BREAKING NEWS: Circuit court rejects APPLL bid to halt cruise ship cap
OTHER NEWS: SWH, EMR agree to new 5-year contract
BAR HARBOR - The cruise ship-reliant businesses suing the town lost another round in court Friday.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston rejected APPLL’s request for an injunction against implementation of the town’s 2022 ordinance capping cruise ship visitation.
APPLL sought the injunction pending its appeal of U.S. District Judge’s Lance Walker’s decision in March upholding the town’s ordinance restricting daily visitation to 1,000 passengers.
A court higher than Walker has now ruled that the town may go ahead with its ordinance.
Yet, the Town Council continued to defy the federal courts by delaying implementation.
“Appellants' joint motion for injunction pending appeal is denied without prejudice for noncompliance with Fed. R. App. P. 8(a), especially considering the 60-plus days that passed between entry of the challenged order and the filing of the instant motion,” the Circuit Court stated.
The court’s three judges ruled that the plaintiffs must go back to the district court if it wants such an injunction.
“Ordinarily, a litigant must seek an injunction pending appeal first in the district court before asking a court of appeals to issue such an injunction.”
The intramural legal maneuvers are testing the patience of the cruise ship industry, which has begun cancellations which could spill over to 2025.
Royal Caribbean cruise lines are content with Portland as its only Maine port of call for 15 of its ships in 2024, and a smaller line, Celebrity Cruises, will be making Rockland the preferred destination for its three ships.
That’s 56,000 passengers in total, according to Town Manager James Smith. That’s a lot of unsold lobster rolls.
In both Portland and Rockland, ships are able to pull into deep harbors and dock without having to anchor off shore and ferry passengers to land.
Royal Caribbean said, “We remained hopeful that the situation would be clarified in enough time for us to add Bar Harbor back into our itineraries. Unfortunately, these changes came many months too late and we will be continuing with our published itineraries that do not include the destination.”
That “situation” would be what one neighboring town manager called Bar Harbor’s “civil war.”
Over the holiday weekend, more evidence of how the vestigial body politic of Bar Harbor has hit rock bottom emerged in the form of attack stickers on town signs targeting council candidate Charles Sidman with vulgarity.
Sidman blamed council members for “fostering” such public extremism with their continued criticism of him instead of APPLL. “They own this,” he said. The stickers represent an “extortionist banana republic or corrupt totalitarian cesspool that is Bar Harbor today,” Sidman said.
“I condemn this vicious attack,” councilor Gary Friedman reacted in an email. “There's no excuse for this kind of vulgar and personal put-down.”
But councilor Kyle Shank stated, “So long as the stickers are not impeding governmental function and/or causing a public safety concern, I believe they're a valid expression of political speech and ought to be left alone and/or treated like any other kind of inconsequential vandalism and dealt with during general cleanup by Public Works.
“While I might not find them to be in the best of taste, it would be hypocritical on my part to publicly support a citizen's right to protest a public political figure with sidewalk chalk but then offer no such support to a citizen exercising that same right with stickers.”
It is not a secret that Sidman has been a major combatant against the cruise ship industry and a Town Council which has enabled that industry.
It is not a secret that he has challenged the last three town managers, including the current one, as tools of the same industry.
It is not a secret that his initiative for a citizen referendum to cap cruise ship visitation to 1,000 passengers was approved overwhelmingly in November 2022.
Sidman was defeated resoundingly when he ran for the council last year by Brechlin, who recently gave equal weight to Sidman’s legal challenge to the council’s inaction and the lawsuit from APPLL.
But must this public discourse include the septic content of a Facebook page where Hochman and Shank are happy to oblige participants?
This is the same page whose admin wrote this about me when I called myself a “local.”
“He’s about as local as Millstein.”
I’ll let you, dear reader, decode that.
No one on the council seems to remember that APPLL was the first to sue and the major reason for the rise in litigation cost.
