As volunteerism declines, fire chief seeks to protect residents ‘as we did' for family of SWH select member opposed to his budget
OTHER NEWS: Residents tell Bar Harbor planners to stop favoring businesses over homeowners
SOUTHWEST HARBOR, Feb. 3, 2024 -It was already starting to get dark that Thursday night in February 2022 when the fire department got a call from a neighbor that smoke was coming out of the basement of a house on Hillcrest Circle.
It took the first truck to arrive on the scene in seven minutes from the time it left the firehouse. In all, 14 SWH fire fighters in four apparatuses and some in their own vehicles were at the scene. They received mutual aid from Tremont, Mount Desert and Bar Harbor.
No one was in the house at the time - only a cat, which perished. The occupants were out of state, according to family member Molly Damon in this post on gofundme for relief assistance for her sister’s suddenly homeless family. She wrote the family lost everything including most of its personal possessions.
Their brother Luke Damon showed up at the fire, fire chief Tommy Chisholm said.
Luke Damon was not just any citizen. He’s a member of the towns’s highest authority - its select board,
And now he’s throwing his weight around, going after - of all people - the firefighters who risked personal injury to try to salvage his sister’s house.
He is blocking a proposed budget which Chisholm said would ensure the same coverage Damon’s sister received that night in February 2022.
Damon said at the select board meeting Jan. 23 that the town was moving too quickly toward a full-time fire department, an eventuality which he opposes.
But that wistful lament does not square with a harsh reality - that volunteerism for Small Town USA is on a steep decline.
Multiple reports and studies indicate a significant decrease in formal volunteer participation over the past decade, with the trend further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a January report released by the Census Bureau and AmeriCorps, the number of volunteers in America dropped about 7 percent between September 2020 and 2021, and in that same year, only 23 percent of Americans formally volunteered with an organization, the lowest percentage since tracking began in the early 2000s
The decline is attributed to various factors, including the pandemic, job demands, changes in lifestyle and cost of housing.
The impact of this decline is being felt by many nonprofits which are struggling. Moreover, compliance requirements for certified fire fighters and ambulances have increased, a far cry from when Damon was a volunteer in Northeast Harbor two decades ago, Chisholm said.
More and more, SWH and Tremont are relying on assistance from neighboring Mount Desert. Why? Because that town has round-the-clock coverage by a full-time staff after its volunteer ambulance service, founded in 1938, threw in the towel in 2020.
It was not cheap, about $500,000, for the town to take over the ambulance service.
Damon is in his second year on the select board. He is loquacious and seems to have a strong opinion about every aspect of municipal governance.
The QSJ would ask Damon for an explanation about his stance on the fire department but the last time I tried to interview him, he called the local police to shut me down. The only select member to use the police department like its his personal security force was George Jellison.
Damon’s broadside against Chisholm, who has served the town many more years than Damon could ever hope to equal, was stunning in its scope and uniformed in its assertions. You may listen to his diatribe starting at 1:46 of the town’s recording of the meeting.
Saying he did not support paying someone just to sit in the firehouse for 10 hours brought a response from Town Clerk Jennifer Lahaye that firefighters don’t just sit around. They have maintenance assignments and training lessons when in the firehouse.
(Lahaye and her husband are volunteers of the fire department.)
Moreover, when there is a call, which would you rather have?
A responder already on premise? Or volunteers who have to drive to the firehouse, strap on their gear and then go the the incident?
Damon received plenty of pushback.
Both select members Natasha Johnson and Jim Vallette supported the fire department budget. Town Manager Marilyn Lowell was unusually forceful in her disagreement.
“There’s going to be a Sunday, everybody’s gone to the beach and spending their day with their family, so when the house burns down, who are they going to blame?” she said.
Only select chair Carolyn Ball supported Damon, saying she worried that people would be less reluctant to volunteer if someone was paid more to do that.
Select member Chapin McFarland is a firefighter in Mount Desert and a volunteer in Southwest Harbor who recused himself from the imbroglio.
The QSJ previously reported on this meeting when the select board Jan. 23 failed to agree on a $287,407 fire budget, a 23.4 percent increase to ensure seven-day a week coverage but still less than a third of the fire budget in neighboring Mount Desert.
Earlier that night, the select board approved unanimously the budget for a town dispatch service which at $380,006 costs almost $100,000 more than the fire department request. MDI has three municipal dispatch offices which two retired Bar Harbor police chiefs have said is the most obvious area to consolidate and save money without any adverse consequence to public safety.
Mount Desert spends $477,938 to staff a dispatch office which doesn’t even offer overnight coverage, which is provided by Bar Harbor. The two towns already share a police force, and Town Manager Durlin Lunt said he expects dispatch will be consolidated as well in the future.
The QSJ wrote Jan. 7 on the duplication of public safety services on MDI and how Bar Harbor had developed the best and latest communications technology which could easily be shared with the other three towns.
“Even though we have that set up and running (shared frequency), everyone kind of likes to have their own frequency,” said retired BH chief Jim Willis.
That means one dispatcher must call out to different parties on different frequencies to ensure the message is relayed to all. That takes time. And time is a killer in a public safety emergency.
Municipal governments are transactional bodies funding year after year practices like dispatch until they realize that the problems are bigger than their capacity to manage. (Let’s see how SWH will deal with its water and sewer needs?)
“It’s not rocket science,” said one retired island police chief. “You get a call and you dispatch it to the right responders.”
“It’s political will and municipal identity,” said Willis. “These towns like to have their own dispatch. It may not be the most cost effective way to do it but they like it.”
Local fiefdoms die hard in these parts. Some are still arguing over the Tremont versus Pemetic sports rivalries.
