AUBURN – In what’s shaping up to be a lengthy and complicated proceeding, Maine’s Board of Environmental Protection this week begins reviewing a series of appeals on pollution discharge and water control permits for the Androscoggin River.

Public hearings before the 10-member citizen panel are set to run for three consecutive days, including two evening sessions for general public comment on the condition of the Androscoggin.

Up for review is whether permit restraints on the amount and types of pollution discharged into the river should be ratcheted back or relaxed. Much of the testimony will revolve around a dispute over the science the state Department of Environmental Protection used to determine what’s known as the Total Maximum Daily Load, or the amount of pollution the government believes the river can theoretically cleanse itself of.

The hearings start at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Hilton Garden Inn Riverwatch in Auburn are likely to continue next week at the Civic Center in Augusta.

Asking to change conditions on discharge pollution permits are paper mills operated by NewPage in Rumford and Verso in Jay. The towns of Jay and Livermore Falls are also asking the BEP to change the conditions on a permit for a shared municipal sanitary sewer system that discharges treated wastewater to the river.

Also up for review are permit conditions requiring Florida Power & Light Co., which owns and operates the hydro-electric dam on the river at Gulf Island Pond, to install a second “bubbler” device in the pond to add oxygen to the water. The permits for the mills also require them to contribute to the installation and operation of the bubbler, which the mills are also appealing.

Besides the companies and towns, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Conservation Law Foundation – representing itself, Maine Rivers, the Androscoggin River Alliance and the Androscoggin Lake Improvement Corp. – are also appealing portions of the various permits and their conditions.

“It is complicated and it’s tough to sum it up in a sentence or two,” said Jack Montgomery, a lawyer working with the power company on the appeal. “It’s a very complex matter in figuring out what’s the right thing to do here.”

At the heart of most of the appeals is a concern the scientific model used by the state to calculate how much pollution the river can daily handle is flawed. The environmental groups are also arguing the amount of time – 10 years – the permittees have to come into compliance is too long.

“Our appeal is primarily about time,” said Stephen Hinchman, a lawyer with the Conservation Law Foundation. “How fast do they have to meet the final number, whatever it is?”

One of the authors of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 is the late Sen. Ed Muskie, a Rumford native.

Muskie wrote the act with the Androscoggin in mind, Hinchman said.

“Since that time things have gotten better but the Androscoggin still does not meet the minimum federal standards for water quality or even the state standards for water quality,” Hinchman said. “My clients are people that live on the river and have been waiting all their lives and their fathers and their grandfathers, to be able to use the river in their community and for as long as they’ve known, it’s always been too polluted and unsafe to use.”

Pete Didisheim, advocacy director for the NRCM, said the hearings and subsequent decisions on the appeals made by the BEP will be historic in scope. “This is probably one of the most significant deliberations on the water quality of the Androscoggin that’s happened in decades,” Didisheim said. “And probably one of the most important ever in terms of the future direction of the Androscoggin River.”

The NRCM will argue during the hearings that the mills, especially Verso’s mill in Jay, need to do more to limit the amount of pollutants they discharge to the river. The Androscoggin, unlike other Maine rivers, continues to be treated mostly as an industrial river, Didisheim said. “We don’t think that mentality is appropriate; we think you can get a clean river and continue to have vibrant mills with good jobs on this river in a cost-effective way and the time has come to do that.”

But attorneys for the mills say they continue to meet or exceed their permit requirements and are willing to continue to improve, but they want their permit constraints to be based on sound science. The mills are willing to be responsible for reducing the amount of pollution they put into the river but can’t be responsible for all the pollution going into the river.

They will also argue that the Androscoggin is much cleaner than it is perceived to be, and that the water quality standards of the Clean Water Act and the state’s standards are met more often than not.

“The big issue that we are fighting about is a handful of days, of the dissolved oxygen standard not being met at depths of below 50 feet,” said James Kilbreth, an attorney for Verso. “To suggest that people ought to be spending tens of millions of dollars to fix that problem is to be totally out of touch with any sense of proportionality. That’s what this is all about. It’s craziness.”

Kilbreth also said the science does not support the limits set by the state on pollution because if fails to adequately recognize pollution going into the river from other sources. Pollution that runs into the river from farm fields, road and street drainages and other “non-point sources” contributes to the problem more than is recognized, Kilbreth said.

Under the model, the mills are held responsible for about 50 percent of the pollution the state believes to be causing the water quality problems, he said. “But there isn’t a single calculation in the model that supports that number,” Kilbreth said. “In all the calculations we’ve done, the non-point is more like 80 percent and the mill contribution is only 20 percent; that’s a pretty big issue. You could eliminate the discharges from the mills completely, shut them down and you won’t fix this problem.”

After the public hearings are complete the BEP will review the testimony, any rebuttal offered in writing or orally, and then vote on the permit appeals. That board won’t likely vote on the appeals until late summer or early autumn, said Cindy Bertocci, the executive analyst for the BEP.