Ellsworth rivaling Bar Harbor in short-term rental listings (cause of increased island traffic woes?)

OTHER NEWS: PERC incinerator auction fails, will try again; BH legal bills a new budget reality? SWH says 'no thanks' to Jellison

ELLSWORTH, Oct. 29, 2023 - MDI’s neighbor to the north has become among the hottest short-term rental destinations in the country, according to Airdna, the data platform for STRs.

In the 2023 season, Ellsworth had almost as many listings (699) as in Bar Harbor (723).

Their total of 1,422 listings was more than the City of Portland with 1,200. (The number includes listings by motels, inns and hotels.)

Could this help explain some of the traffic conditions on the island this year?

In three years, Ellsworth has seen a 37 percent increase in STRs, tying it as the ninth hottest market in the country, according to the Airdna market score given for investability, rental demand, revenue growth, seasonality and regulation.

Its score of 85 ties it with Kailua Kona on the island of Hawaii.

STR listings, annual incomes in Downtown Ellsworth as shown on Airdna map

Two years ago Southwest Harbor experienced the same kind of growth and was ranked as a Top 10 market.

Bar Harbor and Ellsworth are the fourth and fifth largest STR markets in Maine, next to Portland, Old Orchard Beach (943 listings) and Wells (778).

But because Acadia National Park is the signature attraction here, lumping Bar Harbor and Ellsworth as a single market would make it the top market in Maine by far.

If you added the other island towns, Southwest Harbor (367), Tremont (244) and Mount Desert (209), the total for the five towns is 2,242 listings. STRs in Tremont and Bar Harbor make up about 20 percent of their housing stock.

Listings, annual incomes of Downtown Bar Harbor STRs as shown on Airdna map

Maine municipalities have implemented different ordinances to battle the negative effect of STRs on communities. South Portland does not allow non-owner occupied STRs in any residential neighborhood. As a result it only has 172 active listings reported by Airdna. South Portland has 27,000 residents, or more than five times that of Bar Harbor.

Last week, Bangor became the latest to regulate short-term rentals by capping STRs to 1 percent of the housing stock. A host may only hold five permits at a time, to keep investors from buying up multiple living spaces.

No winning bid for incinerator in Orrington; auctioneer to try again

ORRINGTON - On Wednesday, four companies expressed “interest” in acquiring the incineration plant here which could be the region’s only stop gap solution to other-than-landfill for several years.

One is a scrap metal recycler, David Spencer.

Another is a company claiming biomass expertise but has a website with virtually no information.

The third is Delta Thermo Energy, well-known in these parts after it was removed in 2021 as operator of the Hampden waste-to-energy plant when it failed to keep the lights on and raise sufficient capital.

Only one company which expressed interest is actually actively engaged in the business of managing garbage, Marc David Green Solutions LLC, based in Sarasota, FL., AKA MD Power.

In November it broke ground in Chicot County, Arkansas, for a $50 million plant in Lake Village, Arkansas, to turn garbage into gas to produce steam and create energy.

But only Spencer and MD Power showed up with the required $50,000 certified check, and no one made what the auctioneer considered a serious bid, said Orrington Town Manager Chris Backman.

The auction started at $5 million and quickly went down to $1 million in half million increments, until the auctioneer halted bidding and postponed the auction to Nov. 2.

Backman is hoping MD Power has the necessary funding and acquires the plant.

There is 10,000 to 11,000 tons of trash on the floor of the Penobscot Energy Recovery Company incinerator. A company representative talked about firing up the plant to burn most of that garbage so it would not end up at the landfill in Old Town, and haul the rest by rail to the Midwest, Backman said. The company did not reply to an email requesting comments.

It is unknown how the company would retrofit the plant for its gasification technology.

Backman said the town is prepared to take over the plant to prevent it from being turned into scrap.

In late November, an automatic foreclosure will be triggered by the town because the plant owes three years of property tax.

But winter is coming, and the plant needs work to seal leaks and to ensure the utilities will be paid.

Backman said the plant needs about $1 million to fire up again. But others in the industry said it could be as much as $2 million.

The PERC incinerator was the back-up which burned much of the garbage from 115 towns of the Municipal Review Committee when its new waste-to-energy Hampden plant closed in May 2020 after running out of operating cash.

But the PERC plant also closed periodically because of equipments failures and fires. This summer, it closed permanently when 36th Street Capital of Morristown, N.J. assumed control. Its website appeared not to be functioning.

