Delta Variant arrives at MDI as Covid cases spike; ICU bed availability shrinks in Maine
New Bar Harbor planning board is still its pungent self; primer on zero waste
SOMESVILLE, Aug. 28, 2021 - The number of Covid cases at Mount Desert Hospital in August more than quintupled over the previous month, said Hospital CEO Chrissi Maguire in an interview Friday. And the month is not over.
There were six cases in June, three in July and 16 this month as of Friday, with four days to go in August.
“And it’s all the Delta variant,” she said.
The hospital issued this statement Friday,
“With cases and hospitalizations on the rise, we urge all area businesses to reinforce vaccination, masking, distancing, hand hygiene for all customers and staff and to display posters and signage on effective mitigation strategies and to implement masking immediately for all workforce and visitors.”
Maguire sounded alarm at the shrinking inventory of available ICU beds in Maine hospitals where MDI sends its sickest Covid patients.
Dr. Nirav Shah, state CDC director, tweeted out Thursday, “There are 133 people in the hospital w/#COVID19 in #Maine right now. 59 are in the ICU and 27, on ventilators. Of 332 total ICU beds in #Maine, 34 are available right now. Yesterday, there were 39 available beds. And on Tuesday, there were 52.”
Maguire emphasized that 85 to 90 percent of the cases are patients who were not vaccinated. And if everyone indoors masked up, “the protection is 99.9 percent,” she said.
MDI had only 10 cases from March 13, 2020 to Oct. 17, 2020. Then a post Halloween outbreak and a large Thanksgiving family event increased the number for the rest of 2020. The cases started declining in the second quarter of 2021 until the current surge.
“Mount Desert Island has done an amazing job of managing COVID-19 through community cooperation and collaborative partnerships, and we need to call on our dedicated community members and business partners once again to reinforce our best mitigation strategies—vaccination, masking, distancing, and avoiding large gatherings and crowded situations,” the hospital stated Friday. “We know these safe, effective strategies work, and we know that together we can begin to reverse this troubling trend for our region.”
Maguire commended the MDI schools for their mask mandate and the asymptomatic testing of personnel and students. She said children under 12 getting Covid is a worrying trend. Several of the 16 cases in August were of young children. “They are like little petri dishes,” she said.
Salmon “die off” near MDI a warning?
BLACK ISLAND - QSJ had to see it for himself the ignominious salmon farm which had a fish “die off” Friday as reported by the owners.
The immediate reaction up-close this morning (see video above) was how massive an infrastructure it was. I had difficulty imagining two of these in the middle of pristine Frenchman Bay. By the time I arrived, the dead fish had been taken away.
Cooke Aquaculture spokesman John Richardson said in a statement, “Cooke Aquaculture USA is completing the safe removal of mortalities that have occurred at their salmon farm sites off Black Island, near Frenchboro in Maine.
“The mortalities were a result of uncommonly low oxygen levels in the cages. The fish are being disposed of per the company’s standard operating procedures and farm management plan. Cooke expects to be operating as normal over the weekend following the regular harvest schedule.
“All livestock farmers encounter and manage mortalities and the company is taking all the responsible steps and has provided notification to the Department of Marine Resources, Department of Environmental Protection, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, USDA, and NOAA.”
DMR spokesman Jeff Nichols referred all QSJ questions to the company. “All I know is that there was a die off but nothing that would be a violation of the lease.”
In 2019 Cooke reached a settlement to pay $2.75 million in legal fees and to fund Puget Sound restoration projects, putting an end to a Clean Water Act lawsuit that followed the 2017 collapse of one of the fish-farming company’s net-pen structures, according to the Seattle Times.
The nonprofit Wild Fish Conservancy, an advocacy group that opposes fish farming in open water, initiated its lawsuit against Cooke in August 2017, about a week after a Cooke net pen near Cypress Island collapsed. State regulators would later say the company’s negligence led to the collapse and determined that as many as 263,000 Atlantic salmon escaped the floating cage structure and into Puget Sound. Fears did not materialize that the escaped salmon would survive and spread in Washington waters long-term. Some were concerned they could be a threat to native salmon.
