How Bar Harbor squandered opportunity to effect meaningful cruise ship management

Amateur council let personal grievances blind pursuit of goals

Last of 3 parts

BAR HARBOR, Aug. 27, 2024 - Tonight the Town Council will take up one of the most impactful pieces of local legislation in its history, and yet many residents are yawning.

They know this council has a proclivity for talking only to itself and tuning out opposing views.

Member Matt Hochman urged citizens recently to keep an open mind about Chapter 50, the proposed amendment to the current cruise ship management code with more moving parts than a Chinese Go board.

But has the council kept an open mind?

Since introducing Chapter 50, and after much public input and criticism, the council has not changed even a comma in its proposal, despite howls of protest from citizens and legal experts that the document could have been written by the industry it is seeking to regulate.

Why would the industry settle for a 2,500-passenger daily limit - as I reported yesterday - when it won a deal for 4,000 just two years ago, especially knowing that the other side has no spine.

The council lost that leverage when it publicly announced it would negotiate only with the industry and not with citizen petitioner Charles Sidman, who had singularly kept everyone honest.

(Sidman is an experienced “early stage” investor. The council could have used his expertise. I negotiated deals with Yahoo! Google and even Elon Musk, when he owned Zip2, a searchable business directory which he sold to Compaq for $305 million in 1999 during the Dotcom craze when it did not make a dime in profit. Negotiating with the Musk Brothers - Elon and Kimbal - was a singular life experience.)

There were important lessons from those days, one of which was that the opposing side must never know you don’t have other options.

So on March 6, 2024, exactly one week after United States District Court Judge Lance Walker ruled in favor of the town’s right to determine its own rules for managing cruise ship visits, what did the Town Council do?

It issued a press release stating it would not enforce the ordinance which 1,780 hearty souls in Bar Harbor had voted on to restrict cruise ship visitation.

A federal judge had just sided with the town, and the council couldn’t wait to disavow it. The fact that it took only one week suggested strongly that the council had already made up its mind.

Its personal animus toward Sidman was so strong - as represented by my reporting of the F-bomber Hochman - that it could not see Sidman as a partner on any future endeavors.

What a colossal mistake.

The council sent out a worldwide APB: We do not trust Sidman. We will negotiate with the cruise ship industry only.

Harvard Business School should do a case study here on how not to negotiate a contract.

Had I been in charge, I would have let the world know I was engaged with Sidman on next steps. I would not have snuffed out my court victory in one short week.

In business, you can’t hold grudges.

This is not to say I would have given Sidman a free pass.

I would have told him the 1,000-cap citizens ordinance is far from perfect.

Sidman is one of the most self-assured persons I have ever met. So you have to be on the top of your game to challenge him.

I would have pushed Sidman after winning the enormous court victory to make the ordinance better and tighter and go back to voters with revisions. I would have pushed him to accept a more accommodating visitation number - 2,000, 2,200, 2,500 passengers?

That conversation never occurred. And Sidman sued the town for its failure to enforce the citizens ordinance.

Would CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) have dismissed the the town so perfunctorily had it known that the town was seriously considering other options.

These players are all newbies in a high-stakes gambit, including the town attorney Stephen Wagner.

Here is how he answered the question from councilor Maya Caines on Aug. 6 when she expressed discomfort at the proposed 3,200-passenger daily cap and wanted to know how he came to recommending it. He said:

• Discussions have been with “all parties,” which was more misinformation from a lawyer who knew full well that Sidman had been frozen out.

• “This not a proposal from CLIA but the town’s proposal.” That is in direct contradiction to what councilor Gary Friedmann told me yesterday that the town’s proposal was for 2,500 passengers and that 3,200 passengers was the CLIA’s counter proposal.

• Wagner ended by saying, “These are terms that would be, or should be acceptable to the cruise lines and that's the only party that matters."

Here is the Town Hall Streams recording starting at 1:10:42 into the meeting.

Had the council come clean with voters and offered Chapter 50 with 2,500 passengers and cleaned up some of Wagner’s legal giveaways and gave voters a bigger voice, it might have resonated. (And I would have given the industry 3,200 passengers a day for all of November and half of April.)

Consider the cruise ship schedule this year - a full season allowed by the council -which I was able to obtain from Town Clerk Liz Graves. Out of 112 ships, only 12 exceeded 2,500 in capacity. The industry was happy to send 100 ships here this summer under 2,500.

(For fellow cynics, take note of the 34 ships former town manager Kevin Sutherland booked on Nov. 8, 2022, the day voters adopted the current 1,000-passenger daily cap.)

As I have written before, APPLL - cruise ship-dependent businesses suing the town over the 1,000-passenger cap - has had its own share of blunders like giving the rein to Timothy Woodcock, whose maritime law argument was destroyed by Judge Walker, but not before the owners of Ocean Properties flew in an army of Constitutional lawyers from Washington, D.C. and even from St. Louis.

I wrote that they sidelined Andy Hamilton, their best lawyer.

He is now on the case.

And Bar Harbor should worry, and get some serious counsel.