Deer Population Worries Some in Southwest Harbor
Task Force on ambulance service moves forward, ISO and lobster truck permitting discussed
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Andy’s Home Improvement Inc.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR—Some people in Southwest Harbor are concerned about the implications of a large deer population and that some residents and visitors might be feeding the deer.
Worries about the deer herds on Mount Desert Island isn’t a new problem. It’s decades old. Deer haven’t been hunted on the island since the 1930s except when it has been declared a “nuisance” deer situation. Now, though, the Southwest Harbor Select Board is considering what it can do—if anything—to help decrease the amount of accidents involving deer as well as potentially decrease the amount of property damage deer might cause as well as Lyme disease cases on MDI.
Bar Harbor was the first place in Maine where a deer tick was found. That was in the 1980s. There can be up to 100 ticks on a single deer at any given time. Deer ticks are successful in broadleaf forest. Because of the fire of 1947, MDI has large tracts of broadleaf woods creating that habitat.
At its December 10 meeting, the board members discussed a potential deer ordinance related to people feeding deer in Southwest Harbor and how the problem is a bit bigger than the one town.
Discussions ranged around the history of deer population fluctuations on the island, the impacts of overpopulation, and potential solutions such as hunting and contraception. The board decided not to take action on the ordinance at this time, but to continue exploring options.
“I agree with the preamble here. I see it. I know it. We all know it, you know, the damage to the landscape, the increased vehicle deer crashes, the etcetera. The cause of it is multiple, and we haven't really studied this very much,” James Vallette, board member, said of the potential ordinance. “We haven't worked with it as wildlife management experts, with the community who participates and enjoys the deer. There are a lot of people who do feed the deer and it's part of their life; it's part of what they do every day. I would like to have a process that allows some discussion of the bigger picture of the deer population on the island … and pathways for maintaining a sustainable year-round population.”
Vallette worried that the ordinance was singling out just people who feed the deer and also that it was creating a solution without a full understanding of all the factors involved.
Some members of the public present explained what they saw as an urgent need.
“Everybody goes to Seawall,” one resident said. “You can count 50 deer any morning from my garden center to the picnic area. They're not starving. They're being fed. They're eating my plants in the garden center. So I'm protecting them now with deer sprays.”
There’s nothing the deer won’t eat, he said. There had been successful thinning in the past, he said, citing historical records from the 1800s to 2013. The College of the Atlantic has a 2013 report on that history online.
“A lot about MDI has changed in the past 150 years: by 1870, decades after people began coming to the island in earnest, most of the island’s first growth forest was gone,” wrote Erickson Smith, Christopher Phillips, and Anneke Hart in the 26-page document. “Those who settled Mount Desert Island created a landscape of small farms and industries much like the rest of New England. 47% of the Island’s acreage was classified as ‘improved’ in government records, meaning it had been put to human use and not left as forest. In many ways, this creation of a landscape of ‘edges’ (transition zones between different landscape features) was the beginning of a long history of human/deer interaction, as the improvements humans made to the land created ideal habitat for deer.”
Back in 2013, a task force studied how Lyme disease had increased on Mount Desert Island by a factor of four since 2006. Similarly, there was a doubling of deer and vehicle accidents compared to numbers in the early 2000s and 1990s.
At the time, the task force chairman Robert Kelley reported that 20% of all accidents on MDI involved deer. Those events aren’t contained to any town or Acadia National Park. Back in 2013-2014, the task force studied data and hunting methods. The park bans hunting. The goal had been to create a phased hunting proposal to reduce the herd population to a density of 10-15 every square mile.
Discussions about potentially thinning down the herd brought standing room only crowds to the Bar Harbor Town Council Chambers.
Acadia National Park sits on approximately half of Bar Harbor’s land mass and extends well into other portions of Mount Desert Island. When deer tend to have negative pressures in one area, they move to another.
According to Maine state statute rules about feeding deer are related to hunting, “A person may not place salt or any other bait or food in a place to entice deer to that place from June 1st to the start of an open hunting season on deer and, if all open hunting seasons on deer are closed before December 15 for that year, from the close of the last open hunting season on deer to December 15.”
