NYT19980329.0162 NEWS NEWSWIRE As the ferry made its way from Vermont to New York, across the choppy waters of Lake Champlain, Kirk Polhemus, a deckhand, issued a judgment heard over and over these days in the North Country. ``It may not be a great lake,'' he said, ``but it's the best lake.'' These words are heard so often here that it seems the Chamber of Commerce has written the script for discussing the dispute over a federal law that briefly made Champlain an official Great Lake, the equal of Superior, Huron, Erie, Ontario and Michigan. That legislation, overturned in Congress last week, was the brainchild of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. He was seeking federal funds from the Sea Grant program, which finances aquatic research at universities that border the Great Lakes or the ocean. Leahy slipped seven words into the bill last month _ ``The term Great Lakes includes Lake Champlain'' _ and thus unleashed a storm of protest in the Middle West, where politicians from the shores of the five larger lakes rebelled at sharing their ``greatness.'' Now the law has been rewritten, stripping Lake Champlain of that superlative but giving Vermont access to the Sea Grant money nonetheless. ``If you get the money, you don't need the status,'' said Chris Walfield, a desk clerk at a motel here, who, like most residents on the New York side of the lake, found the whole episode kind of silly. But the brouhaha, despite sneering editorials across the country, was a bonanza for the chambers of commerce on both sides of the lake, a perfect example of the public relations credo ``Say what you want about me as long as you spell my name right.'' The coast-to-coast publicity was welcome in Plattsburgh, a faded city reeling from the loss of its Air Force base and the Canadian shoppers who are staying home because of the unfavorable exchange rate. In recent weeks, tourism and civic officials have had ample opportunity to proclaim their lake a scenic, unspoiled gem, more like Lake Tahoe or Geneva than industrial waters such as Lake Superior, Michigan or Erie. And even in Burlington, Vt., a more prosperous and cultivated city than Plattsburgh and well known for its natural beauty and recreation, travel writers from Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Maryland have come calling. They will no doubt tell their readers about the silos and snow geese, the moose and maple sugar, the piney woods and picturesque marinas, to say nothing of the fall-foliage season when both Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks blaze with beauty. The mayors on both sides of the 490-square-mile lake, Peter Clavelle in Burlington and Clyde Rabideau in Plattsburgh, agree that Vermont is way ahead of New York in developing and promoting its lakefront. ``New York is a huge state so it's hard to get recognition,'' Rabideau said. Clavelle agreed. ``The lake is much more important to Vermonters than New Yorkers,'' he said. ``But that's mainly a matter of scale.'' The two cities are as different in character as white bread and wheat bread, or cornflakes and granola. Burlington is a hip place, with fine restaurants and cultural activities that draw residents of Plattsburgh across the lake on ferries that run year round. The Vermont city won the battle with its New York neighbor in the 1950s for a huge IBM plant and is thus an employment mecca. Plattsburgh has the look of an industrial city fallen on hard times, boasting too heartily about a new wine bar and a renovated train station. Yet people who live here rave about affordable real estate, natural beauty and down-to-earth neighbors _ not the snooty urban refugees who are more likely to settle in Vermont. ``It's a completely different culture over there,'' said Mark Barie, head of the organization that is redeveloping the Air Force base, which occupies two miles of lakefront. ``They see themselves as a playground for skiers, hikers, nature buffs. They're less practical and more aesthetic. Here it's dollars and cents and common sense. They wear L. L. Bean clothes so they look like we always looked, but without the label.'' The lake ``is one of the few commonalities, except the weather, that strikes a chord on both sides,'' said Stewart Ledbetter, the news director of WPTZ-TV, an NBC affiliate that serves both cities. It is a long, narrow and deep body of water _ 107 miles from Whitehall, N.Y., to the Quebec border, anywhere from half a mile to 14 miles wide and up to 400 feet deep. The scene of significant battles in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, Lake Champlain is considered by divers to be one of the great troves of unexplored shipwrecks. While far smaller than Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes, it is No. 6 in the United States in size and shares many geological and environmental characteristics with its larger cousins. All six lakes were carved by the same glacier, during the Pleistocene ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. All six share the same drainage basin, emptying into the St. Lawrence River. The six lakes also have identical rock formations, flora and fauna and similar environmental plagues, among them zebra mussels, sea lamprey, phosphorus runoff and mercury pollution. The Sea Grant money will be spent finding ways to clean up the lakes and prevent future problems. But Middle Western politicians balked at sharing the Great Lake designation. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., insisted that the hullabaloo was not ``a tempest in a teapot'' but rather ``a matter of our identity.'' Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, mimicking a slight that was hurled at Dan Quayle during a vice-presidential debate, said: ``I know the Great Lakes. I've traveled the Great Lakes. And Lake Champlain is not one of the Great Lakes.'' Leahy and others guessed that the Middle Westerners took more offense than New York's senators, whose state sits at the edge of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, because they have less to brag about. ``New York has a lot of other things going for it,'' the Vermont senator said. ``For the Midwestern states, the Great Lakes is all they have.'' In a rare burst of candor, Leahy described the compromise struck last week as a win-win situation for him, not only because Vermont got the Sea Grant eligibility, but because, after the vote to rescind Champlain's ``great'' status, he is now owed favors by his colleagues in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. ``He didn't get to be a senator all these years by being stupid,'' said Chris Lamitie, a ferry employee, taking a break at the Galley restaurant on the dock. Donna Holt manages the six-seat clapboard restaurant, serving sandwiches on her daughter's home-baked bread. Mrs. Holt, who has spent most of her life here, had the unlikely experience of being in Wisconsin, where her husband was waiting for a heart transplant at a veterans' hospital, when the Great Lakes dispute flared earlier this month. At first Mrs. Holt and her husband were flabbergasted by the fury of Wisconsin's citizens. ``Then we realized that beside the Green Bay Packers, the lake is their big item,'' she said. Then Mrs. Holt offered her own version of the unofficial I Love Champlain campaign. ``I can't think of any place I'd rather be, except maybe in January and February,'' she said. ``To me it's a great lake _ always was, always will be.''