Maine Legislature approves Dion Civil Deputy bill

AUGUSTA — The Maine Legislature unanimously approved a bill sponsored by Sen. Mark Dion of Portland to clarify the legal training requirements for Civil Deputies earlier this week.

LD 1776, “An Act to Establish Requirements for Civil Deputies” as amended, establishes specific training requirements for civil deputies that align with the duties outlined in the job description.

“Civil deputies today don’t have the same duties responsibilities as full-time police officers, they don’t carry firearms, they don’t wear a uniform, they don’t make physical arrests, and they don’t drive cruisers,” said Sen. Dion. “It is wildly inappropriate and costly to mandate that Civil Deputies receive similar training to that of Police Officers. This bill is about changing the requirements to reflect the actual job and saving taxpayers money.”

Civil Deputies are full-time or part-time employees responsible for civil processes, which primarily includes serving legal documents on behalf of the court from subpoenas to summons. However, current law requires Civil Deputies to have extensive and unnecessary training that goes well beyond the job description, such as Maine Criminal Justice Academy Pre-service Training for part-time civil deputies and an 18-week Basic Law Enforcement Training Program for full-time civil deputies.

Sheriff Kevin Joyce of Cumberland County brought this issue to Sen. Dion’s attention and testified in favor of the bill before the Legislature’s Committee on State and Local Government.

“Many of the skills that a patrol officer performs and is trained for are not skills that a Civil Deputy would ever need. To train the Civil Deputies to this standard would be costly and unnecessary since they will never act on many of these functions,” said Sheriff Kevin Joyce of Cumberland County, President of the Maine Sheriff’s Association. “The intention is to let a Sheriff decide what training is appropriate and make sure that the training is job specific.”

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