Gorham is home to one of southern Maine’s most robust and thriving deer herds, but our town officials, if allowed to continue on their present track, are pushing the entire herd into extinction.
I refer specifically to the deer population in the Narragansett Game Sanctuary, which is bounded approximately by the Stroudwater River, Brackett Road, South Street and the old railroad bed. The deer herd in that area has been protected by state law since 1927, but our present crop of elected and appointed officials seem hell-bent on sidestepping the law’s protections and killing off the herd by systematically destroying its habitat.

The first misstep was Gorham’s 2016 Comprehensive Plan update, which placed the Game Sanctuary in a “growth area,” encouraging increased housing density and mixed-use developments. Since then, the Town Council, Planning Board and staff — ignoring widespread public opposition — have made sweeping zoning changes, often with little or no direct notice to the residents of the areas being rezoned. One of the zoning changes involved a parcel that the Comprehensive Plan specifically excludes from the zone it is now in. You really can’t make this stuff up.

The rezonings have then been followed by massive development proposals, such as the Robie Street development adjacent to the village and a multi-use contract zone designed to obliterate the former golf course. Not to mention the Town Council’s vocal support of the unpopular proposal to build a turnpike spur through the area.

At a recent Town Council meeting, one of our elected officials brought up the facts that the law creating the Narragansett Game Sanctuary was passed about 100 years ago, and that a lot has changed in 100 years. He also pointed out that the law’s only direct stipulation is that it bans deer hunting. Deductive reasoning isn’t everyone’s strong point, but the follow-up question might have been “Why does the law ban deer hunting?” And the answer, obviously, is that the ban on hunting was enacted for the protection and preservation of the deer herd.

So yes, a lot has changed in 100 years, but the original legislative intent — the protection of the deer herd — remains unchanged. What has changed is that the biggest threat to the deer herd today is not hunters, but the acre-by-acre destruction of habitat, especially on the scale currently envisioned — and encouraged — by our Town Council, Planning Board and municipal staff.

In spite of the town’s cruel rush to kill off the deer population, I live in the hope that we still have time to reverse the momentum, and I encourage all interested residents to get involved in two processes that are already in the works — the development of a town-wide Open Space Plan and the revision of the 2016 Comprehensive Plan.