Frustrated by what he perceived as unbalanced coverage, Sidman even bought an ad in the Islander last week to state his case for council membership after the paper reported a one-sided article about the council’s latest effort to side-track enforcement of the cruise ship visitation cap.
His lawyer wrote the council May 21 to state, “The Town has already commissioned a study back in June 2021 … The Initiative resulted in the public's resounding support for the Ordinance that the Council is so reluctant to enforce.
“The Council does not have the option to devise ‘better regulatory tools’ pending enforcement of the Ordinance. The Ordinance exists and is in effect now. If the Council wants to propose an amendment to the Ordinance to the voters five years from now, it is welcome to do so. But that cannot be the Council's reason to avoid enforcement of the Ordinance as it exists in the Land Use Code today.”
Cruise lines are beginning to take note of the dysfunction in Bar Harbor.
Yet there appears to be no let-up on the part of APPLL.
Its president Kristi Bond appeared in front of the council last week to state a falsehood - that the ordinance approved by voters on Nov. 8, 2022 did not include a 1,000-passenger cap. She referred to the summary of the article which appeared on the ballot.
Her remarks two hours and 30 minutes into the meeting were greeted by silence from the council until town attorney Stephen Wagner felt compelled to “correct something … that while I think you accurately read the text of the article, there was a copy of the ordinance affixed to the warrant and that's typical on how ordinances are enacted.
“You have language in the article and then you have the actual text. Just as a point of fact, I just wanted to clarify that.”
One plaintiff in the lawsuit against the town, Captain David Gelinas, president of the Penobscot Bay and River Pilots Association, voiced concern to the Bar Harbor Story about the status quo.
“Proponents of the new land use ordinance had forecast that the ‘higher-class’ small ships would increase in numbers after passage of the ordinance,” Gelinas said. “The record is indicating otherwise. I had dinner last week with a cruise-ship agent who represents a very high-end small ship cruise line (ships of under 500 passengers); this line was originally planning on calling in Bar Harbor four times for 2025. Instead, they are avoiding Bar Harbor altogether and going to Canada; the rationale being that the business climate in Bar Harbor is just too uncertain to plan a voyage there, despite the fact that their passenger count is under the limit set by the LUO.”
FOOTNOTE: Plaintiffs in the case against the town are: ASSOCIATION TO PRESERVE AND PROTECT LOCAL LIVELIHOODS; B.H. PIERS, L.L.C.; GOLDEN ANCHOR, L.C., d/b/a Harborside Hotel; B.H.W.W., L.L.C.; DELRAY EXPLORER HULL 495 LLC; DELRAY EXPLORER HULL 493 LLC; ACADIA EXPLORER 492, LLC, PENOBSCOT BAY AND RIVER PILOTS ASSOCIATION,
SWH reaches agreement on contract extension for solid waste disposal
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Town manager Marilyn Lowell and Lee Worcester, who owns the solid waste transfer station in town, have reached agreement on a five-year contract extension starting July 1, select board member Jim Vallette said Friday.
“The changes are based on what we were requesting as a Select Board, following consultation with the Solid Waste Reduction Task Force, and I am appreciative of the changes that Lee and Marilyn worked out,” Vallette said.
The contract removes the exclusivity provision on recycling so the town may pursue its own solutions.
There's been a lot of talk about legal fees paid out by the town in relation to this cruise ship issue. Regrettably the onus for these expenditures has largely been placed upon the shoulders of those advocating in favor of cruise ship limits. In fact, the vast majority of these legal expenses are a direct result of APPLL's refusal to accept the results of democratic process. Sadly this is far from the first time that the town has had to expend large sums of money defending against law suits from APPLL's main proponent, Ocean Properties. It would be interesting indeed for Bar Harbor's financial office to tabulate a total of the amount of money expended over the past several decades by the town in lawsuits generated by that company. If this were done I very much suspect that the stickers placed upon signs would target someone other than Charles Sidman.
We need to continue to support Sidman in his battle for all the people on the island and its environment. The cruise Ships are ruining MDI.