A nascent effort to set up a Standish Fish and Game Club could lead to the establishment of the town’s first legal shooting range.

At an April 28 Standish Town Council meeting, Greg Sirpis, Dick Bernier and Dan Dyer presented a proposal for basing a new fish and game club on heavily wooded, town-owned property near Steep Falls. The club, which would likely include a shooting range, would be situated on a portion of 300 acres owned by the town between Boundary Road and the Mountain Division rail line. The area is used primarily as a woodlot, and is the site of the old town dump that closed in the early 1990s.

Sirpis said the idea for the club, which remains unincorporated, emerged from a January Town Council public hearing on a proposed firearms ordinance that drew dozens of vocal gun owners and resulted in the ordinance being scrapped.

“There were a couple of us that met afterward outside in the parking lot and said this would be a good opportunity to pursue having a fish and game club,” he said. “There were so many supporters of the outdoors at the meeting. We quickly recognized that those were people that liked to hunt and fish so it might be a great opportunity.”

According to Sirpis, the club could offer fly-fishing lessons, shooting lessons, hunter safety courses, concealed permit classes, trapping classes, archery classes, and safe boating classes, among other activities. It could also focus on natural resource preservation and educating youth to be “future stewards of the outdoors,” Sirpis said.

“If it’s outdoors it’s of interest to us,” he said. “It’s hunting, fishing, boating, kayaking, canoeing, hiking – it could be bird watching for all I care. We really want to have a family-oriented organization that will help us preserve the outdoor tradition of hunting and fishing and all the other things that go along with it.”

Sirpis said the club’s founders hope to lease the property for $1 a year – a “very reasonable” idea, according to Town Manager Gordon Billington.

“I think it serves a public purpose, providing an area for discharge of arms away from residential properties,” Billington said.

Billington said the range, which would be located at least 4,000 feet away from nearby residences, could potentially alleviate problems associated with the use of a large gravel pit known as Maietta’s pit, which led to the drafting of the scrapped firearms ordinance this past winter.

“If we could steer people to a supervised location, which is far removed from residents, that could take pressure off of the use of the pit,” he said.

The firearms ordinance was drafted in response to a petition drive organized by property owners in the Richville neighborhood, along Route 114, many of whom say they were outraged by the use of Maietta’s pit as an informal shooting range for law enforcement and, in particular, recreational firearms users.

Scarborough-based Maietta Enterprises has owned the 109-acre site since the early 1990s, and has significantly expanded gravel extraction at the site in the past two decades as part of its construction business. The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office has used the pit as a SWAT-team training site for years, and the State Fire Marshal’s Office has exploded confiscated material on the site several times.

Deb Boxer, a resident of Cole Hill Road, submitted a petition Nov. 12, with 45 signatures, calling on the town to “disallow” the continued use of the Maietta pit as a “shooting range.” On Dec. 23, about 10 Richville property owners attended a Standish Ordinance Committee meeting and expressed anger regarding noise and safety issues related to shooting activities at the pit last summer, when the Saco-based firearms training company, Weaponcraft, held a number of daylong classes in which large quantities of ammunition were discharged in rapid succession.

Janet Lampron, whose Richville Road home abuts the pit, said she hopes the fish and game club’s firing range comes to fruition.

“It will give people a place to go where they know the police aren’t going to be called, and in an area that’s set up for it and is not going to impact homeowners,” Lampron said. “It’s an in area that’s pretty much undeveloped. It’s kind of in the back 40 and people will know that it’s OK to go there and not cut locks off the gate like they do down here and sneak in. Pretty much daily we’ve had the police out here since the snow melted. The last four days we’ve had nothing but shooting going on behind the house, for hours straight.”

According to Council Chairman John Sargent, Boxer, who could not be reached for comment, attended the meeting and expressed concern about excessive noise at the fish and game club firing range.

Sargent said the four members of the council in attendance had a “really positive” reaction to the proposal.

“They are talking about not only a firing range but a place where they could have a sportsman’s club that would offer multiple items for sportsmen and people in the community,” he said. “Hopefully it will all work out to everybody’s betterment.”