Throughout New England and the northeastern part of the United States different states have different rules about feeding deer. Some have bans. Some have partial bans (or timed bans). Some simply discourage it.
In a 2020 report to the 129th Maine legislature, wildlife biologist Nathan R. Bieber wrote, “The extent to which deer are fed in Maine is not fully known, but Maine’s deer feeding culture appears to be more extensive than what’s seen in other Northeastern states, perhaps owing to relatively severe winters. It is generally agreed upon that feeding is prevalent south to north but that the scale of feeding varies regionally. Southern Maine is believed to consist of predominantly small backyard feeding sites, and while northern Maine has these as well, deer feeding is occasionally much larger in scale and much more organized in northern Maine.”
CRASH DATA
State data on trends in deer-vehicle accidents don’t seem to be increasing much anywhere on Mount Desert Island other than Tremont. Tremont has had 15 accidents with deer involved this year; the town had seven last year and six in 2013. The total number of accidents in each year are 15 in 2013, 16 in 2023, and 20 in 2024.
Southwest Harbor’s number of car and deer accidents have gone down from 14 in 2023 to 6 in 2024. In 2013 there were only 3. The total number of accidents in each year are 29 in 2013, 36 in 2023, and 22 in 2024. Some of that data might be a bit askew because of how the town has been declaring incidents clear or not.
Bar Harbor’s numbers for all accidents is much higher. The total number of accidents in each year are 141 in 2013, 175 in 2023, and 157 in 2024. Deer involvement numbers were 26 in 2024, 31 in 2023, and 22 back in 2013.
Mount Desert had 19 deer-related accidents in 2024 and 2023. Back in 2013, the town had 21.
TREMONT CRASH DATA
SOUTHWEST HARBOR CRASH DATA
BAR HARBOR CRASH DATA.
MT DESERT CRASH DATA
LYME DISEASE NUMBERS
In 2013, 1,376 probable and confirmed cases were reported to Maine CDC. The latest year with data is 2021 and that number had increased to 1,510 cases, which was a 34% increase from the year before. Cases had decreased significantly in 2020. Hancock County had a higher infection rate than most of the rest of the state in 2021.
AMBULANCE SERVICE TASK FORCE
The board members approved the town manager drafting bylaws so that there could be a task force that would focus on the future of the Tremont-Southwest Harbor Ambulance Service.
“Essentially the service has realized they are vulnerable in their current model and need to prepare and explore future options,” wrote Town Manager Karen Reddersen.
The service had already met with two Tremont Select Board members, the Tremont Town Manager, and Reddersen.
The joint committee will be formed with “representatives from each town, each fire department, and the ambulance service to evaluate the situation and explore what a future shared municipal service could look like,” Reddersen wrote in a memo to the board.
Andrew Cline spoke on behalf of the service at the Southwest Harbor meeting. He gave kudos to Select Board Chair Carolyn Ball who helped the service secure housing for people on duty upstairs over the old laundromat at the Claremont Hotel.
“That hasn’t always been possible in the past,” Cline said.
In April, the Claremont will likely need those quarters again.
“Our ranks are thin,” Cline said of the service’s personnel. Because of that, illness, injury, retirements, resignations could jeopardize the service’s mission. “We need to look for a long-term plan that we feel confident is sustainable.”
He believes the future requires collaboration.
Tremont already approved its town manager helping to craft the bylaws for the task force.
Questions might include whether or not to have an ambulance in each town or two in a central location. They could delve into staffing, looking toward how many on duty and how many can the service afford. What should the leadership structure be for the service.
Vallette asked how much of the service’s concerns had to do with housing.
Crew Chief and Board Secretary Kristin Hutchins said, “Certainly housing is an issue…. Housing is a defining issue in this town and even in this island.”
It’s more than that though, she said. There also aren’t enough people stepping into EMT roles.
Almost all the crew members have other jobs.
“Tremont is working toward a public safety building in which they want to have housing for public safety personnel,” Cline said. Southwest Harbor does not currently have that sort of space after April.
