Nuisance animals and boating lawbreakers bring out these specialists
With wardens retiring and the law enforcement pool shrinking, the Maine Warden Service has created specialists to handle boating violations and calls about nuisance animals.
The programs leave fully trained wardens available to patrol the woods during hunting seasons and respond to search and rescue calls. The department was involved in an average of 480 search and rescue calls in each of the last three years.
Wildlife conflict agents are sent to take care of small nuisance or injured animals, such as skunks, porcupines or foxes. Boating deputies are boating law experts with basic warden skills, making it unnecessary for fully trained officers to be on some busy lakes and ponds, including Sebago. The seasonal boating program also feeds candidates into the state’s warden recruitment efforts.
The two programs, which began in southern Maine, are taking off in central and western parts of the state. The wildlife conflict agent program expanded to Bangor just this year, according to Lt. Dan Menard, who is one of two primary recruiters for the warden service.
The deputy warden program that was cut in the 1980s was restarted in the 2000s as seasonal workers who deal with boating issues from Memorial Day through Labor Day. They patrol popular southern Maine areas such as Sebago and Mousam lakes, plus the Belgrades in Kennebec County and white water rafting in The Forks in western Maine.
The deputy wardens work for the state but are paid in part with U.S. Coast Guard funding, he said.
The wildlife conflict agents are on-call contract employees paid through the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife budget. They are also seasonal, primarily spring and summer, Menard said.
The five deputies and six conflict agents handled 437 and 2,833 calls, respectively, this year, giving residents a faster response and allowing wardens to deal with the more serious law enforcement-related issues.
The vacancies in the warden service’s five districts are not at crisis levels yet, but the department competes with every other law enforcement agency in the state for the shrinking pool of candidates, Menard said Tuesday. There are approximately 21 wardens in each district.
The rigorous competition for candidates made the department change its recruitment policy about three years ago from once a year to open enrollment. It also spurred efforts to recruit through scheduled information sessions and job fairs. There are sessions in Newport, Sidney and Ashland this month, and several were already held this year.
Menard said the department gets from eight to 10 inquiries a week. Five people are entered in the winter session of the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. Several others are in various stages of the multi-step process to become wardens.
They also need knowledge of all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, boats, hunting, fishing and trapping, making them the highest trained law enforcement officers in Maine, he said.
Even though pay and retirement benefits for wardens tend to be less than what officers receive from jobs in towns and counties, the department does not have a retention problem, Menard said. Wardens make between $54,724.80 and $72,883.20 a year.
But the wildlife conflict agents and especially the boating law deputies give potential candidates a taste of a career in the warden service. This year, two of the half dozen boating deputies entered training to become wardens, Menard said. Since the program began in approximately 2010, the department has hired 80 percent of the participants.
“It gives us a chance to look at them and see how they handle situations,” Menard said.