Garbage in, garbage out: Is Bar Harbor truly solving its waste disposal inequity?

BAR HARBOR, March 4, 2025 - A two-family house on School Street pays the same for municipal garbage disposal as a restaurant on Main Street which generates exponentially higher volume. That’s because, unlike water and sewer, the cost of solid waste disposal is borne by property taxes.

That did not stir much concern when disposal cost was reasonable low. In 2017, Bar Harbor paid $641,258 to get rid of its trash.

Then in 2023, it exploded - going from $802,845 to $1,038,234 in one year.

That February I wrote the following article, “Bar Harbor per capita trash disposal cost highest among all 115 MRC towns.

“The towns of Hampden, Belfast, Orono - just to name three - have much bigger populations and yet generate far less municipal solid waste than Bar Harbor.

“The Municipal Review Committee, the omnibus agency which manages MSW from 115 towns, estimates that Belfast with 7,000 year-round residents produces 700 tons of waste a year, whereas Bar Harbor with 5,500 residents generates 5,056 tons for which the town is seeking a 22 percent budget increase to manage its disposal. That’s almost $200,000 in additional taxes.

“Of the 115 MRC towns, Bar Harbor is the third highest producer, next to Bangor and Brewer. Read the list here https://www.mrcmaine.org/waste-data/. But it leads all towns with the highest per capita output of 1,839 pounds a year.”

All I did was to amplify what Finance Director Sarah Gilbert warned in a Town Council meeting in December 2022 when she flagged that the cost to dispose of garbage in Bar Harbor was going to be more than $1 million for the first time in its history.

The culprit obviously was the tourism industry, including short-term vacation rentals, as Acadia National Park reported record visitation in 2021 and similar results in succeeding years.

Now the Town Council is finally getting around to addressing this after wasting most of 2024 with its failed campaign to repeal cruise ship passenger limits set by citizens.

As is their wont, the town manager and council are “boiling the ocean,” and over complicating matters so it could be years before citizens see any solution, if ever.

That is part of the Town Council playbook. If a problem comes up which requires challenging the tourism chokehold, then let’s bury it in minutiae.

Here is the council’s purpose statement for tonight’s workshop on solid waste:

“To establish high-level public policy objectives for Bar Harbor’s waste management strategy, addressing fee structures, waste diversion targets, enforcement and facility location in order to ensure decisions reflect the community’s environmental, fiscal, and social values.”

It promises to be another overwrought exercise which could result in defeat by citizens at a future town meeting if not presented properly. (Anyone remember Chapter 50? If you want to kill any idea, just overlay it with complexity and bias.)

For starters, the town seems to have forgotten that it has a long-term contract with MRC, the consortium of 115 towns to effect environmental control measures at a scale not feasible by individual communities.

Bar Harbor agreed to this and signed a 30-year contract.

So why is it now debating global issues as stated in its agenda tonight? (Remember the Higgins Pit fiasco? That was a perfect example of a little town in Maine with overreach that ended up in a $4.5 million bond. )

Whoever is driving this bus would have benefitted from reading the contract with the MRC, and noted that much of what is contemplated was vetted by the council 10 years ago when it decided to join MRC on the promise that scale was important.

Just because the MRC plant was shuttered five years ago for financial failure, it doesn’t mean the town may breach the contract and begin its own operations.

The agenda for tonight’s workshop on solid waste includes a discussion on “whether relocating the facility could enhance our ability to process diverse waste streams (including compost, white goods, scrap metal and marketable and marketable recyclables).”

Are they kidding? Relocating the facility in a town so tight for space, it can’t even find enough housing for people? How long will that take?

Besides, diversion of waste streams is exactly what the MRC is charged to do on behalf of its members.

The Town Council and its manager have once again obfuscated the true intent of the problem and solution.

The problem is clear.

The town is treating its citizens unfairly - once again - by making them pay more than their fair share for a core public service, garbage disposal.

The solution is not that complicated.

Effect a flat fee for the abusers.

Charge hotels, restaurants and other high volume producers a new fee, similar to the water and sewer fees.

It’s not that difficult to figure out.

How many seats are in Havana?

Let’s charge you a waste disposal fee for every seat.

According to GreenBlue.com, half a pound of food is wasted per meal in restaurants, whether it’s from what is left on a customer’s plate, or in the kitchen itself. According to NPR, “food waste from restaurants makes up 15% of all the food that ends up in landfills.”

So why should property owners in town subsidize their careless management of food waste?

The hotels and campgrounds are no better.