Damon may succeed in shutting down the fire budget, but what is his end game? Less fire protection in favor of a dispatch service which is on borrowed time?
MDI of the future needs to be MDI of the present. One dispatch. One fire department. One police force. One ambulance service.
It’s rationale. Maybe that’s why it’s so unreachable in the back side of the island.
Bar Harbor Planning’s blind side: building strategies without all the data .. who benefits?
BAR HARBOR - The Planning Department has acquired more data to inform its strategy to combat the housing crisis but has yet to unlock a crucial piece - the number of businesses that use homes to staff workers for which they don’t charge rent.
A committee was formed to develop rules to register “long-term rentals” after a fire destroyed a three-floor home used to house employees of Bar Harbor Inn in August 2021.
The effort produced 473 registrations in 2023 and 48 additional ones in 2024 as of Jan. 24.
But even though the registrations exceeded expectations, they did not include free worker housing provided by employers. So the town still does not know how many single-family homes were acquired over the years to accomplish that as it continues to implement new housing ordinances.
The registration’s stated goal was for “any dwelling unit that is rented or available for rent for a period of 30 consecutive days or more, in exchange for compensation.”
Those last four words gave many tourism businesses an out from having to register their worker housing.
But wouldn’t Bar Harbor planners want to know the full extent of the rapidly changing housing mix before enacting major policy changes such as the zoning amendments being proposed?
Thursday night, citizens jousted with the planning officials on just that point, at a public forum to discuss four proposed amendments mostly to help businesses with their housing needs.
One woman said, “We've become so business centric and forgot about the people who are living here. The only thing I can say is it makes me really sad. Really sad.
“I'm at a point that I will never see that town again in my lifetime - what Bar Harbor was when I first bought a home here 12 or 14 years ago.”
One man said businesses in town are getting a “free ride” because they force the need for more infrastructure which taxpayers must pay for.
“In Northern Virginia, before they develop an area, they put in the infrastructure first. And we're not doing that,” said the woman sitting next to him. Most speakers did not identify themselves.
Planning Director Michele Gagnon referred to that as developer “impact fees” which Bar Harbor does not impose.
The second woman said a neighbor’s well went dry after a nearby business drilled one for its use.
“Ours is already 400 foot. Do we need to go to the Earth's core?
“When does it stop? It seems like we're always playing catchup. We're not doing planning ahead.”
Given Bar Harbor’s rough estimate of 3,000 dwelling units, 1,145 short-term and long-term rental units is a little more than a third.
Yet, the Planning Department is proposing ordinance amendments without knowing the full impact of the last data point - how much of the traditional housing stock in town has been overrun by hoteliers and restaurateurs who have been on a buying binge?
Thursday night’s forum was dominated by residents who questioned the planning office’s lack of balance in favor of business needs over that of homeowners.
The proposed amendments would allow for more dormitory-style housing for businesses, rural businesses to build employee housing on their properties and easing of density requirements.
They all seemed to favor businesses and not common citizens, residents said.
Former Planning Board member Stewart Brecher said, “If this is an important thing to do for this segment of the community, you should at the same time present a parallel option for another portion so it doesn't look like this is what you're favoring and nobody cares about the residents, and we're just happy to make the bottom line a bit better for those people that hire summer employees.”
The battle for the soul of Bar Harbor is binary. The tourism businesses can only grow if they take from the year-round residents.
FOOTNOTE: One silver lining: At least 100 long-term rental units also had registrations as short-term rentals. One example was the 16 dwelling units registered by College of the Atlantic. For 10 months they are rented out at below-market rents to students, according to COA spokesman Rob Levin. From mid-June to mid-August they are rented out as short-term rentals with market rates which help subsidize the student rents. So even if the town had 645 STR registrations, their impact was less if more than 100 did not take advantage of the full season.
Chamber vote to join APPLL reprised
BAR HARBOR - As a public service the QSJ is republishing its article from June 14, 2023 in which minutes obtained from the Chamber of Commerce clearly showed the chamber joined APPLL with the intent to support the cruise ship lawsuit against taxpayers.
The QSJ is also linking to the stream of the June 6 town meeting starting at Hour 1:54 when Chamber president Bo Jennings said the chamber joined APPLL to support its efforts to reach agreements on visitor caps with individual cruise lines and its “Bar Harbor for All” marketing campaign.
According to the chamber’s own minutes, the motion approved 7-1 does not mention either of those objectives and instead stated,
“To join APPLL and express support for their efforts in overturning the citizens petition through the active lawsuit; to work on messaging to members, the Town, and staff; and to consider Chamber membership in APPLL quarterly.”
At this week’s Town Council meeting, chamber director Everal Eaton said the chamber signed a one-year membership with APPLL in May 2023.
He clarified his comments by answering a QSJ’s question,
“After the board meeting at the end of April 2023, we did join in May 2023. It was a one-time fee to join for the year (APPLL has not received any additional funds from the Bar Harbor Chamber since the membership fee was sent in with the application as is common with other organizations that we maintain memberships with). Since APPLL was a new organization, the board decided to review its membership quarterly with APPLL. The board has done that with two reviews up to this point (Q3 2023 and Q4 2023) and has two more remaining (Q1 2024 and Q2 2024). The membership is not up for renewal until May 2024.”
Consistency in public representations is not a core strength for the chamber.
The new town manager wants to restore funding for the chamber, he said last week, despite the overwhelming vote at the June town meeting stripping the chamber of $42,600 after its APPLL membership was made public.
Losing volunteers is to a great extent also due to losing our year round community
$477k for dispatch? That seems like a lot!!