If it wasn’t for Lincoln we’d be in the dark to just how bad this deal is for the town. We’d have the counsel telling his it’s a great deal, we’d have Appll telling us it’s a terrible deal for them, and we have the islanders talking about road construction and fluff
Ha! How much 'thought' goes into a self perpetuating culture of corruption? Not an entirely snarky question.
Especially when many councilors will get reelected primarily because they are not members of the cruise profiteering companies, now APPL, or their Chamber of Commerce cronies.
Thank you very much for all the recent information on the cruise ship promoters bullying tactics . I am heartbroken about this whole matter. The spirit of caring for and about this Island is simply gone. The ways of Mainers are being lost. All because of a band of people whose only focus is the almighty dollar. What a complete shame. I'm glad I had the opportunity to enjoy MDI and Maine many decades ago before the grifters arrived.
If not for Lincoln Millstein's investigative work, democracy certainly would be dying in the dark here in Bar Harbor.
In the dark of town council and town manager conniving behind closed doors, through their: illegitimate overuse of Executive Sessions; overuse of NonDisclosure Agreements; privileged communications with town lawyers (we pay the billable hours, with no direct access or transparency); cronyism; chumminess with APPL et al; and monetizing *Freedom* of Access requests. (And the darkness of residents' other distractions and assumptions of government officials' good will.)
I suppose the councilors and manager do not see themselves this way. But who but Millstein is holding up a mirror? Or opening a window? Not The Islander, whose oversight of town government, is compromised by closeness - personal allegiances and island ways inbreeding, those who wear the two hat connections to the paper and council (and bring their prejudices to both.)
And the way the counsel is set up it favors candidates that don’t do real 9-5 jobs or have a vested interest in the health of the town. Outside of maya everyone else works from home, is retired or runs a business predicated on tourism.
It appears the Bar Harbor Town Council would be more accurately identified as the Cruise Ship Council. Is that not who they represent? Along with money-making interests of APPLL?
Many residents of Bar Harbor are unfamiliar with The Quietside Journal and the investigative journalism of Mr. Lincoln Millstein. The Mount Desert Islander weekly shows no interest in informing residents about how the Town Council has been working hand in glove for the benefit of the cruise ship industry and the businesses dedicated to serving ship visitors.
Readers of The Quietside Journal need to inform neighbors, friends, family; encourage them all to subscribe to the The Quietside Journal and learn what's going on. A town council should represent the interests of the residents of the town, not businesses which exploit the town.
I want to again thank Lincoln Millstein for his leadership in bringing superb investigative reporting to an important issue for the Island’ s community. Lincoln is now inspiring a group of knowledgeable , capable people to share their expertise and insights to move towards viable solutions. I have learned so much over the past few days from Lincoln and all the commenters. I agree, this information should be posted on Facebook and other media, and the Town’s website !
Many Islander readers may not recognize the name Ted Grindle. Others will remember him fondly as the State Police Officer who only needed to walk into a bar to put a quick end to a brawl. Ted was a large man but I suspect that his power to quell disturbance derived more from the respect he commanded than from his physical size. I first met Ted in 1991 when I began to date his daughter Joyce and because of our mutual love of Bar Harbor, nature, and photography we hit it off immediately. A few years later I married his daughter and Ted became my father in law. Sadly Ted passed away in 1999. Some years later while going through my files I came upon a poem Ted had written and had published in The Bar Harbor Times in May of 1989. Although I didn't even know Ted at the time I was impressed enough with what he had to say that I clipped the poem and saved it. It occurs to me this evening that the poem Ted wrote those many years ago is, if anything, or more value today than when he penned the original almost exactly thirty-five years ago:
I have a question, and since I am not a lawyer, it will be poorly worded for which I apologize. The legal powers and authority of the Town Council and the voters of Bar Harbor ( known as Annual Town Meeting) are delineated in the Town Charter. How can the Town propose that the voters of Bar Harbor vote on the proposed contracts in the future that are contained in the Municipal Code, that is changed by the vote of the Town Council? Isn’t this contrary to the clear division of powers and authorities in our Charter? I hope that lawyers who have so generously given their valuable time to shining the light on the weaknesses of the Town’s current cruise ship follies will help me out. Thank you.
