Committee behaving badly threatens to chase another harbormaster out of SWH

Town unable to retain key employee in critical role; five HMs in four years

Storm surge swamps Manset Dock one year ago.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR, Feb. 8, 2025 - What job on the island has a shorter tenure than that of a second lieutenant during the Vietnam War?

That would be the harbormaster here in one of Maine’s busiest ports.

Over the last four summers, this working harbor - home to the state’s seventh largest fishing fleet, a world-renown boat builder in Hinckley Yachts, the largest commercial marina in Downeast in Dysart’s, MDI Community Sailing Club with 40 boats, ferries from Cranberry Isles and other islands, cruising vessels which rank among the world’s most elite and a Coast Guard station - has been without a full-time harbormaster for as long a period as when it had one.

Jesse Gilley lasted only four months when he left in June 2021 to captain a commercial barge. That summer the town operated without a harbormaster during the busiest time of the year. A good chunk of the following summer also did not have a full-time harbormaster.

In the interim, Oliver Curry recorded the longest tenure - 10 months from August 2021 to June 2022, before leaving in a disagreement over his work schedule.

By August 2022, chaos reigned, prompting Harbor Committee Chair Nicholas Madeira to characterize the working waterfront as “complete mayhem.”

Jarrod Kushla was then destined to be the great bright hope.

Having served 20 years in the Coast Guard - the last post as the commander of the Southwest Harbor Station - Kushla possessed both maritime experience and law enforcement chops.

Kushla was a strict practitioner of chain of command. He reported to the town manager, not to a handful of unruly fishermen with a self economic interest. Like others, it didn’t take him long to size up the situation.

He started full-time in October 2023 and immediately began to joust with Madeira’s committee which took offense at Kushla’s absences at their monthly meetings. The committee refused to accept Kushla’s written reports as adequate communication.

By April, Kushla was history by his own making.

A patina as a governance nightmare among the harbor management fraternity began to shadow Southwest Harbor. Would it ever find another harbormaster given that stain?

Rob Leavitt said he was fully aware of the circumstances here when he left Boothbay Harbor, where he was harbormaster, to look for a place to live for him and his wife - the sine qua non of any job on the island.

In July 2024, the town welcomed its fifth harbormaster in four years starting from when Adam Thurston left to take a more sane role as deputy harbormaster in Northeast Harbor.

The Islander announced Leavitt’s appointment in virtually the same language it had used in each of the previous four articles in as many years.

Now the unrelenting, combative comportment of the Harbor Committee has gotten the attention of the select board once again. It has scheduled an agenda item cryptically entitled, “Discussion of Southwest Harbor Code of Conduct Policy” for its next meeting Tuesday.

That would be Town Manager Karen Redderson’s attempt to cauterize the latest flare-up which occurred at the Feb. 3 Harbor Committee meeting when a majority of the committee ganged up on Harbormaster Rob Leavitt, who has been in his job for only seven months and is still unpacking needed information. Leavitt was accused by several members of deliberately hiding an engineering report from them, even though he said he sent a copy to Madeira.

The meeting left Leavitt shaken, he confided to some colleagues. He told them he is evaluating his options.

The report on the safety of the Manset town dock was required by FEMA as part of the documentation requisite to rebuild after the January 2024 storms caused great damage.

Leavitt noted that all the trucks operated by the three permitted lobster buyers would exceed the 20,000 gross pound limit recommended by the engineer hired to survey the dock. Not allowing the trucks to park on the dock itself would add time to loading lobsters from the boats to the vendor trucks.

Leavitt has said he planned to enforce the 20,000-pound limit, especially since the town could be held liable by its insurance company.

With the exception of former chair Anne Napier and secretary Michael Brzezowski, most of the other eight members have direct or indirect connections with the fishing industry.

Apart from the code of conduct, the select board must address a conflict of interest issue as the committee is heavily skewed to representing only fishermen. Representation by other user groups collapsed when non-fishing members resigned because the meetings were like bar fights in a Western saloon.

One member, Corey Pettegrow, regularly told non-native members to “go back” to where they came from.

I attended two meetings of the Harbor Committee. At the first one, Pettegrow asked me what I was doing there and made disparaging remarks about my reporting. He then, with no authority, told me to remove my cell phone from the table in the Town Office Building.

I stopped attending after concluding that it would take only one slur to elevate it to a confrontation. The committee decided not to conduct meetings on Zoom, but they are recorded on audio.

The Harbor Committee is an advisory panel with no binding authority, but for years it acted with enormous clout because the then select board had members with similar sensibility and like-mindedness. Its influence extended beyond the harbor to affect other assets, such as the town’s once popular skating pond.

The inflection point occurred May 2021 when the committee voted 5-3 to scuttle a proposal to seek $500,000 in grant money to build a recreational area next to the Manset Dock and to improve Chris’s Pond. The projects had huge voter support.

At the same meeting, the committee ousted Anne Napier as chair. Napier was one of the visionaries of the projects.

The very next night in a highly orchestrated scenario, the select board gave the Harbor Committee the necessary authority by voting along gender lines 3-2 to formalize its recommendation.

On June 5, at a special town meeting, 104 residents packed the firehouse and voted unanimously to overturn the select board’s actions and to restore efforts to seek the grants.

The voters broke into a loud applause after moderator Joe Marshall announced the results. Here is the audio.

The Select Board’s major supporter of the Harbor Committee coup, George Jellison, stayed on the board for a few years and then resigned in 2023. He and his sister, Aimie Williams, are now perennial gadflies at town meetings as they continue to slow progress on various projects.

