“It was dark, nasty, muddy,” said Cook, a 17-year veteran of the Jay Planning Board. “There was always foam in the river. The river would turn and (dead) fish would come up. … And it always smelled.”

Back then the muck and smell were things people accepted, the price for good-paying mill jobs.

Things began to improve after the International Paper mill strike here in 1987. During the strike, a bad chlorine leak prompted officials to close the roads, shutting off Jay. That began to open minds about the environment, Cook said, and the mill began making changes.

“I have to give them credit, the river looks a lot better. There’s no foam. It’s not as brown,” said Cook, whose family members, including her late husband, worked at the mill. There’s still work to be done, she said, but it’s now pleasant to be near the river.

That pleasant change is critical, mill officials say, to understanding their side in the dispute with environmentalists over the cleanup of the Androscoggin.

From their perspective – and many other people’s perspectives as well – the three major paper mills on the river are doing everything right.

IP in Jay, MeadWestvaco in Rumford and Fraser in Berlin, N.H., have all reduced the amount of pollutants in their discharges. They’re operating below the limits set by the state, are working to reduce pollution further and continue to provide good-paying jobs to thousands of people.

What’s not to appreciate, they wonder.

Plenty, say critics:

• By state standards, the river is the most polluted in Maine. Some 40 miles of the approximately 100 miles of river from the New Hampshire border to the ocean in Brunswick fail to meet even the lowest state classification.

• Bureau of Health advisories caution not to eat more than six to 12 fish from the river per year, in part because of dioxin from past mill discharges. That number is among the lowest for any river in Maine.

• While technically considered safe to swim, except during heavy rains below Lewiston, pollutants in the water and algae blooms from organic waste keep most people out of the river.

• The three large mills on the river continue to legally discharge almost 5 million pounds of treated, organic pollution annually into the river.

• And, say critics, because state regulators are more concerned with keeping those mill jobs and playing nice with mill officials, they have failed to pressure mills to clean up their act and the river.

Mill spokesmen fire back with both facts and emotion, citing the substantial drop in pollution discharges over the years and the ultimate cost if the mills are pushed too far, too fast.

“The bottom line is, the paper industry is in deep trouble in Maine,” said Tom Saviello, a state legislator and IP’s environmental, health and safety manager at the Jay mill. “If we’re going to spend money, let’s make sure we spend it and get some kind of improvement, not spend money and say, Gee, that’s a nice idea, but the mill’s not there anymore.'”

Mills are different today

Saviello points out that his mill and others have changed.

When he came to Jay in 1991, the mill discharged 17,000 pounds a day of organic waste (waste that rots), which its license then allowed. “Traditionally the paper industry operated right up to the license limit. If our limit was 17,000 pounds, we operated at 16,999 pounds.”

If there was a breakdown and more pollution was discharged, “It was, Oh my goodness, we had an upset,'” Saviello said. In other words, no big deal.

“In 1991 when we got our new license, we made a decision here that we’re no longer going to operate like that. We changed the paradigm,” Saviello said. “Operating close to the limit is not acceptable to us. We worked hard to bring our discharge down significantly.”

Statistics back that up. In the 12 years 1991 to 2002, IP’s daily discharge into the Androscoggin dropped from 17,000 pounds of organic waste to 4,841. The mill did that, Saviello said, by reusing more raw materials to save money and pollute less.

To further cut pollution would cost millions that the mills don’t have, Saviello insisted. “We got the low-hanging fruit. The next 5 percent becomes very hard and very expensive to do.”

How expensive? Environmentalists point to a study done for the state last year indicating that if each of the three mills spent $20 million to reduce pollution, the river could be brought into compliance.

The industry says the report is flawed, and that it would cost IP alone $30 million to $60 million to accomplish the improvements cited in the report. “That would make us uncompetitive,” Saviello said.

John Williams of the Maine Pulp and Paper Association agreed. “The report said the improvements would pay for themselves in a couple of years. That isn’t true. If it was, the mills would have done it.”

Furthermore, Saviello disagreed with Lewiston state Rep. Elaine Makas and others who complain that state regulators are being too nice to the mills by allowing them 24 years to clean up. (The state classified the Androscoggin River in 1986 as Class C – the lowest grade – and has a goal of 2010 for meeting the Class C standards.)