It strikes me that the current members of the Town Council, and the town manager, are not going to change either their attitude or their insolence towards the community as there is no penalty for not doing so. Might I suggest the townsfolk, between now and the next set of election(s) where the incumbents can be tossed out and the town manager fired, adopt a page out of the playbook of your Amish neighbors: - institute the practice of Shunning. As the outfit running the pier and the hotel and certain restaurants is the big gorilla here, the townsfolk can adopt the approach of refusing to work for those people (resign as staff and take another job, hey why not?), refuse to sell to those people, refuse to service their customers. Need your car fixed? Sorry, go hire an off-island tow company and tow it to Bangor. Need a plumber for a leak or blocked sewer? Sorry, go fix it yourself. Need a crewman for those shuttle boats? Hey, go run them yourselves. Once the staff quits and nobody sells to them, the principals behind the bad crowd start to feel some pain. Shunning has a certain effect in focusing the mind.
Meanwhile, you need a new town manager, someone not so arrogant towards the citizenry. And again I offer my services for half price what is paid today, no contract, you don't like the performance, you fire me at will. I can make that open offer secure in the knowledge that no Town Council in Bar Harbor will ever hire someone who is not their personal lapdog and panting puppy, so it has a certain ephemeral quality. Have a nice day, folks.
The Constitution’s Contract Clause provides: No State shall . . . pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts. The Supreme Court has interpreted the clause to limit a state’s power to enact legislation that breaches or modifies its own contracts.
That's quite true, but it assumes the contract is lawful; i.e., that the state had the authority to enter into the contract in the first place. We are not talking about a run-of-the-mill procurement contract here. This "contract" is in reality a license or permit from the town, with another, I think misleading, name. It is settled law that a state or its political subdivisions cannot contract away the police power, which (for the benefit of non-lawyers) is the legal term for its regulatory authority.
Please repost The Quietside Journal on you personal facebook pages. This immoral and now illegal action by the Bar Harbor town council needs to be seen by all your friends and family
I'd just like to share two thoughts related to our legal invoices.
1. Much of the work that our town staff is doing (and has done as, at least as of late) that requires legal consultation are likely directly related to various items of litigation, even if they are not coded as such. Example: the Town Council did not themselves draft the rules and regulations for enforcement of the current LUO (i.e., Chapter 52) - that had to be done by town staff and then commented upon/edited by the council in public session. Given that those rules and regulations themselves have significant legal challenges - and would have to be written in such a way as, to the best of our staff's ability, stay within the confines of settled case law - it's pretty easy to see how "town staff use" and "litigation" are themselves deeply intertwined and indistinguishable. S
2. We are a town of limited resources, which extends to staff labor hours. The time spent fulfilling various FOIA requests is time not spent otherwise providing services to our citizens. As such, it feels appropriate to charge the individual(s) making the request for the effort/time invested on delivering the information if the time investment is more than trivial. While I'm not at all a part of these kinds of requests outside of furnishing information on request, for this particular case, given that this also likely required ensuring that all of the documents did not contain sensitive and/or confidential material, this likely also meant conferring with our town legal staff (which will then have additional costs).