Stripped of its major sponsor, the Harbor Committee has become an empty shell politically.

But its pugilistic style takes its toll.

The Harbor Committee is a de facto commercial fishing subcommittee. Maybe it’s time to label it what it is, and create a Harbor Committee which has true representation of the residents.

FOOTNOTE: The following is part of an article I published in 2021 relevant to the above.

SWH boards, committees hostile to folks from away and women, say ex members

SOUTHWEST HARBOR, MAY 15, 2021 - This town has morphed into a Shakespearean tragedy, with the treachery of MacBeth, the internecine doings of Julius Caesar and the madness of King Lear, just for good measure.

A passel of good ole’ boys - men with self-professed local cred - are taking the town “back from those women and their fancy ideas” as one local businessman put it. The men on the select board and harbor committee dealt fatal blows this week to proposals for improved access to the town’s beloved Chris’s Pond, where generations of children learned to ice skate, and recreational appurtenances to the town-owned Manset dock.

Both proposals were spearheaded by teams of women volunteers who spent hundreds of hours over a year and a half, only to be snuffed out by the likes of selectman George Jellison, who waited for the final airing of the proposals, to vote against taking the issue to the town meeting in June.

By the end of Tuesday, the two women who chaired both boards no longer did. Anne Napier was voted out and replaced by Nicholas Madeira as chair of the harbor committee. Kristin Hutchins resigned from the select board late Tuesday night. Napier said the rotation of chairman is common.

“George Jellison has a long history of not engaging in the beginning or the middle of a process” only to vote no without much warning, said Lydia Goetze, former select board chair.

“The reason I ran (for selectmen) after I moved back in 2005 was that the public discourse toward women in town was so hostile,” said Geotze, who was on the select board for six years and served a year and a half as chair.

Denying voters the opportunity to decide on the Chris’s Pond proposal received swift blowback.

“The SB (select board) vote disenfranchised residents of the town of SW Harbor by removing a warrant item which would have allowed residents to vote on whether to apply for a grant ... a grant which would have improved year-round recreational activities used by many SWH residents, as well as some visitors, and at no cost to the town,” said Napier.

The idea for the grant came from Misha Mytar of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust - to match the trust’s acquisition of an abandoned property near the pond with federal funding to create parking and landscaping.

The Island Housing Trust, headed by Marla O’Byrne, would then build a house on the remaining lot for much needed year-round housing at below market rates.

Jane Ayres Peabody of the Conservation Committee also spoke at length at the select meeting Tuesday in support of the pond proposal.

Select member Carolyn Ball made the final presentation to the board.

It was a exemplary community effort to create a better version of what we have.

All which was met with a perfunctory, guttural response from Jellison: “I think it’s a terrible idea … for the abutting property owners. I don’t think the town should be involved in this.

“I’ve seen this plan change probably four times since February,” Jellison said, either not understanding or purposely disregarding the numerous changes such complicated projects undergo during their gestation.

Within a matter of minutes, the motion was cast and Chad Terry and Allen “Snap” Willey followed Jellison’s lead. The 3-2 vote had Hutchins and Ball in the minority.

The harbor committee, of which five members benefit directly from keeping the harbor commercially oriented, is also dominated by men.

Well intentioned citizens - led by women - who had the idea of doing something with the Hook property, a sliver of land at Manset dock which Carolyn Hook was renting to the town.

After 25 years of flaying about, Lydia Goetze said she was the one who broke through to convince Carolyn Hook to sell the land to the town. The natural extension of that purchase was to determine what to do with it.

“The recommendation for the Manset properties was to include a small green space with a couple of picnic tables … not to turn the entire area into a ‘recreational space.’ Nor was this my idea alone,” Napier wrote in an email to QSJ. “This plan, worked on and approved by the harbor committee for nearly two years, combined commercial fishing, recreational boating, kayak launching, barge access, heavy equipment loading, boat launch, parking, a new Harbormaster's office with two ADA (American Disabilities Act) bathrooms, and a small green space.

“Half of the work and all of the green space costs were anticipated to be covered by grants. Work on the plan had proceeded for nearly two years with on-going acceptance until just recently.”

The group of five men was going to have none of that. In a 5-3 vote Monday night, they obliterated the idea.

“I just want to put the brakes on what we have here,” said committee member Corey Pettegrow. “The functionality for this is wrong for this area… You can’t have excavators, trucks, boom trucks and a family with a picnic in that area. This is a busy place. It’s not even a fun place to be from now until September. My whole issue on this has been function.”

Pettegrow was virtually AWOL during the process, having failed to attend most of the meetings when the plan was discussed.

But he does speak from experience when it comes to handling heavy equipment.

He caused serious damage to an Ellsworth woman’s car in 2012 when a boat hull he was hauling snagged a utility pole in Somesville and sent it flying. The force of the unfinished boat hull catching on the overhead wire pulled the pole entirely out of the ground and turned it into a projectile, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Marlene Bennett, then 60, was driving a 2007 Dodge sedan behind the truck and trailer when the pole flew from its upright position into the roadway, police said. The force of it being pulled out propelled the pole through the front passenger-side door of Bennett’s car.

At the meeting Monday night, member Ron Weiner voiced exasperation with Pettegrow and others. “I wish somebody had raised the questions before now. I’m a little troubled we’ve gone as far as we have and not gotten anywhere. I’m really confused about it… To me, it now seems like a waste of time.”