Tabled items

Ground water ownership

The issue of ground water ownership came up during several meetings, beginning with the review of this issue by a representative from the Maine Attorney General's Office. Essentially, ground water in Maine is privately owned by the surface land owner. However, in spite of local ownership, state agencies have broad authority to regulate ground water use. The Legislature did not direct this group to address ground water ownership, nor did it compose the group in a way that would facilitate discussion of this issue. The issue of ground water ownership and the prospect of fundamental changes to this topic is highly complex. It raises a range of fundamental legal questions that were beyond the scope of this effort and the expertise of the work group.

Allocation

Many in the group felt that specific allocations of water - defining specifically how much each user would be entitled or defining a hierarchy of uses - is not necessary at this time, because there generally are few water use conflicts. Others felt that we were simply postponing the inevitable. In the final analysis, the prevailing sentiment of the work group was to recommendation no action on the matter at this time recognizing that allocation may become necessary in watersheds with many users when other approaches are unsuccessful.

Costs to the regulated community

The group considered cost to state agencies of implementing the recommendations, as presented in a later section of this report. Due to time constraints on the process, which was spent mostly on developing the recommendations, the group did not specifically address costs to the regulated community. However, the work group expects the approach outlined here to have a minimal impact.

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Introduction   Meetings   Issues   Tabled Items   Risk Analysis   Recommendations   Costs   Appendices

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Last updated on February 5, 2007