Kyle, Have you actually looked at each invoice as I did, like the money spent on Higgins Pit, Atlantic Avenue easements, various Planning Board reviews? Stephen Wagner now has a seat at virtually every council meeting. Most people rarely saw Tim Pease or Ed Bearor and had no clue they were the town attorneys. The annual legal cost went from $68,000 to $386,000 in four years and most of that is not related to litigation that I could determine. I am looking forward to reviewing Rudman Winchell's invoices for July and August on how much it charged for Chapter 50 and the CLIA contracts. This feeds on itself. When a legal strategy back fires - like the poor advice the town got on how this was a maritime law issue which led Kevin Sutherland to pursue contracts with CLIA and then Judge Walker blew that off and said it was a "home rule" issue, the town lawyer pivoted and devised a new strategy which will meet the same fate but meanwhile keep those billable hours pumping. Wagner is now running the town and is directing the council when it should be the other way around. (How many contracts have you ever negotiated? Or any of the councilors?) On FOAA, we wouldn't have had to use it so frequently had the town made public records easier to access. One of Maya Caines's job was to redesign the dysfunctional town website before she was laid off. It is still as opague as ever. As always, thanks for writing. At least you appear to be trying ...
One last thought, the town staff became extremely insecure under Town Manager Kevin Sutherland. The departments heads were as good as they come in municipal government. Val Peacock allowed Sutherland to run rough shod. The staff became much more risk averse. it's not a coincidence that legal costs sky-rocketed starting under Sutherland. The current town manager shows no impulse to rein that in. I asked him what controls he's implemented to prevent staff to call the town counsel on every minor decision which has to be made. He did not answer.
Good evening Lincoln! I do not have a copy of the invoices, but I’d be happy to also check them out/review them as a whole if you’re willing to share (we only ever really see invoices monthly so we don’t get a longitudinal view).
I can’t really speak to how things looked when Mr. Sutherland was Manager, but it might also be worth considering that we may have also benefited from additional legal assistance during our interim manager period. Sarah did a phenomenal job of wearing two hats, but wearing two hats during such a highly charged period with so much pending litigation may have easily warranted additional help. Again, that’s just my hunch in the absence of more information, but wanted to share it.
Re: contracts, this is (unfortunately!) a large part of my job, so I have a fairly good background in them. That said, the contracts I work on may be pretty different (technology v municipal), so there may be some key differences.
Agreed on your point above re: needing a better town website! Absolutely agree. The data folks want is often there, but the user experience of getting it leaves much to be desired.
Hey Kyle , the time fulfilling FOAA requests and providing information to the public should be the first priority in servicing citizens and not seen as a burden which Cornell Knight instituted. Freedom of information is the oxygen for a well-functioning government. Maybe that's why Bar Harbor is so messed up.
The FOIA statute expressly provides for cost waivers when disclosure will be in the public interest, e.g., to the non-commercial working press :
1 M.R.S. Sec. 408-A(11) Waivers. The agency or official having custody or control of a public record subject to a request under this section may waive part or all of the total fee charged pursuant to subsection 8 if:
A. The requester is indigent; or [PL 2011, c. 662, §5 (NEW).]
B. The agency or official considers release of the public record requested to be in the public interest because doing so is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. [PL 2011, c. 662, §5 (NEW).]
If it wasn’t for Lincoln we’d be in the dark to just how bad this deal is for the town. We’d have the counsel telling his it’s a great deal, we’d have Appll telling us it’s a terrible deal for them, and we have the islanders talking about road construction and fluff
Who the hell does the council think they are? It is infurating that they are ignoring the will of the people.
Ha! How much 'thought' goes into a self perpetuating culture of corruption? Not an entirely snarky question.
Especially when many councilors will get reelected primarily because they are not members of the cruise profiteering companies, now APPL, or their Chamber of Commerce cronies.
https://www.facebook.com/100003481921514/posts/pfbid0564zfaTW3xTNtTM2VNHNwwdsoKUP35EurkpEmoxBwKPDkCFzUEMQPEF97n2umyftl/
Thank you very much for all the recent information on the cruise ship promoters bullying tactics . I am heartbroken about this whole matter. The spirit of caring for and about this Island is simply gone. The ways of Mainers are being lost. All because of a band of people whose only focus is the almighty dollar. What a complete shame. I'm glad I had the opportunity to enjoy MDI and Maine many decades ago before the grifters arrived.
