May 15, 2012, ELLSWORTH, Maine — Two individuals and a southern Maine organization are ramping up their legal fight to restore alewives to the St. Croix River, this time accusing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of complicity in preventing the fish from spawning Down East.
Friends of Merrymeeting Bay, Doug Watts of Augusta and Kathleen McGee of Bowdoinham have notified the EPA that they intend to file suit against the agency within 60 days over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act.
A type of river herring, alewives spawned by the millions during the 1980s in the St. Croix River, which separates Maine and New Brunswick. But they all but disappeared in the river after blockades were put up in the 1990s, prompting a dispute that continues today.
The complainants are trying to overturn a 2008 state law that blocks the passage of sea-run alewives above Grand Falls Dam near the Washington County town of Princeton. The 2008 law was viewed as a compromise in the pitched cross-border battle over the lowly fish.
Fishing guides, sporting camp owners and others want to keep alewives out of the upper St. Croix watershed because they say large spawning runs will ruin the economically important smallmouth bass fishery. The other side accuses the state of purposefully suppressing an ecologically important indigenous fish species based on false fears that alewives will harm bass, a non-native fish introduced by sportsmen.
Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and the two individuals are poised to press the EPA on the alewife issue based on feedback from a judge in an earlier, unsuccessful federal suit against the state of Maine. Specifically, the complainants charge that the EPA has neglected to enforce a provision of the Clean Water Act that would require the federal agency to review any changes to water quality as a result of the fish passage blockades at Grand Falls Dam.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News.