Mar. 9--After wrestling for years with a chunky proposal to manage the shoreline around the three big lakes in western Connecticut, FirstLight Power Resources has come up with a skinny substitute.

"We call it shoreline management plan lite," New Fairfield First Selectman John Hodge said Thursday.

But after a meeting Friday in New Milford Town Hall, it seemed the slimmed-down version might satisfy everyone.

"We're glad they are addressing the issues," Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Friday about FirstLight's recent work on the plan. "It's a slow, arduous process."

Blumenthal said his office will continue to "monitor and scrutinize" FirstLight to make sure the plan respects the legal rights of lake residents.

The plan, when completed, will be the first time there has been a comprehensive set of regulations governing the shorelines of Candlewood Lake, Lake Lillinonah, Lake Zoar and stretches of the Housatonic River.

There is hope the plan will control development around Candlewood Lake, which in turn may slow the lake's overcrowding.

FirstLight inherited the complex shoreline management plan from Northeast Generation Services in 2006, when NGS's parent company, Northeast Utilities, sold several hydroelectric plants in Connecticut and Massachusetts for $1.34 billion.

FirstLight has to complete the plan because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has required it to do so as one of the terms of a 40-year license issued in 2004, which lets FirstLight operate the five hydroelectric plants on the Housatonic River.

Three of those plants form the lakes.

James Ginnetti, FirstLight's vice president for external affairs, said Thursday the utility decided to greatly reduce the 50-page document because, after studying it, the company's lawyers found it to be needlessly complex -- sometimes redundant and sometimes contradictory.

The new document is an attempt to clear away that complexity and state the basic concepts of the plan as simply as possible.

At Friday's meeting, FirstLight took steps to neutralize the main point of contention between the company and shoreline residents -- charging the people who live on the lake an annual fee for their use of a narrow band of utility-owned land that circles Candlewood Lake.

FirstLight broke the impasse on the issue in February when it agreed to not charge the fee.

But at Friday's meeting, Ginnetti said that pledge might have to be broken in the future, if some radical change of circumstances forces FirstLight to impose a levy on shoreline residents.