PORT TOWNSEND — Port Townsend city staff will address deer management questions in 2026.
“Everybody’s got a different perspective about the deer,” said Emma Bolin, the city’s director of planning and community development. “Amazingly, you could agree with someone politically, and then you realize that they feed the deer.”
Conversations about deer are not new, City Manager John Mauro said during Monday’s city council workshop. In 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) gave an extensive presentation to the council, which can be viewed on the city website.
Data on deer population, its effect on traffic and aggressive behavior is not available, Bolin said, but staff time requirements are high to pursue the data necessary for action.
Bolin and Port Townsend Public Library Director Melody Sky Weaver presented the workshop, which concluded that, for thorough city engagement to occur, timelines should be adjusted for 2026.
“We talked about the small ways to move the needle in the interim,” Bolin said in a phone interview. “And the small ways that have the biggest impact are adjusting human behavior. That’s my biggest message: We need to make it trendy to avoid and respect wildlife.”
Implementation of some form of management plan, whether culling the population or introducing birth control, likely would be taken on by WDFW, Bolin said, but the agency is not interested in overreaching and would require a thorough city-led outreach process to define the problem and desired outcome.
Bolin said WDFW is willing to provide support and education, and potentially to serve on a stakeholders’ committee.
“We’ll need to ensure that we have the staff investment to prepare materials for those meetings in the future,” Bolin said. “With the 2025 work plan and all of the statutory requirements, and then leaving time for our day-to-day operations, as well as the inevitable fires that come up, it doesn’t leave very much time. We want to get it right, and we want the public to understand that we’re very ambitious and we’re in the business of trying to solve problems for the community, but it feels disingenuous to put forth a public expectation that we can solve deer-related issues when the reality is that we can never actually solve issues that deer present in our community.
“At best, we can hope to mitigate those, and it will take time to develop a plan, to engage the community and then to implement and adaptively monitor and manage that plan,” Bolin continued. “It could take decades to get it right.”
City staff also will focus heavily on housing issues and the comprehensive plan in 2025, Bolin said.
According to the staff presentation, no West Coast communities have successfully implemented a deer management plan.
Following the presentation, a number of members of the public commented on the issue, including resident Joan Fabien, who shared her experience of being attacked by deer.
“I myself was on the city right of way putting garbage into the rolling can that was already there,” Fabien said. “I was swarmed by aggressive deer and ended up in the ER with many thousand dollars worth of injuries that still haven’t been completely resolved.”
Fabien said her nose was broken, and because it occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no hospital beds available, so she sat up all night, straightening it with ice packs.
Fabien added that she saw a need for the city code to be enforced with a higher fine and suggested a deer hotline.
Bolin said the city will maintain engagement through public education and code enforcement in 2025.
The library will provide an educational opportunity at 6 p.m. Sept. 26. Cole Janowski, a wildlife conflict specialist with WDFW, and KT LaBadie, code compliance officer with the city of Port Townsend, will give a presentation titled “Living With Deer” at the Port Townsend Public Library.
Code compliance can be challenging, as there is only one compliance officer, Bolin said. There needs to be solid evidence that someone has fed deer to enforce a fine, she said.
The city also provides education based on concerns filed on the city website complaint portal at https://cityofpt.us/planning-community-development/page/code-compliance.
Council member Libby Urner Wennstrom introduced the concept of a community group to do some of the initial work of investigating data and defining the problem, moving into 2025.
“Maybe there’s another way to go forward, which is organizations or groups, that aren’t policymaking, or formal city things, but end up doing a lot of study stuff and then present it going forward,” Urner Wennstrom said. “Maybe there’s a group that would like to step up. I’m feeling a lot of community energy around this, and I don’t want to say, ‘Oh we can’t even think about it for another six years.’”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