“Whenever you start to ratchet down on a mill license, you give them time to come into compliance with that number,” said Saviello, defending the time frame. “These changes are millions and millions of dollars.”

Meanwhile IP is spending $1 million a year in its continuing effort to reduce and prevent waste, Saviello said. The mills need to be able to dump some pollution in the river to make paper and keep good-paying jobs, he said.

Those jobs are central to the pollution issue. Some 1,130 people work at the Jay mill, another 1,150 at the MeadWestvaco mill in Rumford. According to the Maine Pulp and Paper Association, the typical annual paper mill wage, not counting overtime and benefits, is $54,700.

Maine has already lost paper mill jobs, almost 4,000 in five years, according to state data. Those job losses have impact when used by the industry to lobby against expensive mandates.

“We’re in the state at the pleasure of the state, and the people of Jay,” Saviello said. “We have a responsibility to make the water quality better. Our customers are demanding that.”

But the mills don’t want to spend money that won’t help the water quality, which is something environmentalists want, he contended.

DEP: We’re making progress’

Meanwhile, state regulators, under fire from environmentalists for going too slow, agree with the mills that cleaning the Androscoggin is a big job that takes time.

Compared to some other rivers, such as the Kennebec, the Androscoggin’s cleanup has been slower because the river has more mills and is smaller, said Andrew C. Fisk, head of the Land and Water Quality Bureau within the Department of Environmental Protection.

Even though the river has not been meeting Class C standards since at least 1986, the Androscoggin’s water is much better than it was 18 years ago, and more of the river is meeting standards. “We’ve been making progress,” Fisk said. Cleaning the river is like “a 20-round prize fight. We’re on Round 18.”

The mills have significantly reduced the creation of cancer-causing dioxin after the state passed a dioxin law in 1997. “Reductions have gone way, way down,” Fisk said.

In the ’90s, the state also passed laws to reduce color, foam and odor, which has made dramatic improvements, he said.

Thousands of pounds of mill waste still discharged each day eat up oxygen in the water, which degrades the quality, Fisk acknowledged. “But it’s not where you have dissolved oxygen levels so low that the fish are dying,” Fisk said. “We’re way past that.”

The work that lies ahead involves “second-generation” changes to fight pollution, such as reducing the mills’ organic waste and phosphorus, Fisk said, which are nutrients that create algae blooms and deplete oxygen.

“The Clean Water Act never considered nutrients,” he said. The idea was to first focus on the pollution that created color, smell, foam “and burning rivers, then start working on nutrients,” Fisk said, adding that Maine tracks pollution better than most of the nation. “Our standards are high.”

Fisk acknowledged the state has not yet rewritten pollution licenses for the mills, which expired in 1999 and 2000. The delay was not because his department is soft on the mills, as environmental critics have argued, he said.

Rather, the federal government handed over Clean Water Act regulation to the state, Fisk said. The state had to then decide how much pollution the Androscoggin can take, and divvy up how much each mill and treatment plant can discharge. That has taken years, he said, and wide disagreement on pollution limits has slowed the process.

The DEP plans to issue the licenses next summer. Proposed limits for organic waste are 25 percent lower than current limits, which would still be higher than what each of the mills currently discharges, angering environmentalists.

At the same time, the amount of phosphorus that the mills will be allowed to discharge will be cut by nearly half, Fisk said.

All that means that by 2010 – 24 years after the river was designated as a Class C river – all of the Androscoggin should achieve its C classification.

“The license limits for the mills are being reduced, which will result in cleaner water,” said DEP Commissioner Dawn Gallagher.

Gallagher disagreed with Lewiston’s Makas, who has quoted the commissioner as saying the proposed new licensing standards would not cost the mills anything. They will cost the mills money, Gallagher said. DEP isn’t yet sure how much.

Proposed license limits will be aired in a public hearing late this year and the new licenses issued in the summer of 2005. The process is expected to be contentious, and the mills are already objecting to the phosphorus reductions.

“Balking would be putting it mildly,” Fisk said of the response by mill officials. “This is the first time phosphorus has been regulated.”

Meanwhile, Gov. John Baldacci said he has no problem with how the Androscoggin cleanup is proceeding. “It’s being handled appropriately,” said spokesman Lee Umphrey. “The river is cleaner today, and we are protecting jobs. This is an important balance.”