HELENA — Chatting in the first-floor lobby of the Montana State Capitol earlier this week, Mike Cuffe was interrupted every 30 seconds or so by a bipartisan procession of lawmakers, slapping him on the back or shaking his hand and offering congratulations.

The Republican from Eureka, serving his fourth and final term in the state House of Representatives, had just introduced and secured passage of the last bill of his career in the lower chamber. The measure will provide funding critical to combating a statewide crisis that emerged last year, when a destructive species of invasive mussel was detected in Tiber Reservoir — the first-ever positive hit in Montana’s waters.

“In hindsight, I wish I had had the drive to punch the program we’re doing now through two years ago, but I don’t think anybody could have pushed it through,” Cuffe said in the interview last week. “Mussels are the game-changer. When you get them in your water, you don’t get rid of them.”

He’s quick to note that he is just one of many lawmakers, state officials and scientists who have teamed up in recent months to revamp the state’s invasive species program during the fast-paced legislative session. He singles out other members of the Northwest Montana’s legislative delegation, including Rep. Mark Noland, R-Bigfork, and Sen. Chas Vincent, R-Libby, as two of the effort’s biggest drivers.

But when the issue is brought up with his colleagues, it’s Cuffe’s name that’s mentioned first.

“He’s a champion on the issue, and he’s been ringing that bell since he’s been in the Legislature,” Vincent said in an interview last week. “It takes quite a bit to get Representative Cuffe fighting mad, and when we had the hit at Tiber Reservoir, he was definitely fighting mad.”

Vincent and Cuffe also serve as delegates to the Pacific Northwest Economic Region Foundation, which tackles a range of economic issues shared by states and provinces from Montana to Alaska. Vincent credited Cuffe, in his capacity as one of the group’s two vice presidents, with helping to secure millions of dollars in federal funding for invasive-mussel programs in the Northwest states.

And while Cuffe regularly clashes with Democrats on policy issues debated every two years in Helena, his work on invasive mussels has won him praise from across the aisle.

“He’s done more than his fair share and is due a great deal of credit. He recognized the problem for what it was early on,” said Sen. Mike Phillips, D-Bozeman, a biologist who has spent three sessions on the Senate Natural Resources Committee. “With invasive species in general, if you get behind the curve of opportunity, you’re really going to be hard-pressed to put in place a solution that can matter.”

He added that the more than $12 million Cuffe helped secure to fund the program over the next two years was no easy task in an already-tight budget cycle.

“That’s a substantial effort on our part. We’re a small state with a million residents,” Phillips said. “It’s hard to marshal substantial financial resources because we just don’t have a big tax base.”

When he first arrived in the Legislature in 2011, mussels weren’t on Cuffe’s radar.

Market conditions had recently forced the Eureka native’s hometown lumber mill to close, and he’d felt it was finally time to return to public office decades after his last political job as former Montana Rep. Dick Shoup’s press secretary in Washington, D.C.

He credits former Flathead Sen. Verdell Jackson for working to first draw the state’s attention to invasive species, and said his work with the Pacific Northwest foundation got him working to address the threat of invasive quagga and zebra mussels.

“That was a huge learning curve, and not one that I was eager to take on,” said Cuffe, who graduated from the University of Montana in 1974 with a journalism degree.

Before his career in the timber industry, Cuffe’s jobs included working as an Associated Press stringer and as editor of The Western News in Libby.

“I’m not a scientist, I’m not a real technical guy. Like a reporter, you learn a little bit about general things and you organize patterns.”

Regarding his work on invasive-species legislation this session, he added, “I’m more of a generalist, but I saw what needed to be done and what buttons needed to be pushed to get it done. And I can be very relentless.”

Cuffe’s bill to ramp up the state’s invasive species program includes portions of another measure sponsored by Rep. Mark Noland, R-Bigfork, one of Cuffe’s key partners on the issue. While the language isn’t as strong as groups working to protect Flathead Lake had hoped for, it will establish a pilot program to allow stricter regulations on watercraft west of the Continental Divide.

Caryn Miske, executive director of the Flathead Basin Commission, acknowledged that the program falls short of the state commission’s goals, but commended Noland and Cuffe for getting some of the proposals included in the bill.

“Overall, this has been nothing short of a smashing success in a session when everything else was being cut,” Miske said. “From a funding perspective, I don’t think we could have done much better.”

Cuffe’s work this session hasn’t drawn universal praise, however.

Rep. Jim Keane of Butte, a member of the Legislature’s natural resources budget committee and the Environmental Quality Council, is also one of the top House Democrats working through the still-pending budget and infrastructure bills. While he singled out the state’s invasive-mussel issue as a top priority before the session started, he remains skeptical of whether the program goes far enough.

“It just seems like what happened was the lobbyists said, ‘We can’t do this, here’s something for two years,’” Keane said, referring to changes to the original funding proposal that eliminated a user fee for irrigators and lowered those paid by hydroelectricity producers.

“I recognize that this is what you need to do to get started, but is it going to be appropriate? I’m not sure.”

For his part, Cuffe doesn’t argue that the program is perfect, and he expects the state’s response to mussels and other invasive species will evolve.

But he noted that the program will more than double the state’s boat inspection stations, add new regulations on out-of-state watercraft and mussel-fouled water bodies and establish far more rigorous program for sampling and testing water bodies in the state.

“If we don’t meet this challenge and do it right, this is devastating,” he said. “This aquatic invasive species legislation, I think is the biggest, most important piece of legislation that I have ever carried, and very likely will be the most important one I will ever carry.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.