“Whether people like it or not,” all-terrain vehicles are here to stay and need to be managed professionally.

New Hampshire Bureau of Trails Chief Chris Gamache made this pronouncement at Tuesday’s outdoor recreation and tourism conference in Newry.

In New Hampshire, ATV registrations have increased three-fold from 1995 to 2003, and national sales of ATVs are five times higher than sales of snowmobiles. Four years ago, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine held its first statewide conference devoted to ATVs, recognizing the sport as one of the fastest growing of outdoor recreations.

So, ATVs are here and are here to stay, whether or not we like it.

We like it.

ATVs bring dollars to Maine in sales and tourism. More than $220 million three years ago and still growing, which are dollars worth active cultivation.

Maine has some 5,000 miles of ATV trails, but most of those miles are on private land where landowners open trails at their pleasure, and rightfully so. It’s their land.

In recent years, a number of local landowners have closed access to their trails because ATV owners have behaved so badly, tearing up the ground and leaving garbage behind. Not all ATV owners are so rude, but isn’t it always those few bad apples?

Maine’s paper companies make good-faith efforts to keep their lands open to public use, even grooming trails in many areas.

Not all landowners are so willing to make that effort, though, but ATV owners are a determined bunch who are growing in number, so at some point we will come to an impasse of access versus use and safety.

At a legislative hearing in 2003, one teenager testified that if landowners closed off private properties, “people will hit the roads.”

That’s true. Who hasn’t seen an ATV whipping down a country lane, or along the shoulder of a paved road?

In 2006, after a local ATV club couldn’t get access to enough private land to connect its recreational trail network, members turned to town government for permission for ATVs to drive on certain public roads. The selectmen in Peru granted that request, so now ATVs can ride on portions of Main Street to the Peru-Mexico bridge.

This is not an ideal situation. These powerful vehicles are designed for off-road use and that’s where they ought to travel, but too often they are forced onto Maine’s streets because landowners have tired of the trail destruction.

Maine has a fair number of ATV clubs that maintain trails, but nothing close to the number of snowmobile clubs, and certainly not enough to maintain ATV trails that take a pounding year-round.

At the Wednesday conference, ATV Maine Executive Director Dan Mitchell said more ATV clubs and more volunteers devoted to trail maintenance and building landowner relations could really make a difference.

Rather than expecting volunteers to establish hundreds more ATV clubs to groom thousands of miles of trail, maybe what we need is for existing ATV clubs to partner with existing snowmobile clubs. There is certainly considerable crossover between ATV and snowmobile use, so it makes sense that these owners and users work cooperatively to maintain the network of outdoor recreation trails.

Snowmobile clubs and landowners have very agreeable relationships across the state, which is not something that could be said for all ATV clubs, so there may be some benefit in spreading shared diplomacy, too.

The combination of ATV and snowmobile clubs would make the best use of registration fees and volunteer time, better maintaining Maine’s trails and enhancing the revenue stream we draw from these increasingly popular motor sports.