Wow!! Again, thank you for publishing this!
I have lost complete and utter confidence in our town's governance.
There are some very fine town employees but ... the craven councilors and their conniving managers. Sheesh.
If not for Lincoln Millstein's investigative work, democracy certainly would be dying in the dark here in Bar Harbor.
In the dark of town council and town manager conniving behind closed doors, through their: illegitimate overuse of Executive Sessions; overuse of NonDisclosure Agreements; privileged communications with town lawyers (we pay the billable hours, with no direct access or transparency); cronyism; chumminess with APPL et al; and monetizing *Freedom* of Access requests. (And the darkness of residents' other distractions and assumptions of government officials' good will.)
I suppose the councilors and manager do not see themselves this way. But who but Millstein is holding up a mirror? Or opening a window? Not The Islander, whose oversight of town government, is compromised by closeness - personal allegiances and island ways inbreeding, those who wear the two hat connections to the paper and council (and bring their prejudices to both.)
And the way the counsel is set up it favors candidates that don’t do real 9-5 jobs or have a vested interest in the health of the town. Outside of maya everyone else works from home, is retired or runs a business predicated on tourism.
It appears the Bar Harbor Town Council would be more accurately identified as the Cruise Ship Council. Is that not who they represent? Along with money-making interests of APPLL?
Many residents of Bar Harbor are unfamiliar with The Quietside Journal and the investigative journalism of Mr. Lincoln Millstein. The Mount Desert Islander weekly shows no interest in informing residents about how the Town Council has been working hand in glove for the benefit of the cruise ship industry and the businesses dedicated to serving ship visitors.
Readers of The Quietside Journal need to inform neighbors, friends, family; encourage them all to subscribe to the The Quietside Journal and learn what's going on. A town council should represent the interests of the residents of the town, not businesses which exploit the town.
I want to again thank Lincoln Millstein for his leadership in bringing superb investigative reporting to an important issue for the Island’ s community. Lincoln is now inspiring a group of knowledgeable , capable people to share their expertise and insights to move towards viable solutions. I have learned so much over the past few days from Lincoln and all the commenters. I agree, this information should be posted on Facebook and other media, and the Town’s website !
Many Islander readers may not recognize the name Ted Grindle. Others will remember him fondly as the State Police Officer who only needed to walk into a bar to put a quick end to a brawl. Ted was a large man but I suspect that his power to quell disturbance derived more from the respect he commanded than from his physical size. I first met Ted in 1991 when I began to date his daughter Joyce and because of our mutual love of Bar Harbor, nature, and photography we hit it off immediately. A few years later I married his daughter and Ted became my father in law. Sadly Ted passed away in 1999. Some years later while going through my files I came upon a poem Ted had written and had published in The Bar Harbor Times in May of 1989. Although I didn't even know Ted at the time I was impressed enough with what he had to say that I clipped the poem and saved it. It occurs to me this evening that the poem Ted wrote those many years ago is, if anything, or more value today than when he penned the original almost exactly thirty-five years ago:
Parking Problems
I'm as sorry as I can be
For they've changed my town to
a city
Had I wanted to live in such as
this
I'd have moved to some
metropolis.
Round and round one has to tear
A pain it is to have to do
Just to accommodate a very few.
No one seems to realize
That with a town of this ones's
size
You only have so much
room
Regardless of the summer boom.
If some of the old is worth
retaining
We'd better start with a little
restraining
A cup that constantly runneth
over
Put's only a few in that field of
clover.
A few lanes only do we have left
That are quiet and peaceful and
of traffic bereft.
One should remember - or at
least he oughta
That a cup will only hold so
much water.