In Maine, Cooke was fined a pittance, $156,213 for 11 violations of its state permit in 2020. Cooke is the only sea-based salmon aquaculture firm in Maine, with pen farms in Washington and Hancock counties, as well as a hatchery on Gardner Lake in East Machias and a fish processing facility in Machiasport. It’s also a multi-billion-dollar company. A $156,213 fine is like a large tip at one of its company events.
New planning board much like the old planning board in Bar Harbor
BAR HARBOR -For a journalist, the planning board here is the gift which keeps on giving.
This board seems unable to conduct business without a whiff of impropriety or ethical breach. A single regular meeting on Aug. 4 seemed to define it.
Chairman Tom St. Germain proposed the board consider changing the town’s building height limit to exempt rooftop parking. The town does not have rooftop parking on any building currently. So the exemption would only apply to new construction.
Guess who has plans for a new three-story “bed and breakfast” on Cottage Street which is at the height limit? And the building would need parking.
That would be Tom St. Germain, the sitting chair of the planning board who simultaneously would be developing the town’s biggest project.
He claimed the idea for the exemption came from an engineer on another project. He did not identify the engineer. Moreover, he said he has no personal stake in the idea, that he was “indifferent” to it. QSJ asked him to name the engineer and did not get a response. St. Germain has never replied to any of QSJ’s questions.
At no time did St. Germain mention his own hotel project, and remarkably at no time did any board members question him about the connection. The history of how Bar Harbor came to build hotels under the radar of zoning regulations is sordid and involved St. Germain. More on that later.
The rooftop discussion occurred immediately after the board voted 5-0 to approve Ocean Properties’ long contested application to expand employee housing at Acadia Apartments on West Street Extension.
At no time did new member Ruth Eveland declare that while director of the Jesup Library, she successfully, along with others, landed a $500,000 donation from the Walsh family which owns Ocean Properties. It was the largest single gift in the library’s 2020 Next Chapter campaign. In 2013, the Walsh family donated $100,000 for architectural designs to kick start the campaign.
Was her approval of the Acadia Apartments application influenced by this money? The vote was her first act as a new board member. The other new member is Elissa Chesler, a scientist at Jackson Labs.
Eveland replied to QSJ by email but did not answer the question. The library is “supported widely by many members of the community. I am participating in a few active solicitations, but am not now involved in seeking funds from Ocean Properties,” she wrote. She resigned as director earlier this year and now consults.
QSJ is also an occasional donor to the library but certainly not in the amount equal to the Walshes. And QSJ does not operate a business which requires approval from the planning board.
Eveland could have easily disclosed the conflict and had her fellow board members advise her on how to proceed. This is what the Tremont planning board did when new member Beth Gott disclosed her conflict as having done work for an applicant.
”I was unaware at the time of the 8-4-21 PB hearing that Ms. Eveland was helping to raise money for the Jesup's capital campaign to which the owners of Ocean Properties had been and might continue to be major donors,” said attorney Arthur Greif who represents a neighbor opposing the expansion.
“Bar Harbor's ethics ordinance stresses the need for full disclosure by any board or committee member of potential conflicts of interest. A board member has far better knowledge of such potential conflicts than does any member of the public or a party appearing before that board. I regret that Ms. Eveland did not raise this issue for her fellow Planning Board members to consider.”
Ironically, at the same meeting, Eveland, who was chair of the Town Council when large cruise ships began to visit Bar Harbor, boasted about her work on an ethics policy for the town.
In June 2012, Bill Trotter, the eminent reporter for the Bangor Daily News, wrote about the wholesale eviction of the families in the 16 apartments which were acquired by Ocean Properties to house employees. Trotter quoted one ousted tenant as saying, “I think it’s cruel. Why not fix the place up and let low-income people live here? These are nice people and working people. It breaks my heart. I feel sorry for them.”
