Maine Roadside Weed And Brush Removal Law

Title 30-A §3291 sits in Maine's municipal code, in the chapter governing parks, trees, and playgrounds. Subsection 1 lets a municipality set aside part of its roads-and-bridges budget to do the first cutting: removing trees, shrubs, worthless fruit trees, bushes, and weeds growing between the road limit and the traveled part of any highway or town way, sparing shade trees, timber trees, cared-for fruit trees, and ornamental shrubs. That initial clearing continues year by year until the entire strip along the way has been cut once.

Subsection 2 is where the landowner's own duty starts. Once a stretch has been cleared for the first time, 'the owner of the land adjoining the highway or town way shall each year, before the first day of October, remove all bushes, weeds, worthless trees and grass from the roadside adjoining the owner's cultivated or mowing fields.' The municipality keeps responsibility for any other land along the way, except wild land, so the annual duty falls specifically on owners whose adjoining fields are cultivated or mowed, not on every abutter.

Miss the October 1 deadline and subsection 3 hands the job to the town: the municipal officers of the municipality where the land sits 'shall have the bushes, weeds, worthless trees and grass cut and removed,' and the actual cost of that work 'shall be a lien upon the land adjoining the highway or town way and shall be assessed and collected as a tax on that land.' There's no separate fine; the mechanism is cost recovery through the property tax system.

Maine has no separate statewide statute ordering private landowners to control noxious weeds anywhere other than a roadside. The state's other weed-adjacent regulation, the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry's Chapter 273 rule, works differently: it bans nurseries and garden centers from importing, selling, or propagating for sale invasive species like Japanese knotweed and Japanese barberry, and it doesn't require any landowner to remove invasive plants already growing on their property.

Section 3291 carries no fine or criminal charge. The consequence for missing the October 1 deadline is that the municipal officers do the cutting and removal themselves, then the actual expense 'shall be a lien upon the land adjoining the highway or town way and shall be assessed and collected as a tax on that land', meaning it rides along with the owner's property tax bill and carries the same collection power a town has over unpaid taxes.