PORTLAND, Maine — August 8, 2012 — The state is committed to a plan that would allow alewives to return to the St. Croix River above a dam that blocks their passage, but only in a gradual manner and not in an unrestricted fashion that environmental groups and Maine Indian tribes are calling for, Maine's attorney general said Wednesday in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA last month sent a letter to Attorney General William Schneider saying a Maine law that bars alewives, or river herring, upriver of the Grand Falls dam violates the federal Clean Water Act, and that Maine should take action to allow alewives upriver of the dam. Advocates of restoring alewives to the river's full watershed had hoped the EPA's letter would force the state to open the dam's fish passages and allow the fish upriver.
But in his response, Schneider wrote that the law, known as the alewife law, is valid, and that the state never intended to apply it for purposes of the Clean Water Act. That stance is opposed by the Conservation Law Foundation, which has sued the EPA in hopes of giving alewives full river access.
"The state has always regarded the alewife law as a fisheries management measure with meaning and effect only in that context; it has never considered the statute to be a CWA water quality standard," Schneider wrote.
Schneider's letter is the latest step in an ongoing dispute about whether alewives should be allowed full access to the St. Croix River, which serves as a boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.
The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation filed a lawsuit against the EPA in May to require the agency to force Maine to allow the fish to return to their natural habitat above the Grand Falls dam. The CLF claimed that not doing so violates the Clean Water Act.
The Passamaquoddy Tribe and other groups have also pushed to have the river opened to alewives.
Read the full story from the AP at the Boston Globe.