Back to the sordid history of the town’s dalliance with “bed and breakfast.”
In 2016 Stephen Coston, a former council member, proposed to tear down an existing building on Mount Desert Street and replace it with a hotel, except he called it a “bed and breakfast” because the town’s zoning ordinance failed to properly define a “BnB.” Several owners of inns and BnBs objected. After a year of deliberations, the planning board voted 3-1 to approve the project despite its attorney’s opinion that it was not a BnB. Tom St. Germain voted to approve.
Five years later, St. Germain took the same playbook he approved to feed at the trough himself, and this time with Coston as a partner. He learned that by calling it a “BnB” he didn’t have to go through the planning board and only through the Design Review Board.
Bar Harbor resident James Collier, attorney to the town of Tremont and the planning board of Mount Desert, referred to this activity as a “dangerous subterfuge” to end-run sound planning.
“In Bar Harbor they have an inn with 30 rooms and they call it a BnB … and the attorney Ed Bearor (Bar Harbor town attorney) said, ‘I’m not from Bar Harbor but it doesn’t look like a BnB to me,” Collier said July 13 at the Tremont PB workshop on proper planning.
“If you’re going to do to what you’re talking about that it’s compatible wth the land, be honest, is it compatible, or it is a dangerous subterfuge?” Collier said. “Don’t get yourself in a situation where you have that BnB.
“It offends me every time I walk by it.”
COA trustee, zero waste guru tells how to reduce household trash as Hampden plant stays shut
SEAL HARBOR - With the shuttered Hampden waste plant entering its 16th month of closure, what can climate-conscious citizens do with all their human flotsam?
They can produce less of it and commit to DYI waste management, or “zero waste,” said Sarah Currie Halpern, trustee of College of the Atlantic and founder of Think Zero Home, a personalized coaching program designed to help individuals and families create a low or zero waste lifestyle and household.
One major difference between a municipal waste plant and zero waste is that the plant actually encourages towns to produce more trash with a minimally required tonnage in order to receive the best fee. Scale is the game there.
Sarah Currie Halpern’s summer home in Seal Harbor is a temple to a contrarian notion. This summer she’s gone to the town dump only twice.
Her house is filled with small and large recycling stations for aluminum, glass, batteries, razor blades, paper, cardboard, plastics and even cork. The backyard has two wooden composting bins next to a garden which flourishes from the fertilizer.
Zero Waste is also a lifestyle. Sarah doesn’t so much food shop as she forages, barters and harvests. She favors local markets as the purveyors are more likely to take back cardboard boxes, egg cartons and jars. She buys bread from Little Notch Bakery in Southwest Harbor where she can stuff it into her bag sans packaging. Ditto for MDI Ice Cream on Firefly Lane which will happily fill her glass jars. And she brings her own containers to Burning Tree Restaurant in Otter Creek to package dinners cooked to her order.
And, of course, there is Clynk.com.
Founded in 2006, Clynk is a fast-growing can-and-bottle redemption and recycling service that has processed over 900 million containers since its inception. The company offers a convenient bag-drop system that eliminates waiting in line, manual counting and material separation while reducing fraud. The company has about 150 employees and currently operates in Hannaford Supermarkets in Maine and New York, and has licensed technology in Oregon, Iowa and New Brunswick.
Before forming Think Zero LLC, Sarah previously ran the Solid Waste and Zero Waste Programs for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability (MOS). Her work focused on implementing the Zero Waste Plan by increasing commercial, school, and housing authority composting and recycling, encouraging waste reduction, reuse, and donation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from waste, and developing/improving waste policy citywide.
But she will be the first to acknowledge that the industry still has growing pains, because it relies on third-party vendors and agencies and their promises. She sends her soft plastic to TerraCycle in New Jersey which she said, “It’s not ideal so I do try to reduce soft plastics as much as possible.”
