflowed a hearing room at
the Maine
State House in Augusta to support a bill that would finally bring
the river
up to snuff. "We've decided we don't want to be second-class
citizens
anymore," declares Neil Ward, of Leeds, a fourth-generation
valley resident
and a founding member of the alliance. "We want and deserve
what everyone
else in Maine already has."
Even though the bill the group favored ultimately failed, the
Androscoggin
River Alliance has put both the legislature and the paper mills
on notice
that the waterway has a new set of homegrown advocates who care
deeply about
the future of a river that has long been mired in the past. "That
was the
kind of resistance the paper companies had never seen before," says
Elaine
Makas, of Lewiston, a Democratic state legislator and alliance
member. "All
of a sudden there was this group of people standing up and saying,
'We want
to be treated fairly.' "
It was the kind of outcry rarely seen before in the valley. The
alliance is
visible proof of a renaissance of community pride and public interest
in
towns from Rumford to Lewiston. "For a long time, I think
the people of the
valley had a real inferiority complex," explains Makas. "We
felt that what
we had was the best we would ever get, that we somehow deserved
this
situation. People really bought into that attitude."
Makas, a Bates College graduate who deliberately decided to return
to
Lewiston in 1989 after she finished her graduate degrees in social
psychology, sees a definite -- and a defining -- change in public
attitudes
in her city. "I think for so many years people from other
parts of the state
looked down their noses at Lewiston," she says. "It was
this old mill town,
sort of dumpy, with a smelly old river.
"Well, guess what. We aren't so old and dumpy anymore. Lewiston
is
developing a wonderful gateway complex at what used to be the entrance
to
lower Lisbon Street [formerly the city's famously down-at-the-heels
main
thoroughfare]. One of the old mills is being converted into luxury
condominiums. We've got new buildings going up along the river.
Auburn has
the new Hilton Garden Inn, a wonderful riverside park, even a new
Gritty
McDuff's brew pub."
Key to the new development is the Androscoggin River. "We
have more than
$400 million being invested in downtown Lewiston-Auburn," Makas
notes, "and
the river is part of our new community identity, the center of
everything
that's happening."
The Androscoggin is Maine's most industrial river, lined with
mills and
stalled by dams from Rumford all the way to Brunswick. "For
a very long time
the price of well-paying jobs in that valley was the pollution
of that
river," explains Naomi Schalit, who helped organize the alliance
as
executive director of Maine Rivers, an environmental advocacy group. "They
used to call the smells 'the smell of money.' That was the deal
that was
made in that area. . . . I think in part because of the diminishment
of the
employment power of the mills and in part because of rising environmental
consciousness, the people in that area are quite aware that things
will have
to change."
Even after many of the textile mills in Lewiston and other towns
closed in
the 1950s and 1960s, valley citizens and their elected representatives
accepted the idea that a certain level of pollution was inevitable
to
protect the remaining paper mills in Rumford and Livermore Falls. "We
folks
in the Lewiston-Auburn area understood what it was like not to
have a job,"
Leeds resident Neil Ward offers. "Until recently Lewiston
had been in
decline for decades, while the Upper Valley had a nice little industry
going. We bought the payroll-or-pickerel argument, and we were
always
willing to give them a chance to keep their jobs."
No one argues that the Androscoggin River is far cleaner than
it was in the
bad old days, when walls of chemical-laced foam, billowing stenches,
and
rainbow-hued water characterized the waterway. But the last major
improvements in the river's water quality occurred in the 1980s,
and the
International Paper Mill in Livermore Falls and the Mead/New Page
mill in
Rumford still dump tens of thousands of pounds of solids, phosphorus,
and
other pollutants into the river every day. Algae blooms fed by
the waste
turn the river slimy green in the summer and deplete oxygen levels
far below
the lower limits needed to sustain the indigenous species required
by law.
"You don't want to swim in it," Schalit points out. "Just
ask the students
on the crew team at Bates. It's not a body of water you want to
fall into.
It's not one you want to eat the fish from."
Two years ago, the legislature considered and then overwhelmingly
voted down
a bill that would have forced the mills to clean up their discharges
to meet
minimal standards for a Class C river -- the lowest standard in
the law.
Instead, legislators approved a measure that created a new, separate,
and
considerably lower Class C standard just for the Androscoggin above
Lewiston
-- in particular a fourteen-mile stretch of dam-impounded dead
water called
Gulf Island Pond -- and a section of the St. Croix River in eastern
Maine.
Due to a typographical error, the bill had to be reconsidered and
passed
again this year.
