MONTVALE—Complaints about deer were increasing in September and Mayor Michael Ghassali said Sept. 13 that he was not sure what the borough could do without regional assistance.
Ghassali said he had fielded many phone calls from residents. “For some reason again, the deer issue is huge again,” he said.
Glen DePiero, manager at DePiero’s Farm Stand and Greenhouse on Summit Avenue, Montvale’s last remaining farm, told Pascack Press in August that deer had destroyed $20,000 of mums in 2021 and recently destroyed mums left outside, forcing the farmer to install a $5,000, 8-foot-high plastic fence around his valuable plants.
Ghassali did not mention DePiero’s deer woes. The 12-acre farmstead is on the cusp of celebrating a century in farming, if it continues until 2024.
“There’s a lot more deer than before,” Ghassali said. “And there’s nothing we can do as one town, unless multiple towns, the county, the state, the region comes together.
He said Saddle River was “getting some flak for hunting them” but that Montvale could not do that as “we have smaller backyards; we can’t do that here.”
Ghassali said he did not have a solution but noted that surrounding towns have been talking about the deer issue. He said there’s really no good solution. He said there was one solution where deer could be trapped in one place, put in a truck, and take them to a different state.
“I’m stuck, if someone has any ideas, wide open,” the mayor said.
No council members commented.
On Oct. 10 we asked Ghassali whether the Pascack Valley Mayors Association had come to any answers regarding deer overpopulation and if he had any comments on DePiero’s impacts from deer. Also, we asked if Ghassali had any answers for the deer overpopulation problem.
“We have discussed it and it always turns to a discussion around having a regional solution rather than individual town-specific solution. Unfortunately we still don’t have a unified solution,” Ghassali said.