U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock concurred with an earlier recommendation by a federal magistrate that the lawsuit filed by Charles FitzGerald of Atkinson and Kenneth Cline of Bar Harbor should be dismissed.

The two men filed the suit last year alleging that a 2006 state law violated the terms of Maine’s agreement with federal officials to maintain the Allagash as part of the Wild and Scenic River program.

The law, LD 2077, codified a list of 11 locations where visitors could drive a vehicle to the river’s edge, or within a short distance of it, in order to launch a boat. The bill, which was hotly debated in the Legislature, also redesignated six bridges in the waterway as permanent structures.

In her August 2007 recommendation, U.S. Magistrate Judge Margaret Kravchuk argued that because the Allagash is owned and operated by the state, Maine officials have the right to set management policies for the waterway.

The inclusion of the Allagash within the federal Wild and Scenic River program does not give the federal government the power to pre-empt state control of a state-managed river, Kravchuk wrote. Instead, federal officials can only recommend management changes to the state or seek to remove the river from the program, she wrote.

"If, as the plaintiffs maintain, the state of Maine through loose stewardship has ‘downgraded’ the Allagash from a wild riverway to a scenic, or perhaps recreational, riverway, there is no congressional enactment that pre-empts what the state has done," Kravchuk wrote at the time.

Woodcock did not expand on Kravchuk’s arguments in his decision, which was released Monday.

Neither Cline, FitzGerald nor their attorney could be reached for comment Monday, so it was unclear whether they planned to appeal Woodcock’s decision. FitzGerald had said during an interview after Kravchuk’s recommendation that they planned to "fight it the whole way."

The decision was the second defeat in less than a week for those continuing to fight battles over access and bridges within the 92-mile waterway. Last Wednesday, the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission rejected attempts to block the state from reconstructing a logging road bridge at Henderson Brook in the Allagash.

The existing Henderson Brook Bridge, which is used by truckers hauling an estimated 150,000 tons of timber from the Maine woods annually, is in serious disrepair and in danger of collapsing.

Both FitzGerald and Cline had joined four other individuals and RESTORE: The North Woods in appealing a LURC staff decision to grant the state a permit to construct a new bridge adjacent to the existing span.
"This content originally appeared as a copyrighted article in the Tuesday, February 12, 2008 edition of the Bangor Daily NEWS and is used here with permission."