PORTLAND – Law enforcement agencies around the state are busy crafting guidelines on how to notify residents when a sex offender moves to town.

Police and sheriff’s departments have until next month to adopt sex offender notification policies under a requirement that aims to reconcile the different approaches now taken by towns and cities. While larger cities such as Lewiston and Portland have had policies in place for more than a year, smaller municipalities are still scrambling to meet the requirements.

The minimum notification standards were issued by the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. Academy Director John B. Rogers said the public should be comforted knowing their local police agencies will be required to assess sex offenders and base community notification on that assessment.

“There was an awful lot of controversy about how a community makes notification … some did little or nothing,” Rogers said, while others conducted high-profile notification campaigns involving broadcast and print media.

In Waldo County, Sheriff Scott Story said his detectives will be required to interview each of the county’s 130 registered sex offenders and conduct a basic risk assessment on each of them.

High-risk offenders, such as pedophiles and repeat offenders, might require door-to-door notification as well as a community meeting, Story said. Low-risk offenders might entail just notifying deputies who patrol that area.

“We have to balance this carefully to make sure we’re not scaring the public as well,” said Story, president of the Maine Sheriff’s Association. “There are some people who are on the sex offender registry that are not particularly high risk to the community.

I think sometimes you can cause more fear going door-to-door with individuals who are not high risk.”

Controversy over how police agencies notify residents about sex offenders has been largely eclipsed by the creation of the state’s online sex offender registry.

The registry allows anyone with access to the Internet to see the names, addresses and photographs of more than 2,200 sex offenders in Maine.

The registry has drawn scrutiny since last month’s slayings of two men who were targeted and gunned down by a Canadian man who got their names and addresses from the online registry.