Ted Grindle
Bar Harbor
I have a question, and since I am not a lawyer, it will be poorly worded for which I apologize. The legal powers and authority of the Town Council and the voters of Bar Harbor ( known as Annual Town Meeting) are delineated in the Town Charter. How can the Town propose that the voters of Bar Harbor vote on the proposed contracts in the future that are contained in the Municipal Code, that is changed by the vote of the Town Council? Isn’t this contrary to the clear division of powers and authorities in our Charter? I hope that lawyers who have so generously given their valuable time to shining the light on the weaknesses of the Town’s current cruise ship follies will help me out. Thank you.
It strikes me that the current members of the Town Council, and the town manager, are not going to change either their attitude or their insolence towards the community as there is no penalty for not doing so. Might I suggest the townsfolk, between now and the next set of election(s) where the incumbents can be tossed out and the town manager fired, adopt a page out of the playbook of your Amish neighbors: - institute the practice of Shunning. As the outfit running the pier and the hotel and certain restaurants is the big gorilla here, the townsfolk can adopt the approach of refusing to work for those people (resign as staff and take another job, hey why not?), refuse to sell to those people, refuse to service their customers. Need your car fixed? Sorry, go hire an off-island tow company and tow it to Bangor. Need a plumber for a leak or blocked sewer? Sorry, go fix it yourself. Need a crewman for those shuttle boats? Hey, go run them yourselves. Once the staff quits and nobody sells to them, the principals behind the bad crowd start to feel some pain. Shunning has a certain effect in focusing the mind.
Meanwhile, you need a new town manager, someone not so arrogant towards the citizenry. And again I offer my services for half price what is paid today, no contract, you don't like the performance, you fire me at will. I can make that open offer secure in the knowledge that no Town Council in Bar Harbor will ever hire someone who is not their personal lapdog and panting puppy, so it has a certain ephemeral quality. Have a nice day, folks.
The Constitution’s Contract Clause provides: No State shall . . . pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts. The Supreme Court has interpreted the clause to limit a state’s power to enact legislation that breaches or modifies its own contracts.
That's quite true, but it assumes the contract is lawful; i.e., that the state had the authority to enter into the contract in the first place. We are not talking about a run-of-the-mill procurement contract here. This "contract" is in reality a license or permit from the town, with another, I think misleading, name. It is settled law that a state or its political subdivisions cannot contract away the police power, which (for the benefit of non-lawyers) is the legal term for its regulatory authority.
Judge Walker addressed this on p.37 of his decision on APPLL's lawsuit:
"When the Supreme Court finally abandoned using the freedom to contract as an
antidemocratic talisman, it reaffirmed what a great many of its other decisions had long
established, summing up the concern over individual liberty as follows:"
'[F]reedom of contract is a qualified, and not an absolute, right. There is no
absolute freedom to do as one will or to contract as one chooses. The
guarantee of liberty does not withdraw from legislative supervision that wide
department of activity which consists of the making of contracts, or deny to
the government the power to provide restrictive safeguards. Liberty implies
the absence of arbitrary restraint, not immunity from reasonable regulation
and prohibitions imposed in the interest of the community. '
"W. Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, 392 (1937)."
Thanks for the cite.
Please repost The Quietside Journal on you personal facebook pages. This immoral and now illegal action by the Bar Harbor town council needs to be seen by all your friends and family
Good afternoon Lincoln and QSJ readers!
I'd just like to share two thoughts related to our legal invoices.
1. Much of the work that our town staff is doing (and has done as, at least as of late) that requires legal consultation are likely directly related to various items of litigation, even if they are not coded as such. Example: the Town Council did not themselves draft the rules and regulations for enforcement of the current LUO (i.e., Chapter 52) - that had to be done by town staff and then commented upon/edited by the council in public session. Given that those rules and regulations themselves have significant legal challenges - and would have to be written in such a way as, to the best of our staff's ability, stay within the confines of settled case law - it's pretty easy to see how "town staff use" and "litigation" are themselves deeply intertwined and indistinguishable. S
2. We are a town of limited resources, which extends to staff labor hours. The time spent fulfilling various FOIA requests is time not spent otherwise providing services to our citizens. As such, it feels appropriate to charge the individual(s) making the request for the effort/time invested on delivering the information if the time investment is more than trivial. While I'm not at all a part of these kinds of requests outside of furnishing information on request, for this particular case, given that this also likely required ensuring that all of the documents did not contain sensitive and/or confidential material, this likely also meant conferring with our town legal staff (which will then have additional costs).
