WESTBROOK – A new effort to restore a ruined watershed has gotten under way, starting in Westbrook, and it may cost local landowners thousands of dollars in new fees, according to officials connected to the project.

The work began in late August, when workers with the Long Creek Watershed Management District got started in an area just off Thomas Drive, within sight of Col. Westbrook Executive Park. The area is the headwaters of the Long Creek Watershed, according to Kate McDonald, a project scientist with the Cumberland County Soil and Water Conservation District.

The watershed, McDonald said, extends from the headwaters down to Clarks Pond, near the Maine Mall. Once, the area was thriving with trout. Human encroachment changed that, she said, starting with agriculture in the 1950s and ’60s, then commercial development and the Maine Mall in the following years.

Eventually, McDonald said, the pavement cut off water flow, and pollution from cars, along with road salts, fouled the area.

“You end up with a glorified ditch by the side of the road that was your stream,” she said.

Now, the new effort is geared toward restoration of the watershed. The first steps of the work, which take place off Thomas Drive, involve manually placing 30 boulders and 100 tree stumps and logs into the water area. The boulders, McDonald said, will disrupt the flow of the stream enough to cause small pools to form. That, combined with the shade from the tree roots, will create a more natural habitat.

McDonald said the district will not introduce wildlife to the watershed directly, but she hopes the improvements will draw fish and insects back naturally.

“The long-term goal is to return trout and the bugs they eat to the stream,” she said. “We should see them in a lot more places, and it should be a much more viable fishery.”

Tamara Lee Pinard, executive director of the Long Creek Watershed Management District, and program manager for the Cumberland County Soil and Water Conservation District, said she knows that restoring the watershed could be a tall order. Regardless of what the district does, the primary cause of the initial damage – human development – still remains.

“We can’t undo the development,” she said. “People are here, but we’re trying to find ways to make the stream as natural as possible.”

Pinard said the work is the result of a legal agreement between state and federal environmental agencies and the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. The foundation sued the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Maine Department of Environmental Protection after a 2008 study by the DEP found certain watershed areas, including Long Creek, did not meet water quality standards set by the state and federal government.

Pinard said one result of the lawsuit was an agreement that created the Long Creek Watershed Plan in 2009, and officially began the process to restore the watershed.

The process will be expensive. McDonald said the project is two years into a 10-year permit to do the work, and Pinard estimated it would cost approximately $1.5 million a year to finish.

Landowners, Pinard said, will be responsible for paying for it. As part of the agreement, property owners will have two options: upgrading the property to meet up-to-date DEP regulations, or joining the watershed district, which requires an annual fee of $3,000 for every acre of impervious land, meaning buildings, pavement and other man-made structures, Pinard said.

One of the larger companies that uses the property is Idexx Laboratories, which has a facility on Thomas Drive. An Idexx spokesman referred inquiries to Boulos Property Management, the company that actually manages the property.

Paul Ureneck, vice president of project management at Boulos, said this week that the company owns approximately nine properties within the watershed area, and the fees will add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“We were not happy with this thing in the beginning,” he said.

Ureneck said he understood the good intentions behind the new rules, but for property owners who had already spent a small fortune just building their properties in the first place, having new rules handed down out of the blue was not welcome.

“In all these properties (that we run on the watershed), we (already) went through the various approval processes,” he said. “Then all of a sudden the government comes back and says, ‘Oh, guess what? All of the rules we told you to abide by, they don’t work.’”

Despite the misgivings, Ureneck said, his company understood that the rules were coming from the federal government. Fighting the new regulations, he said, could have cost just as much in court costs, and that’s assuming Boulos would win, so Ureneck took the if-you-can’t-beat-them-then-join-them approach.

“(We said), why not become a part of the process, and get a seat at the table? If you fight it, you lose,” he said.

That began a process of negotiation and discussion with the DEP, which ultimately smoothed ruffled feathers of landowners like Boulos. Ureneck said the state officials made it clear that the intent was not to force-feed new rules to landowners; rather, the intent was to make the process a dialogue, where the state answered questions and listened to and attempted to accommodate landowner concerns.

“The DEP really did do, I think, an honest job in trying to make this a collaborative effort,” Urenek said.

McDonald said in addition to the boulders and logs, workers will plant over 3,000 trees, shrubs and flowers throughout the watershed area. In addition, she said, the district will continue to work with local landowners to make sure that everything is being done to promote proper drainage and reduce any new pollutants that could get introduced into the watershed.

“We don’t want to restore the stream, and then have a big storm come through and wash it all out,” she said.