By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

NEWRY – Stalled efforts to mitigate some problem areas along the upper and lower Sunday River watershed got a booster shot Tuesday morning.

Since 2003, there has been a lull in restoration activities.

River consultant Jeff Stern of Harrison attributed that stalled momentum to a lack of organization and funding.

“It was not necessarily due to a lack of interest,” Stern said after a two-hour summit meeting Tuesday morning at Sunday River Inn.

Through 2003, 13 erosion-control projects were completed in both watersheds, said Keith Anderson. He’s the project manager for the Oxford County Soil and Water Conservation District in Paris.

“We have applied for an extension to extend the projects,” Anderson said Tuesday. “When that goes through, the plan is to complete 15 more sites for erosion control.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, 25 town, county and state officials, residents and a river expert reorganized cooperative efforts to follow through on projects and to try and stabilize Sunday River.

They also brainstormed other ways to find needed funds, learned of a new sediment-retention method for high-elevation streams and brooks, and discussed reviving a Youth Conservation Corps to get young people involved in volunteer restoration work.

“I can’t see why we can’t accomplish what we set out to do, with a group like this,” said Newry Board of Selectmen Chairman Steve Wight.

But he and others also worried about finding funding and engineering help to quickly stop the river from undercutting its outside bank opposite the road to Hurricane Island Outward Bound’s wilderness school.

The river has gouged out large chunks of the bank and ripped away a buffer of trees, a few yards away from Sunday River Road. That kind of destructive action has occurred since the 1980s and 1990s, Stern said.

Tons of eroding soil, silt and sediment have destabilized Sunday River to the point where it began cutting new channels, threatening camps, homes, roads and floodplain property, and ruining the river’s fishery.

Stern said, “A whole network of severely eroding old, abandoned logging roads” high in the western watershed has contributed to the instability.

Now, work needs to be done to set the river right.

If Tuesday’s meeting “gets the momentum going again, then it will be a success. We had a lot of principal players here, so I think it’s the beginning of some great stuff,” Stern said.