Meanwhile, officials in Old Town are in a panic about the Juniper Ridge landfill filling up faster than scheduled.

State Rep. James Dill, D-Old Town, is sponsoring emergency legislation for the state to investigate solutions to the solid waste management crisis and report its findings by June 1, 2024.

People are worried that Maine’s largest landfill could fill five years prematurely, according to a draft of the legislation.

“There are 159 towns sending direct, unprocessed trash to Old Town,” City Manager Bill Mayo told the Bangor Daily News. “This has never happened in the past, and it has people in town worried.”

Backman is hoping other legislators in the region will help sponsor Dill’s legislation.

BDN reported Juniper Ridge accepted 73,338 tons of waste in September, according to its monthly status report. Nine complaints, all of them about odor, were documented last month, a notable increase from previous months. Data show one or two complaints per month was typical during 2023.

As a result of the DEP’s approval of “temporary” increases in municipal solid waste and wastewater treatment plant sludge at Juniper Ridge, the partial expansion, which was expected to last through 2033, is now expected to use that capacity by 2028, the reports said.

The new owners of the Hampden plant told the Municipal Review Committee earlier this month that they did not expect to be fully functional until 2025. With PERC out as well, the region’s garbage will go to landfill without any other alternative in sight.

Bar Harbor may be facing permanent increase in legal cost

BAR HARBOR - As the Town Council convenes Monday night in a special executive session to discuss the cruise ship lawsuit, its attorneys will be racking up the largest legal bill the town has seen in its history.

The town has already spent $130,176 of the $200,750 budgeted for legal expenses for FY24 after years of spending no more than $25,000 for many years, reported Finance Director Sarah Gilbert. That’s one third of the year with many more cost to come.

By far the biggest bill is from defending the cruise ship lawsuit. But there is the lawsuit challenging the 2021 ordinance restricting short-term rentals filed by former Planning Board member Erica Brooks and Victoria Smith. They are appealing an April Superior Court judgment in favor of the town.

But is this just the cost of doing business for a municipality under enormous stress from so much incoming fire?

The town’s attorney, Rudman Winchell, wrote an excellent brief to defend the town’s “home rule” right to regulate traffic in the case brought by several restaurant and hotel owners and a trinket shop who are the direct beneficiaries of the cruise ship passengers as they disembark with their credit cards.

What if the United States District judge in the case, Lance Walker, actually sided with Rudman Winchell and ruled that the ordinance to cap daily visitors at 1,000 is legal.

Such a decision would be tectonic in its impact on Bar Harbor. Would Rudman Winchell have earned its measly $225 an hour municipal rate? Any appeal would ensure Rudman Winchell gets a steady check for years to come.

Legal spending is always a lightning rod for the libertarians in town whose knee-jerk reaction is to question its cost.

But what if it actually shuts down the foul cruise ship visitations, the scourge of Airbnb and the takeover of the town by hotels and restaurants who cater only to the tourists and shut down in the winter when the residents could really use a hot meal out of the house?

SWH select board names 2 new members to Conservation Commission, rejects Jellison

SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Well, the Jellison brother and sister tag team did not give up without a fight.

For more than two years now they have tied up the town’s resources - police and town administration - with personal grievances about parking across her house at a restaurant which has been a town landmark since the Sixties, to his attempt to prevent an abutting neighbor to move solar panels from his roof to a pad on the ground, to his application to join the Conservation Commission, which he has attacked mercilessly for more than two years, as the commission worked to update the town’s beloved skating pond.

George Jellison, former select board chair, was denied six times when he attempted to create a no-parking zone around his sister’s house. At the last two select board meeting when he was chair, he could not even muster a second to his motion.

This summer the Planning Board voted unanimously to reject his opposition to his abutting neighbor’s request.

Tuesday night, his sister Aimee Jellison Williams attacked the select board for its “unfair” choice of new voting members which did not include her brother.

“You’re making it about the Chris’s Pond debacle. It’s not. It’s about a lot more.”

Memo to Aimee Williams:

If you’re trying to gain favor of the Conservation Commission, best not to characterize its signature project as a “debacle.”

See this video of Aimee Williams’s final appeal to the select board Tuesday night to rebuff the appointment of former select chair Kristin Hutchins and Kathleen B. Lindquist as voting members of the Conservation Commission. They were approved.

LEFTOVERS:

I meant to post this video last month but forgot. Was out fishing on Long Pond when this person showed up in his Rube Goldberg invention. Then the thing took off!