The original hearings on the bill had been quiet and low key,
with little
input from valley residents. But word spread in communities along
the
riverbanks that the bill essentially maintained the status quo
and made
their river a second-class waterway, so dirty that it deserved
its own
special status so it could stay dirty.
"I found out what the legislature had done last session,
and I was upset,"
Neil Ward says. "Lewiston and Auburn are seeing the first
inkling of real
economic development, and the reason is this river running through
the
middle of the community. And that's not going to continue if the
river
stinks and turns green every summer. We're seeing [the paper companies']
corporate heads making more money in a year than it would cost
to clean up
the whole river, and I felt it was time the corporations put some
money back
into the river."
Ward, working with Schalit, Eliza Townsend at the Maine League
of
Conservation Voters, and a handful of residents, helped organize
the
Androscoggin River Alliance in June 2004. Twenty-five people showed
up at
the first meeting, surprising everyone involved.
Schalit credits the new interest to several factors. The Lewiston
Sun-Journal daily newspaper gave the river issue front-page coverage
for
months, she notes. "Plus, there are more people using the
river," she adds.
"That was unheard of twenty-five years ago. There are people
who row on it,
kayakers, canoeists, people who have chosen to live on it. People
are
getting closer to the river."
Representative Makas in January reintroduced the river-improvement
bill that
had failed two years ago. She acted largely out of anger at the
paper mills
and at the legislative assumption that the Androscoggin was essentially
a
lost cause. "The paper companies made me mad," she explains. "I
felt their
attitude was that the river was there to use as they wanted. I
also didn't
like the way they talked about Lewiston, as if it didn't matter
what they
put in the river because, after all, it was only going to Lewiston
anyway,
and we don't count."
Makas' bill would have done away with the special Class C designation,
and
given the paper companies five years to meet Clean Water Act standards.
Mead/New Paper had no problem with the schedule. International
Paper, on the
other hand, said it would need at least fifteen years.
Schalit says even she was stunned when more than 100 people turned
out for
the hearing on Makas' bill before the Natural Resources Committee. "I
wasn't
prepared for it," she says, "much less the committee.
We had overflow rooms,
we had people in the visitor center. It was astonishing."
While the attendance was "duly noted," as Schalit says,
by the committee,
many alliance members felt betrayed when the committee amended
the bill
after the public hearing to favor International Paper's position. "We
were
up against the most powerful industry in Maine," Schalit explains.
The paper
companies "have open and free access to the governor's office.
They had open
and free access to the Department of Environmental Protection."
The committee watered down the bill despite a state-sponsored
report by N.
McCubbin Consultants in 2003 that laid out a series of actions
that would
bring the mills into compliance within the five-year time frame. "The
report
said they can do this in the short term, they can do this relatively
inexpensively, and they can do this cost effectively," Schalit
points out.
"And they come out more competitive, producing paper at a
lower cost. That
argument carried no weight with the commitee, none."
"We weren't saying they should stop using the river," Makas
adds. "We were
saying they should follow the McCubbin report. We're not trying
to turn this
river into a pristine mountain stream. International Paper had
been licensed
to pump 10,000 pounds of waste a day into the river. What we wanted
would
have restricted it to 7,000 pounds in five years. They said it
would be too
expensive."
"I knew the bill as it was written would fail, just like
it had the last
time," explains state Senator Scott Cowger, of Hallowell,
chairman of the
Natural Resources Committee. "Rather than see it fail, I wanted
some
success. What we were able to do was extract from the mills a commitment
to
get to the higher standard. International Paper finally said it
needed ten
years, rather than fifteen. I consider that a success."
Not everyone agrees. The Natural Resources Council of Maine has
sued the
state because the law allows only five-year licensing schedules,
not ten.
And the Androscoggin River Alliance doesn't plan to let the matter
drop in
future legislatures. "I don't see this as an acceptable compromise," Makas
says.
More importantly, neither do many of the region's residents. "I
wasn't
expecting people to react the way they have," Makas explains. "All
of a
sudden I can't go anywhere in Lewiston or Auburn without people
coming up to
me and talking about the river. I was at a funeral and after the
service the
minister grabbed my hand and said, 'Thank-you for fighting for
our river.' "
"We're not done here yet," says Neil Ward, who now works
one day a week for
the Natural Resources Council of Maine. "I'm forty-five years
old, and this
is the first time in my life I've seen a glimmer of economic prosperity
in
the Lewiston-Auburn area. It's because of the river. We can't stop
now."
Reprinted by permission, all rights
reserved by Down East magazine.
No further reprint or electronic
reposting is expressed or allowed.
|
