DIXFIELD – A bill that would ban four species of baitfish, floundered Tuesday in a legislative net while being gutted and reduced to one minnow species that isn’t even here.

Still, two of 11 members of the Legislature’s Committee on Inland Fisheries and Wildlife who voted on Bath Rep. Thomas Watson’s L.D. 163, managed to keep it intact as a minority report.

Within a week or two, after the majority report amendment is drafted, the filleted bill will get tossed into the House pool for debate.

“An Act to Prohibit the Use of Nonnative Baitfish,” would ban Eastern silvery minnows, and emerald, spottail and blackchin shiners from use in inland waters while keeping 19 others. Watson said these four are considered invasive and detrimental to native Maine fish.

The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, however, said there are no known populations of blackchin shiners in Maine, and isn’t sure why the species was ever included in the list of legal baitfish in the first place. On that, Watson agrees.

As a result, on Tuesday, by a 9-2 vote, the committee banned blackchins, but kept the other three in the state’s legal creel, Chairman Sen. Bruce Bryant said Thursday by phone from his Dixfield home.

“Watson wants to see these four off the list, but I think that causes more problems than it solves, and I’m not sure there was a problem to begin with,” he said. “We did agree to eliminate the blackchin shiner, because it’s not even in Maine.”

Bryant said there are no identified problems in Maine with Eastern silvery minnows, and emerald and spottail shiners, but restricting their use by the public, and preventing bait dealers from growing and selling the fish, would unfairly hamper a rural Maine industry.

“Without a real problem with these baitfish being here, and with the economic piece that helps rural Maine, the committee felt that it was not in the best interest of the state to try and limit that,” Bryant said.

Watson disagrees. Contacted Thursday night in Bath by phone, he said the committee was shortsighted.

“The committee chose to take the easy way out and ignore the problem,” he said. “They were swayed by arguments from bait dealers and rather alarmist statements that this would put an end to ice fishing in Maine, which it’s not designed to do.”

Watson said the bill was kept alive by Sen. Joseph C. Perry, D-Penobscot, and Rep. Jane E. Eberle, D-South Portland, who weren’t there when the nine discussed and voted on it. They voted later in the day.

Perry said late Thursday night by phone from his Bangor home that he only agreed to do that as a personal favor to Watson to help get it to a bigger audience in the House.

“On this particular bill, I almost know nothing about it. I’ve only read the summary,” Perry said. “Tom serves on the Tax Committee I chair, but I don’t think I’m on Tom’s side in the end on this.”

Eberle, who is away, could not be reached.

According to legislative analyst Curtis Bentley’s March 6 summary of testimony presented at a Feb. 20 public hearing, proponents say the hardship of removing the four species from the legal list is far outweighed by the negative statewide ecological and economic impact these fish could have on Maine’s fisheries.

Maine law bans the importation of baitfish into the state to prevent spread of disease, among other things.

The biggest problem opponents have with the bill is how to distinguish the four select species from the rest of Maine’s minnow species.

“It’s a real problem to identify many of the minnow species, not only for fishermen and bait dealers, but, also, for biologists and wardens,” department Director of Fisheries John Boland said late Thursday afternoon by phone in Augusta.

“It’s almost a lab experiment to ID them, so, you can’t be requiring the public and dealers to identify them, and then have to train the warden service in minnow identification,” he added.

Boland said the department is very concerned about the spread of any fish species into new waters, but rather than ban these baitfish, they’d rather continue to work with bait dealers and educate the public.

“We’ve worked with the baitfish community to grow and sell bait that comes from within Maine’s borders, but these have been in Maine for a long time and haven’t presented any real problems,” he said.

“We hold the general public to a ‘zero tolerance’ policy regarding non-native species, but the department allows sportsmen to use non-native baitfish in over 85 percent of our inland waters,” Bentley said. “These four species of fish have been linked to a fish disease that has caused massive fish kills throughout the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley.”