ONCORD, N.H. - The agency that oversees the Connecticut River said yesterday that no additional water was released for a canoe trip by Vice President Al Gore and Governor Jeanne Shaheen last week.
The Connecticut River Joint Commission, after consulting with the Secret Service, asked Pacific Gas & Electric to move up a planned water release by about two hours Thursday so Gore's canoe would not run aground or be tipped over by surging waters, the group's executive director, Sharon Francis, said in a statement.
''As hosts for our vice president on the Connecticut River, we felt a responsibility for his safety and that of the governor and the river's other guests,'' Francis said.
Gore used the occasion to announce $819,000 in federal money for projects related to the river and its watershed, including $100,000 for the commission, which comprises officials appointed by the four river states: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Republicans have accused Gore, an environmentalist and the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, of wasting billions of gallons of water during a drought for a campaign photo opportunity.
State Republican Party chairman Steve Duprey raised the allegations again yesterday, calling Gore a ''pseudo-environmentalist.''
''He wasted 4 billion gallons of water,'' released at a rate of 180,000 gallons per second, Duprey said. ''The vice president says one thing on the environment and does another.''
Duprey also said releasing the water early ''amounts to a corporate campaign contribution'' by Pacific Gas & Electric.
However, Peter Burling, a Democrat from Cornish and the House minority leader, said the utility often adjusts the timing or rate of its water releases to accommodate other groups, such as the Boy Scouts. In fact, Burling said, ''the vice president asked that it not happen,'' but local commission members made the request.
The river commission and the utility also said the figures quoted by Duprey, reported in the news media last week, were wildly inaccurate and the allegations of waste and political favoritism were unfounded.
Pacific Gas & Electric officials say they did not lose any money by changing the timing of the water release. Utility spokesman Shawn Cooper said the utility released only 27,000 gallons per second through the Wilder Dam, slightly more than the average daily flow during the drought but less than the flow on days when energy demand is high.
''The timing was a little bit different than we usually would have done, but the amount of water was the same,'' Cooper said.
''We don't want to get dragged into the political fight,'' he said. ''If it was George Bush or George Pataki or whatever, we would have done the same thing.''
In this case, the river commission had planned the trip in advance and invited officials from the four river states and federal environmental and wildlife agencies, as well as Gore and Shaheen.
However, in preliminary trips, commission members found the river level either too low or too high because of a large, quick release of water, Francis said.
The bottom line, Burling said, was that the release helped the environment, particularly trout downstream.
He called New Hampshire Republicans the real ''pseudo-environmentalists,'' saying they defeated a bill this year that would have given towns money to buy and protect land around wellheads and other community water supplies.
