An appreciation: Durlin Lunt's irreplaceable voice for the working families on the island

NORTHEAST HARBOR, Aug. 22, 2025 - Durlin Lunt, town manager of Mount Desert for 16 years - my favorite public servant on MDI - will be honored at a party today from 4-6 at the Neighborhood House on the occasion of his retirement. The public is invited. Refreshment will be served.

Lunt is a rare breed of a disappearing class of town managers who become the chief executives of the towns they grew up in. It will be difficult to replace him.

I will remember Durlin for his simple wisdom, his compassion for the underclass and his courage.

Last March I wrote about how Lunt campaigned to even the playing field for the salaried town employees whose compensation was way out of sync with the market. In that, he took on his own select board.

Less than one week after my article, the select board reversed itself and approved the raises which affected about half of the staff in a town with the highest tax base in Hancock County.

In 2023, Lunt took on an even bigger target - Acadia National Park and its Friends of Acadia factotum - for their historic mistreatment of the Village of Otter Creek, which was seeking a sliver of land so residents may use its inner harbor.

In a remarkable letter, Lunt asked U.S. Sen. Susan Collins to urge the National Park Service to recognize “the need to work closely with the Town of Mount Desert to begin the process of addressing past injustices to the village of Otter Creek.”

Lunt listed a bill of particulars dating back to when the park was founded in 1919 as the Lafayette National Park.

“Through such actions as denying the right of vehicular egress to the water through the Blackwoods Campground, denying access to fresh water at the shores, refusing to allow vista clearing at the Town Landing, construction of a causeway on the Park Loop Road, with limited tidal flushing capacity with the stated intent of turning the harbor of Otter Creek into a swimming pool - a bitter irony for an agency charged with the preservation of natural resources - and withholding the rights of Otter Creek residents to full access to and the ability to maintain traditional and historical village roads and paths.”

Ever pragmatic, Lunt set aside some of the more challenging issues for a simpler ask for now:

Give the town back 3,000 square feet of land taken illegally by the park so it may construct a vehicle turn-around to allow Otter Creek residents use of the Town Landing in the inner harbor.

I will also remember Durlin as one of 250 signatories in support of six units of affordable housing in the village opposed by a group of nimby neighbors - Ann Cannon, Marc Cannon, Melissa Cannon Gurz, Lamont Harris, Stuart Janney, Joseph Ryerson and Lynne Wheat. They appealed their lawsuit to the state’s Supreme Court after losing in Superior Court.

It was an unusual public stance by a town manager who did not run away from facing off with the dark side of the town - an oversized sense of entitlement by wealthy summer people.

It was the exclamation point to his years of valuable service to the town - to protect its unique economic strength, its diversity in serving the working class along side its well-heeled billionaires, its understated sensibility to avoid the ephemeral frisson of celebrity-watching in the Hamptons, and lastly, to be very much a genuine Maine town.

Lunt was joined by his son in this regard.

In the 2013 documentary Summer Colony, which took almost 10 years to make, Jeremy Lunt captured the marginalization of natives by summer people, as rising real estate prices and declining opportunities for year-round employment pushed more and more year-rounders out of the community.

Downeast Magazine in June 2022 captured the diaspora in an article, “Can Northeast Harbor stay livable year-round?”

It wrote that Summer Colony was not an optimistic movie. “I think Northeast Harbor is dying,” Peter Godfrey, a lifelong summer resident, told the filmmakers. “The cleaning shop just closed. There’s no drug store. You walk down Main Street and you see art galleries and gift shops. God forbid if the news store or hardware store close. The place would be gone.”

Northeast Library has four copies of the movie. Below are three trailers from Youtube:

Longtime local residents are unambiguous about the beginning of the end of this village as a year-round community.

They pointed to the sale in October 1987 of the house at 8 Rock End Road from Jack and Carol Wright to Marion and Charles Gogolak of Westwood, Mass. By today’s thinking the sale would have been unremarkable, a 1930s bungalow with a handsome and welcoming front porch on a street steps from the Neighborhood House passing hands.

But 38 years ago it was seen as the first encroachment by “summer people” into a neighborhood heretofore occupied exclusively by year-round locals, according to Lunt and others, including Terry Renault, owner of McGrath’s Variety Store on Main Street.

Lunt once told me that the wealthy summer people occupied the “donut” part of the town or the waterfront homes dotting the harbor, like Peabody Drive and Harborside Road. The year-round denizens, many of whom made their living catering and supporting the summer people, were ensconced in the Neighborhood Road district.

The Gogolaks are well-liked summer residents, like many others. But they will always be considered members of a brigade of rich outsiders from away buying up the town. Charlie Gogolak and his more famous brother Pete are Hungarian immigrants who introduced the soccer-style of kicking to American football.

The donut has now become a fully baked scone, with the village comprising virtually of all summer residences.

And the hardware store became its latest victim. The irony is not lost that FT Brown will close the day after Durlin Lunt’s last day as town manager on Sept. 1.

Durlin Lunt was the standard, the dean of all the regional town managers, who did not trade his commitment to an authentic Maine life for cruise ships, glamping resorts or subdivisions in all the wrong places.

Last January, in a bitterly cold, wind swept day on Main Street, I ran into Durlin. We said our hellos and quickly went on our way. Winter in Maine is not a time for outdoor chit chat.

Thank you Durlin for your fight! May your successor take up the torch!

FOOTNOTE: Lunt will stay as interim manager three days a week until the town finds his replacement.