Kyle, Have you actually looked at each invoice as I did, like the money spent on Higgins Pit, Atlantic Avenue easements, various Planning Board reviews? Stephen Wagner now has a seat at virtually every council meeting. Most people rarely saw Tim Pease or Ed Bearor and had no clue they were the town attorneys. The annual legal cost went from $68,000 to $386,000 in four years and most of that is not related to litigation that I could determine. I am looking forward to reviewing Rudman Winchell's invoices for July and August on how much it charged for Chapter 50 and the CLIA contracts. This feeds on itself. When a legal strategy back fires - like the poor advice the town got on how this was a maritime law issue which led Kevin Sutherland to pursue contracts with CLIA and then Judge Walker blew that off and said it was a "home rule" issue, the town lawyer pivoted and devised a new strategy which will meet the same fate but meanwhile keep those billable hours pumping. Wagner is now running the town and is directing the council when it should be the other way around. (How many contracts have you ever negotiated? Or any of the councilors?) On FOAA, we wouldn't have had to use it so frequently had the town made public records easier to access. One of Maya Caines's job was to redesign the dysfunctional town website before she was laid off. It is still as opague as ever. As always, thanks for writing. At least you appear to be trying ...
One last thought, the town staff became extremely insecure under Town Manager Kevin Sutherland. The departments heads were as good as they come in municipal government. Val Peacock allowed Sutherland to run rough shod. The staff became much more risk averse. it's not a coincidence that legal costs sky-rocketed starting under Sutherland. The current town manager shows no impulse to rein that in. I asked him what controls he's implemented to prevent staff to call the town counsel on every minor decision which has to be made. He did not answer.
Good evening Lincoln! I do not have a copy of the invoices, but I’d be happy to also check them out/review them as a whole if you’re willing to share (we only ever really see invoices monthly so we don’t get a longitudinal view).
I can’t really speak to how things looked when Mr. Sutherland was Manager, but it might also be worth considering that we may have also benefited from additional legal assistance during our interim manager period. Sarah did a phenomenal job of wearing two hats, but wearing two hats during such a highly charged period with so much pending litigation may have easily warranted additional help. Again, that’s just my hunch in the absence of more information, but wanted to share it.
Re: contracts, this is (unfortunately!) a large part of my job, so I have a fairly good background in them. That said, the contracts I work on may be pretty different (technology v municipal), so there may be some key differences.
Agreed on your point above re: needing a better town website! Absolutely agree. The data folks want is often there, but the user experience of getting it leaves much to be desired.
Hey Kyle , the time fulfilling FOAA requests and providing information to the public should be the first priority in servicing citizens and not seen as a burden which Cornell Knight instituted. Freedom of information is the oxygen for a well-functioning government. Maybe that's why Bar Harbor is so messed up.
Kyle, the data under cruise ship information is one big advertisement for the cruise industry and the whole thing should be scrapped.
The FOIA statute expressly provides for cost waivers when disclosure will be in the public interest, e.g., to the non-commercial working press :
1 M.R.S. Sec. 408-A(11) Waivers. The agency or official having custody or control of a public record subject to a request under this section may waive part or all of the total fee charged pursuant to subsection 8 if:
A. The requester is indigent; or [PL 2011, c. 662, §5 (NEW).]
B. The agency or official considers release of the public record requested to be in the public interest because doing so is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. [PL 2011, c. 662, §5 (NEW).]