Reddersen said she appreciated the work that’s already been put in and that there are a lot of moving parts.
“It’s fairly complex,” she said.
ISO RATING
Fire Chief Tom Chisholm presented the new ISO rating for Southwest Harbor.
Every five to 10 years, the ISO, the insurance service office, needs to be evaluated by municipalities.
It looks to the level that a fire protection system has in place. That impacts a home or business’s insurance premiums. The better the fire protection, the better the cost ot that premium. The last time the town had been evaluated was in 2017.
“The direct relation to that is we got a couple phone calls from larger establishments that spoke of their premiums going up $1,600 every six months or every year alone,” Chief Chisholm said.
The town’s increased level of protection has helped with that ISO rating after the evaluation.
“So my hope is that next round of insurance premiums that come out, we see a reduction globally as a town, especially those larger businesses that pay a higher premium that we're able to back on this one,” Chisholm said.
Factors that can impact an ISO include a town’s emergency communication's’ systems, multiple aspects of fire department coverage, the water supply system (how close a hydrant is, etc.), and community risk reduction.
TOWN OFFICE HOURS CHANGING
Because of the Christmas holiday and employees’ travel schedules, the board approved closing the town office at noon on Tuesday, December 24, 2024 and Thursday, December 26, 2024.
WARRANT
Reddersen also requested an additional warrant be prepared for December 20 to meet the warrant schedule. The select board members will review the warrant by Monday, December 23, 2024.
APPOINTMENTS
Appointments to the Water/Sewer District Trustees were postponed until after the positions were advertised. There had been two reappointments on the agenda. One was for William Tillman. The other was for Ben “Lee” Worcester.
To keep things from being insular, Vallette stressed that committee member vacancies should be advertised for that reason, the board held off on reappointing two men to the town’s Water/Sewer District Board of Trustees.
The select board appointed David Scull, Kenneth J. Rozsahegyi, Lydia Goetze, Mary Ellen Martel, Lee Ann Rhoades, and Nancy Weingarten for the Sustainability Committee for terms effective until June 30., 2025.
LOBSTER BUYER TRUCK PERMIT FOR 2025
The three existing lobster buyer truck permits have been extended through to January 31, 2025. The town currently allows three lobster buyer truck permits on a first come, first serve process on the first business day of the new calendar year.
The move is to “buy a little more time because we know January 2 is coming and we don’t know the structural integrity of the dock,” Reddersen said. “We’re going to need some time now to figure out what needs to be done.”
The harbor committee has recommended amendments to the town’s current Coastal Waters and Harbor Ordinance.
“A structural engineering assessment of the Manset Dock is currently in process and findings are expected by the end of December,” Reddersen wrote in her memo.
The board discussed the current process. Questions about pier weight restrictions, whether to increase number of permits, adding language of non-transferability language, equity of the application process, potential changes to schedule of fees, and any other related items.
The permits are sold annually in January. There is a gap in time between when the permits are issued and May when the amendment changes might be voted in. More information, Reddersen said, will be available for the January 14, 2025 meeting of the select board. That will likely include a plan for interim permitting from Feb 1 through to the town meeting.
A representative of the Downeast Lobster Pound in Trenton, which started buying lobsters this summer, said that his company had been waiting to see if they could get a permit in Southwest Harbor.
“We would like to be able to buy lobsters in Southwest Harbor,” he said.
Their truck, he said, would meet the weight limits in Manset. There’s one person they buy from in Southwest Harbor and two more that they’d like to help. Right now, they use Dysarts to load, but that site can’t be utilized once the tourism season starts.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
For our earlier story about other aspects of the SWH Selectboard meeting…
https://fathom.video/share/QVDA2pTySEwJxRw9Zp-KtA826yxcyieY
https://barharborstory.substack.com/p/dot-will-fix-broken-seawall-road
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Just a quick reminder to everyone. The main host of the so-called "deer-tick" is actually rodents. Eliminating the deer population on the islands probably won't move the infection rate very much at all.