The Bethel Water District will hold informational meetings on the Bingham land trust on Monday, Oct. 19, at 4 p.m. in Newry and 7 p.m. in Bethel.

BETHEL — Water District trustees are asking Mahoosuc Land Trust officials to back the district’s bid to modify restrictions in a 1925 trust deed to allow timber harvesting.

The deed allows only enough wood-cutting to cover annual taxes on the district’s 2,200 acres in the Chapman Brook Watershed in Newry.

Trustees Brent Angevine and Reggie Brown said the district wants to harvest and sell enough timber to pay for a new water system in West Bethel.

Water there is safe to drink, but it’s laden with malodorous minerals, and iron and manganese, Angevine said.

“If we can cut the wood that’s up there — only a winter harvest, but not a large harvest — we can come up with a way to provide good, clean water and not have to raise rates to do it,” Angevine said at a meeting with land trust officials on Friday.

To change the deed restrictions, they have to go through the Office of the Maine Attorney General and the court system.

In 1925, philanthropist William Bingham II of Cleveland, Ohio, gave 2,358 acres in Newry to the district’s predecessor, the Bethel Water Co., with specific restrictions, Angevine said. The property is located in the upper watershed on the eastern side of Black Mountain and the southern side of Barker Mountain.

To protect Chapman Brook’s purity, Bingham restricted activities such as wood harvesting.

His deed states that if the district no longer needs the land, it reverts back to state ownership to be forever managed as a public game preserve, bird or game sanctuary, public park or state forest reserve.

If that happens, the restrictions would cease, Angevine said.

The problem driving the district’s bid to change Bingham’s restrictions was the severe rain deluge in June 2007 that destroyed the 2,500-acre watershed. Until then, the watershed was the district’s primary water supply for Bethel for more than a century.

The ensuing flood buried the brook under tons of gravel, boulders and trees. It also triggered a massive clay slide into the brook, which rendered the brook unusable as a primary water source, Brown said.

He said the district has pumped clay out of the brook’s reservoir four times and each time it refills with clay.

Preserving the watershed as an emergency water supply should still qualify it for the deed-prescribed use, Angevine said. However, the district must wait for a report from the Maine Drinking Water Program to determine whether the watershed could safely serve as a backup water source.

If Maine gets the land because the property is deemed no longer usable to the district, Angevine said the state will cut the wood and gain the revenue and Newry would lose the tax money.

“This 85-year-old document needs a little amending to align itself with today’s world,” Angevine said. “It is my contention that (Bingham’s) intent and what we want to do is in the spirit of his intent.”

However, land trust Lands Committee member Larry Ely said it would be a hard sell to the state.

“The attorney general is obligated to enforce the terms of the trust,” Ely said. “I feel that the donor of the land had very specific instructions placed on it, and you want to amend them because you don’t agree with the restrictions he put on, and I don’t see the attorney general OK’ing that.”

The district, which is its own entity, having been created by the Legislature, now has a new water source that supplies Bethel rate-payers with clean water.

The district also wants to clarify its lease of some of the Bingham deed land with Sunday River Ski Resort.

The resort pays the district $5,000 a year to use portions of the land atop Barker Mountain, Angevine said. From that, the district pays $4,000 in taxes to Newry.

Angevine said the district wants to:

• Amend Bingham’s trust to secure district ownership.

• Gain the right to harvest timber.

• Better clarify the Sunday River lease.

• Grant public access — primarily snowmobiling and hiking — to the watershed.

“We want the deed set, so (the land) will pass to the state if we were to do anything that would grossly deviate from the trust’s intent,” Angevine said.

Mahoosuc Land Trust President Stephen Wight, a Newry selectman, said the land trust must let its Lands Committee decide whether to back the district.

[email protected]

The Bethel Water District’s 2,200 acres in Newry are located in the upper Chapman Brook Watershed, at center between Black and Barker mountains and the Riley Township-Newry line at left.