More segments of the state's most pristine rivers, along with the mouths of several tributaries feeding Lake Superior, would receive greater environmental protections under two state Department of Natural Resources proposals.

A public hearing tonight at the Great Lakes Visitor Center will allow citizens to comment on designating the mouths of seven tributaries in Bayfield County as Outstanding Resource Waters. The designation would prohibit the discharge of pollutants and nutrients beyond concentration levels already found in the waters. The protected areas would extend in a quarter-mile arc from their mouths into Lake Superior.

The same proposal would also prohibit any new or increased discharges of nine specified pollutants into the Lake Superior basin without applying the best process or control technologies to remove the pollutants.

Another, unrelated proposal would add segments of rivers and streams throughout northern Wisconsin to the DNR's list of Outstanding Resource Waters, as well as to a similar list, known as Exceptional Resource Waters. Forty-four conservation groups and government bodies submitted a petition in August 2004 asking the DNR to expand environmental protections to 100 river and stream segments considered, by some petitioners, even higher quality than some segments already designated.

A lawyer for Midwest Environmental Advocates said the designations could be as effective protecting the rivers as the state's stewardship program, which allows the state to purchase land for preservation. The advantage to designating rivers is the land surrounding them remains on the tax rolls, he said.

Development near the waters would be scrutinized but not necessarily prohibited, he said.

"(The designation) gives the DNR the ability to pace and shape the growth," Hanson said during a speech at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College last week.

The petition largely based its recommendations for designations on a study conducted by the DNR itself, Hanson said. "We're really not asking for that much," he said. "We're just asking for a little more care, a little higher standard of care."

Many of the river and stream segments included in the petition are in Ashland and Bayfield counties: Bad, White, Chippewa, Kakagon, Brunsweiler, Iron, Marengo, Potato, Flag, Siskiwit and Sand rivers and Denomie, Vaughn, Beartrap Creeks, Tyler Forks and Wood Creek Slough.

The state Natural Resources Board is expected to consider a DNR proposal responding to the petition and schedule public hearings during the board's Oct. 26 meeting, according to Russ Rasmussen, DNR director of the Watershed Management Bureau.

Rasmussen said the DNR's proposal would likely include about half the river and stream segments recommended for designation by the petition.

Tonight's 5 p.m. hearing at the Great Lakes Visitor Center will focus exclusively on the proposal to make designations for the mouths of seven Bayfield County rivers and streams: Bark, Cranberry, Onion and Sioux rivers, along with Fish, Pikes and Whittlesey creeks. The mouth of the Brule River in Douglas County is also proposed for designation.

The proposal excludes the mouths of two other rivers with Outstanding Resources Water designations upstream. The mouths of both the Flag River in Port Wing and Thompson Creek in Washburn are located near municipal wastewater treatment plants, whose discharges do not comply with the designation's water quality standards, according to Nancy Larson, a DNR Lake Superior specialist.

"That's really hard to do for a wastewater treatment plant," she said.