Now that the political wrangling is over, the architects of a plan to add Katahdin Lake to Baxter State Park are gearing up for the next big challenge: Raising the money to seal the deal.

Sam Hodder, senior project manager for the Trust for Public Land, said his nonprofit now will have to reach out to the handful of donors who had pledged major money to the land deal back before it went through its legislative metamorphosis.

Lawmakers, in response to pressure from sportsmen and Katahdin-area residents, changed the bill to require that hunting, trapping and snowmobiling be allowed on the northern 1,975 acres of the 6,015-acre property. The 4,040 acres surrounding Katahdin Lake in the south will be added to Baxter and likely managed as a wildlife sanctuary.

The land trust will have to raise approximately $11.5 million to complete the transaction, which involves trading a private company 21,000 acres of prime timberland in exchange for the 6,000-acre lake property.

“It’s not going to be a black-and-white answer overnight,” Hodder said Friday, one day after the Legislature voted to send the bill to Gov. John Baldacci. Instead, fundraisers will have to reopen discussions with the donors to make them comfortable with the new deal.

“I’m really hoping this puts us in a better position to get the project done,” said Hodder, adding that he was pleased with the end product.

Others offered mixed reactions to the compromise.

Mark Scally, chairman of East Millinocket’s Board of Selectmen, thought the Legislature gave away too much for too little return, echoing Rep. Herb Clark, D-Millinocket, in calling the swap “the steal of the century.”

Scally and Millinocket Town Councilor Matthew Polstein also believe that the 1,975 acres left open to traditional uses wasn’t good hunting ground.

“They gave us the bad land,” Scally said. “They [conservationists] are getting all the good stuff.”

Polstein said he would rather have seen all 6,015 acres run as a wildlife sanctuary and another, larger and better area in the Katahdin region purchased for traditional usage, but the political reality of the controversy dictated otherwise. As part of the compromise, the state did gain a two-year option to purchase 8,000 acres east of the lake for traditional uses.

The legislators “did the best they could do,” Polstein said.

Buzz Caverly, the former longtime director of Baxter State Park, was decidedly upbeat about the compromise.

“This is an opportunity that comes along once in a lifetime and was worth all of the effort everybody put into it,” said Caverly, who knew the park’s creator and namesake, the late Gov. Percival Baxter.

Caverly said he was pleased the 4,000 acres around the lake, which Baxter included in his original vision of the park, would remain off-limits to hunting.

“I think he would be thrilled,” Caverly said.

Patrick McGowan, commissioner of the Department of Conservation, was still obviously upset with some lawmakers’ suggestions that his agency was behind the plan to prohibit hunting around the lake. The department merely wanted to transfer a “clean deed” to the Baxter State Park Authority, which indicated it would run the land as a wildlife sanctuary.

Despite the weeks of occasionally frustrating negotiations, McGowan said he was pleased to have the deal completed. “It’s good that it passed, and we’ll go forward and make it work,” he said.

Comments from Millinocket Councilor Wallace Paul show that some hard feelings linger.

Paul said he believed that more people in the Katahdin region may have supported the original land swap had it not come on the heels of proposals from environmentalist Roxanne Quimby and others to create a national park in the region. He believed local concerns were addressed inadequately.

“We are going to have a voice in this,” Paul said. “People up here are not the ‘redneck terrorizers’ that we are painted to be. They [environmentalists] are trying to protect what we have built over the course of generations.”