BETHEL — Scott Stone, Lincoln Jeffers and Jonathan Labonte were but a few of several speakers at Thursday’s Androscoggin River Watershed Council conference trying to help guide a future vision for the river by sharing personal experiences and desires.

Their goal — like that of the conference — is to grow the local economy while protecting the “golden goose” — the river and its resources.

“I want to preserve what is really special about the river,” said Stone of Bethel. He is an avid angler, businessman and member of Bethel’s Upper Andro Anglers Alliance.

“I want to be able to walk into the river,” Stone said. “I want to wade into that river. I want to feel the river all around me.”

“I want to fish for the fish that are in that river, and I want to have a wilderness experience, but I want to be able to get out of the river, get in my car and drive five minutes down the road and be home.”

“How do we do that?” Stone asked. “How do we share it and protect it? Because that’s kind of like polar opposites.”

Jeffers and Labonte offered possible strategies based on past, present and future opportunities.

Jeffers is Lewiston’s city administrator assistant and in charge of economic development; Labonte is executive director of the Androscoggin Land Trust and an Androscoggin County commissioner.

Among the ideas they shared were expanding on Auburn’s Great Falls Balloon Festival by getting people onto the river in canoes or kayaks to enjoy the balloons like Labonte and the land trust did this year, or the American Folk Festival in Bangor, which Jeffers said generates about $10 million and attracts thousands of people.

“It takes about a million dollars to produce the American Folk Festival, so not every community is going to have that opportunity, but it creates a significant economic engine,” he said.

Other opportunities involve creating riverside parks like Auburn’s Festival Plaza, or multi-modal trails like the Lewiston-Auburn Riverwalk, or bicycle/pedestrian paths like Bethel, Lisbon and Brunswick have done.

Both Jeffers and Labonte said the challenge, however, is to get people to overcome the mindset that the Androscoggin, which was one of the nation’s worst polluted rivers, should be treated as an asset and not a liability.

“The river’s been cleaned up dramatically since the ’70s,” said Jeffers, a former Arkansas river guide. “Rivers are sort of what I consider the ‘golden goose’ and we can’t kill them. We really need to figure out how to utilize them.”

Jeffers said Maine is now transitioning from 19th and 20th century heavy industries like Lewiston’s Cowan Mill and paper mills, which built communities around them, generating jobs, hydropower electricity and tax bases, while turning the river into a sewer.

“When I first moved to Auburn, I said, ‘God, we’ve got this awesome river,’ but people were like, ‘Ack, we don’t want any part of that; it peels the paint,'” Jeffers said.

“So, you sort of had that perception from a generation ago and we’re still getting over that, at least in areas downstream from the heavy industry on the rivers.”

“Well, the reality is, times change and industries change,” he said. “We really all need to recreate our economies, and even though the paper industry is still strong, it really doesn’t have the employment that it used to have.”

He said people want to be on rivers and that should be a key component of any development along the Androscoggin.

Make the river the centerpiece of redevelopment efforts, develop a vision for it and market it, Jeffers and Labonte both said.

“We have to reconnect the river to these built communities like Jay and Livermore Falls and reintroduce the river as a key component of their economic and community development,” Labonte said.

“Because, if they thrive, our ability to conserve land, to conserve wildlife habitat and important natural areas is going to thrive as well.”

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Androscoggin River Watershed Council Conference speakers Jonathan Labonte, left, and Lincoln Jeffers, both of Auburn, listen Thursday morning to Scott Stone of Bethel and the Upper Andro Anglers Alliance talk about how best to develop the watershed while protecting its resources and rights of landowners along the river. More than 65 people attended the nearly seven-hour conference.

During Thursday morning’s Androscoggin River Watershed Council Conference at The Bethel Inn Conference Center in Bethel, Androscoggin Land Trust Executive Director Jonathan Labonte talks about Lisbon’s proposed off-road trail system and the importance of building similar trails along the Androscoggin River to boost economic development.