It’s estimated by some authorities that hotels generate one cubic yard of waste per room each month. First-class hotel rooms generate 3.2 pounds of waste per room, while first-class meals generate 2 pounds of waste. With fewer amenities, economy hotel rooms generate 1.7 pounds of waste per room and 1.2 pounds of waste per meal.

Every hotel and campground can be charged a fee according to the number of beds and campsites.

This is the immediate problem which requires an immediate solution.

Or the town can drown itself in three more years debating pay-as-you-throw implementation. Not that PAYT isn’t important. The town should pursue that solution but not wait to implement a fee on commercial waste disposal.

The workshop agenda also stated that any new town policies should ensure “they comply with state mandates (e.g., Extended Producer Responsibility).”

Maine was the first state to enact legislation (EPR) to tax producers of packaging in 2021. Since then it has been haggling over rules on how to implement it with the business community, as represented principally by the Maine Chamber of Commerce, trying to slow it down. At this stage the law won’t take effect until 2027 at the earliest.

The only reason to add that to the town discussion is to complicate matters even more.

Meanwhile the news out of Hampden is positive. Even the most strident critics of the MRC since the “Fiberight” plant closed in 2020 are giving the new owners a thumbs up.

Innovative Resource Recovery is poised to accept some municipal waste starting in April and go to full operation in 2026.

Organic matter is central to its strategy to create natural gas from digested waste. Its DEP permit requires that 50 percent of the facility’s output be recycling or products made for resale, and the rest to landfill.

So IRR has simplified the plant operation to achieve that goal.

It has eliminated the processing of pulp products which contained too much moisture, said MRC Executive Director Michael Carroll. Instead IRR has invested in high quality anaerobic digestion reactors to make renewable biogas. The plant has a direct feed to Bangor Natural Gas in Bangor.

IRR has also sharpened the process to break down everything inside a bag of garbage.

High valued recyclables, like cardboard, will continue to be managed as an important asset, but soiled cardboard may go into the digesters.

IRR may be the best and last hope for the region’s waste disposal needs. The previous owner boasted it could redirect 80 percent of waste from landfills. It lasted nine months before it ran out of cash and closed the plant on Memorial Day weekend 2020.

Carroll said IRR isn’t over promising. It will achieve its 50 percent permit requirement. Everything beyond that will be a welcome upside.

So why is Bar Harbor re-inventing the wheel?

Why is it talking about municipal composting, when it is forbidden in the contract?

Nibbling away at the Hampden operator and crippling its chances of success will guarantee another insolvency.

Has the town manager and council heard about the disastrous composting effort in Ellsworth and the seven-year battle between the city council and the composting operator? Large composting sites emit strong smell and attract gulls and vermins.

MRC Director Michael Carroll suggested member municipalities seek grants to purchase odor-free composting bins for residents who want to compost in their back yard which is not a forbidden activity. The town can also do that with the revenue from the new fees.

Most members of the Association to Protect and Preserve Local Livelihoods, the businesses suing the town over the cruise ship ordinance, are perfect examples of large enterprises which consume more than their fair share of town resources for garbage disposal.

Besides restaurants, other big waste producers in Bar Harbor include College of the Atlantic, Acadia National Park, hotels and campgrounds.

Lee Worcester, president of Eastern Maine Recycling, once said in a meeting in Southwest Harbor that park campgrounds generated some of the foulest garbage on the island.

Bar Harbor is not alone in this gross inequity. Acadia Disposal District, the non-profit owned owned by Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Tremont and Trenton to coordinate trash disposal strategies, does not have a single town with a fee structure for heavy users.

Mount Desert is about to be hit with its biggest consumer of garbage services with no way to extract a reasonable fee. The historic Asticou Inn has been under renovation by hotelier Tim Harrington for more than a year. When it opens this summer it will have a staff of more than 200 workers and an equal number of guests a day who will be generating the largest amount of garbage in town.

The hotel owner will pay a hauler to cart away the trash to be dumped at either the transfer station in Northeast Harbor or the EMR facility in Southwest Harbor and not pay a dime extra.

In Southwest Harbor, Harrington’s Claremont Inn has the same arrangement. So does the United States Coast Guard station, which pays to have its garbage hauled to the taxpayer-supported EMR transfer station but no fees for dumping an indiscriminate amount of garbage.

This is not an academic discussion.

The Juniper Ridge landfill in Alton is filling up. Some peg its remaining lifespan at less than five years.

Some actuary could easily come up with a formula to assess a fee for the Asticou Inn, COA, Jackson Lab, Bar Harbor Inn, campgrounds and Airbnb rentals.

Give residents 10 free bags a month.

Put it on the ballot in November and it will win.

Why make this harder than it needs to be? The only ones cheering the delay are the volume abusers of the planet.