The Freeport Shellfish Conservation Commission, dealing with a sharply divided opinion on a proposal to lease town-owned clam flats for private aquaculture endeavors, will decide on Oct. 8 if it wants to recommend an amendment to the shellfish conservation ordinance to the Town Council.

Doug Leland, commission chairman, said Friday that while the scientific community sees clam farming as a means of combating a declining soft-shell clam population along the town’s clam flats, the people who make their living digging in the mud stand virtually united against town-leased clam flats.

“As a commission, we’re sitting in the middle,” Leland said. “The harvesters say everything is cyclical.”

But scientists such as Brian Beal, the University of Maine at Machias marine ecology professor who has been studying the town’s mud flats for two years, are not nearly as optimistic.

The commission will sort it all out at the Oct. 8 meeting, which takes place at the Freeport Community Center at 6:30 p.m.

The Freeport Shellfish Conservation Commission conducted a public hearing on its proposed ordinance amendment Sept. 10 at the Town Hall.

Leland said the commission might have to “tweak” an eight-page proposal for the ordinance amendment, which proposes a five-year pilot program for individuals to farm on the town’s flats on the Harraseeket River and Casco Bay. According to state law, no more than 25 percent of a town’s flats can be used for aquaculture, in which the clams are farmed rather than gathered in the wild.

Leland said that statewide clam landings are less than half of what they were in 1980. Predation of soft-shell clams by green crabs is blamed. Proponents of aquaculture say the practice will allow individuals to seed their flats with juvenile clams, and manage the resource with better results.

But the clammers and others say that the town’s clam flats are for everyone, and leasing to individuals is unfair to harvesters who don’t have the resources to farm.

“The clammers aren’t being represented here,” commission member and clammer Dale “Chopper” Sawyer told the Tri-Town Weekly. “Every inch of mud we have we have to fight for. We’re losing ground. There are only two clammers on the commission, and they’re not being represented.”

Sawyer said that a majority of harvesters who spoke at the public hearing opposed the ordinance amendment.

Beal, who has studied green crabs and their effect on soft shell clams in Freeport for two years, said earlier that the Freeport Shellfish Conservation Commission’s idea is long overdue.

“No municipalities are doing it,” Beal told the Tri-Town Weekly. “It is a head-scratcher. I react by saying, ‘What’s taken so long for Maine communities to get to this? And I congratulate Freeport. The Maine Legislature approved municipal leasing in 1917. This is a historic decision by the commission. It creates opportunities for people in the future.”

Leland said the commission heard familiar arguments at last week’s hearing.

“I heard a lot of reinforcements of views that we had heard before,” he said, “but I didn’t hear many changes. The harvesters are against it. They simply don’t see the need to do it.”

So the commission has much to weigh on Oct. 8.

“If it’s rejected, that’s where it stops, and if it’s approved we send it to the Town Council for approval. I would expect that process to be rather thorough and at some point, the Department of Marine Resources will be involved,” Leland said.

The commission will take all questions asked at the hearing and put them on the town’s website, and have a printout of the questions available at the Oct. 8 meeting.

“It represents the beginning of a conversation that’s going to go on for some time, if the shellfish landings continue to decline,” he said.