A lawsuit filed against TerraCycle in March 2020 alleged that it and its biggest corporate partners — including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Late July Snacks, Gerber, L’Oreal, Tom’s of Maine, and Clorox — are not telling the whole truth when they say their packaging is recyclable, according to Vox.com.
“It says the recycling programs are not accessible or transparent, and the vast majority of packaging still winds up in the landfill or ocean despite conscious consumers’ best efforts. TerraCycle helps these conglomerates ‘reap the rewards of portraying their products as recyclable while offering no corresponding benefit to the environment or to consumers concerned about sustainability,’ according to the suit,” Vox reported.
The suit also says that TerraCycle has provided no hard proof that it is recycling what it says it is. (The brands named in the suit declined to comment, citing pending litigation, except Gerber, which said it “stands behind all of our claims around recyclability.”)
Misrepresentation is a hallmark of the waste disposal industry. The Hampden plant is closed because the founder misrepresented its capabilities. Will the clean waste industry clean itself?
We’ll see.
2020 Census: MDI older than Maine
By Nina Dietz, QSJ summer intern
BAR HARBOR - The population of Maine is the oldest in America, with a median age of 45 years.
The Mount Desert Island population is even older.
The median age of America as a whole is 38, seven years younger than the Maine average, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
The median age of Bar Harbor, the youngest town on the Island is 45.2. The rest are even older, with median ages of 49.9, 54.4, and 58.3 in Tremont, Mount Desert, and Southwest Harbor respectively. In Southwest Harbor, more than one third of residents are over the age of 65.
The country is currently facing a labor shortage and the Island has been no exception. This summer restaurants have had to cut hours of operation and pay rookie waitstaff $15 an hour or more. Some motels are down to a single maid this tourist season. This labor shortage shows no signs of letting up and is even worse in some industries such as nursing and elder care. As the Island moves forward from the pandemic further investment in elder care will be necessary, especially in Southwest and Mount Desert.
Another point of interest from the most recent census data is the distinction that Bar Harbor is more diverse than the rest of the Island and the state as a whole. Bar Harbor is 89.8% white whereas the rest of the state is 94% white. The second largest group is those identifying as Asian, with 6.2 percent checking that category. The statewide Latino population is only 1.7%, but it is nearly double that in Bar Harbor at 3.2%.
MDI has had a relatively stable population over the last decade with a population of 10,680 at the time of the 2010 census and a current population of 10,280. It has experienced a decrease in population of 4 percent.
The final way MDI particularly stands out from the rest of the state is in terms of its home values. In Maine as a whole the average home is worth approximately $190,000. On MDI that figure goes up to over $320,000. This disparity has gotten markedly larger over the last census cycle as housing prices on MDI have been driven up by the second home market and its proximity to Acadia National Park.
Lincoln’s Log
Rogue Cafe in Southwest Harbor, one of QSJ’s favorite eateries, posted this on FB today:
“So. This is hard, but necessary. We are switching to take-out. We are no longer comfortable with inside dining. There have been too many unvaccinated people not wearing face coverings in here. Too many restaurants shutting down for confirmed Covid cases or exposure. We have too many people in our circle who are health compromised. I know too many people who have become very ill with this virus. Plus, not enough staff and no place for them to live, anyway. It shouldn’t be this way.
I don’t want to be the reason someone becomes sick. We are taking a few days to pull this switch off and get happy with our decision.
I know it’s super high season and that every eatery is packed. Most cannot do this amount of business AND takeout. We are choosing to try to fill that void really well, as opposed to what we’ve been trying to pull off. Open to possibility for private porch parties up to 20 people, but more on that later.
Apologies to anyone who has reservations. We’ll be making a lot of phone calls this afternoon.
We will have all the info/menu up by Monday night.
Thinking of making this last through the end of the year.
Please keep yourselves safe.