Bambi beware: The Montgomery County Council voted unanimously Tuesday to loosen hunting firearm restrictions in an attempt to give hunters and farm owners more flexibility to deal with the county’s overabundance of deer.
The new regulations would bring Montgomery more in line with state standards, which have always been less restrictive than the county’s.
“We’re dealing with a very serious problem in Montgomery County of an excessive deer population that is harming public safety and that is contributing to increases in Lyme disease and increasing crop and vegetation damage,” council Vice President Phil Andrews said.
In 2006, there were 1,951 car accidents involving deer in the county, according to the police department.
In an unfortunate coincidence, last month Councilman George Leventhal was hospitalized after hitting a deer with his car on the Capital Beltway.
“I honestly believe that I would vote in favor of this bill even had not this great misfortune occurred to me,” he said.
If signed into law, the bill would allow hunters on parcels of private property 50 acres or larger to shoot deer without obtaining a permit from the state’s Department of Natural Resources and without seeking permission from the chief ofpolice, both of which are currently required by Montgomery.
While there are more than 350 plots of land that meet that standard in the county’s urban zone — the heavily populated lower two-thirds of the county to which the law applies — the change is intended to allow farmers who suffer crop damage from deer to be able to shoot them without navigating a sometimes lengthy permission process.
Hunters would have to notify police of the intended hunt, however, and would have to post signs around the property’s perimeter and follow other safety regulations.
The bill also reduces the buffer zone around houses and other occupied structures in which hunters cannot fire weapons from 200 yards to 150 yards, in line with state standards, and reduces the buffer zone around roads from 100 yards to 50. The state does not require a road buffer zone.
According to the Natural Resources Department, there were no accidents in the state between 2000 and 2005 that involved a hunter shooting a nonhunter. There have been only two, nonfatal, hunting accidents in Montgomery County since 1991.
