AUGUSTA – With motorcycle fatalities in Maine the highest in a decade, and at the request of an 86-year-old great-grandmother, a Kittery legislator is sponsoring a bill to bring back a motorcycle helmet law.

That legislation, L.D. 172, will be staunchly opposed by the United Bikers of Maine, promised Dave Gagnon of Lewiston, United Bikers’ director for Androscoggin County.

“I don’t agree with the helmet law,” Gagnon said Friday. “Like our motto says, Let those who ride decide.’ I don’t think people who don’t ride should tell people who do ride what they should do.”

Maine had a mandatory helmet law from 1983 to 1993. The law now says that drivers or riders under age 18, or those with less than one year’s experience, must still wear helmets, according to the Maine Law Library.

Eleanor Rogers asked her legislator, Rep. Walter Wheeler, D-Kittery, to introduce the helmet law to prevent deaths and serious injuries. When the elderly woman sees motorcycle riders zooming by without a helmet, it frustrates her.

“Why are they doing it?” she asked. “I don’t know why we ever repealed the law. If legislators had any sense” they’d bring it back, she said.

Rogers watched as a motorcycle crash changed the life of the niece of her son-in-law. The young woman had just graduated from high school and was getting ready for college. “She was riding with her boyfriend with no helmet.” The crash left her permanently brain damaged, Rogers said. “She functions,” but college and an independent future is no longer in the picture. “If she was wearing a helmet, she might have had a concussion, but not brain damaged,” Rogers said.

Bringing back the helmet law “makes sense, for no other reason than because of finances.” Fewer people getting injured or dying would not only prevent heartbreak, but there would be bills taxpayers didn’t have to pay, Rogers said. “How many of these people end up on Medicaid, which the state and federal government pay for?” she asked. “There’s a budget deficit. This is one way they might cut the deficit.”

Wheeler agrees with the bill, which also proposes helmets for motorized cycles and mopeds, “but I don’t know if it’ll get anywhere. The motorcycle people are too strong.”

Gagnon disagreed that a helmet makes a difference in safety.

Most of the time he wears a helmet, as does his wife and daughter. “But it’s a personal choice.” Because someone on a motorcycle is so vulnerable in a crash, Gagnon questioned whether a helmet “makes a difference once you get above 10 miles per hour.”

The United Bikers of Maine, which since former Gov. John McKernan’s administration has been an effective political organization, has 5,000 members. “We will definitely fight this,” Gagnon said. “I know we’ve defeated this before.”

Gov. John Baldacci has not decided whether he’ll support or oppose a helmet law, said his spokesman, Lee Umphrey. “Such a law would be consistent with this (proposed) increased use in seat belts,” Umphrey said. Like seat belts, motorcycle helmets “would save health costs,” Umphrey said. But he added that Baldacci is withholding any decision until he reviews the facts and the legislation.

The bill has been assigned to the legislative Transportation Committee, which will hold a public hearing. That hearing is not yet scheduled.