How many visitors does Acadia get?
No one really knows but incorrect numbers only plunge park deeper into a financial abyss as deferred maintenance cost escalates
SOMESVILLE, March 21, 2021 - Google “how many visitors to Acadia” and the answer will come back as “2.67 million” in the pandemic-depressed year of 2020. In other years it’s been as high as 3.8 million.
Google uses data - surprise! - from a company called statista.com, which tries to make money off of your click by prompting you to buy a subscription.
Problem is the answer is incorrect. That number is an estimate - and potentially a bad one - of the number of “visits” a year. Theoretically, 53,000 persons could visit the park 50 times a year to get to that number, or 100,000 persons 27 times.
(The QSJ moved to Maine after retirement and made about 50-60 visits to Acadia during the past year but not during the high tourist season)
John T. Kelly, the park employee who manages the statistics, said he and others who are knowledgeable about such matters, believe the number of “visitors” annually is between 750,000 and 1.1 million.
Why is that important?
Because while the numbers often are used for boosterism, the incessant promotion of the popularity of Acadia National Park is sinking the park service into a bigger trap1. Acadia, as of 2018, reported $103 million in needed work, including $66 million in deferred maintenance. Nationally the entire NPS network reported $11.9 billion in deferred maintenance.
More visitors only makes the maintenance more difficult.
Kurt Repanshek, who writes the National Parks Traveler blog and perhaps the most authoritative voice on NPS doings, wrote in 2019:
“Another year of estimated visitation numbers has been released by the National Park Service. As unreliable, unhelpful, and unsustainable as the numbers are, the head counts should be tossed aside.
“First of all, the numbers are estimates. Weak ones at that. Park staff acknowledges that.”
“There are real problems with constantly pushing for higher visitation. They include adding to maintenance issues, impacting resources, and stressing an already stressed park staff.” Acadia National Park has $66 million in deferred maintenance, including more than $35 million in road work which is in direct contradiction to promoting more visitors.
Facility Condition Index (FCI) - A measure of a facility’s relative condition at a particular point in time. The FCI rating is a ratio of the cost of repair of the asset’s deficiencies divided by the current replacement value for the asset.
Kelly said Acadia is looking to change its method of counting visitors. “Because of changing travel patterns, Island Explorer bus riders, and new management actions, the park will be reviewing and updating its counting methodology over the next year or so.”
The last time Acadia undertook a major change in methodology, the number of visits went from 5.4 million in 1989 to 2.3 million in 1990.
The NPS counts the number of cars which crosses the Park Loop Road at Sand Point Beach. It also uses mobile counters in various busy spots such as Cadillac Mountain and Jordan Pond. It then extrapolates the number of visits by triangulating some assumptions.
“We multiply that number (Sand Beach count) by the average number of cars that enter the park in other locations,” said Kelly, assistant to the Acadia park superintendent, “The total number of cars is multiplied by the average number of visitors in a car to get an estimated total daily visitation.”
One would think today’s crowd-counting AI technology could solve the problem readily.
Meanwhile the decades-old methodology continues to serve up confusing results.
Kelly said the park service itself is among the worst violators, often conflating “visitors” and “visits” in its publicly disseminated information such as the promotional graphic below:
That certainly gives license to others to re-publish the error. Friends of Acadia, the giant non-profit with $65 million in assets, states in its mission statement:
“Drawing more than 3.5 million visitors each year, Acadia is one of the ten most popular national parks in the US. It is also one of the smallest and most vulnerable.
This is why Friends of Acadia exists. We are an independent organization of passionate people, inspiring those who love this magnificent place to make a real and lasting difference for Acadia.”
Then there are the self-interested actors happy to exploit the confusing visitation numbers.
The cruise ship industry, for instance, likes to remind folks that the 254,000 passengers who disembarked in Bar Harbor in 2019 is a fraction of the land-based visitors. Even the owner of the firm hired to develop a straw poll on the question of the cruise ships’ future in Bar Harbor got tripped up on the stats when he compared the 254,000 number to 3.8 million Acadia “visitors” at a Feb. 2 town council meeting.
He had to be told by a council member that the 3.8 million number was for total visits, not visitors.
The 254,000 passengers who flock to a small dense area of Bar Harbor in a tight concentrated time period compared with 750,000 persons visiting the entire island fully for six months and then partially for the rest of the year dramatically changes the comparison.
If nothing else, the cruise industry is facile at such obfuscation. In the 2019 report on traffic congestion in Bar Harbor commissioned by the Cruise Line Industry Association, it managed to sneak in this fat graph about the 254,000 passengers:
“This increase in the number of cruise tourists has contributed to a record number of visits to Acadia National Park in 2018, which directly contributed more than $388 million to and overall generated more than $520 million for the state economy, according to a National Park Service news release.” This was an NPS fact sheet which got hijacked.
According to a study paid for by the state in 2019, very few passengers bothered to visit the park. See chart below:
It validates residents’ concerns that the cruise ships are crowding out local people in the village.
Cruise ship survey uses biased info, studies
BAR HARBOR, March 2, 2021 - There are only three relevant questions on the issue of cruise ships in MDI:
Ban them.
Decrease their frequency.
Or stay the course …
In an effort to move this question to a decision by voters, council member Gary Friedmann earlier this year proposed to conduct a straw poll of residents’ sentiments. Friedmann’s intentions were noble, but it was a typical Bar Harbor reflex - fix a problem by creating another one.
The straw poll is now gumming up the works, and this week, the council voted to move the referendum on the cruise ship question to November instead of June because it could not get its act together to complete the questionnaire for a June referendum.
It wants to put the straw poll in front of voters in May or June and then design a ballot question for the fall.
The straw poll proposed by the outside vendor was so biased in favor of the cruise industry it had at least one member “so upset” about the draft when it was first presented.
At the town council meeting this week, member Val Peacock reminded everyone that the question of rejecting cruise ships altogether should remain an option for voters. She said she’s heard too many residents resigned to believing the town will never accept a total ban.
Her voice has grown more influential since she took her seat last June. Her quiet and disarming manner is non-threatening. Her research is impeccable. More and more her questions are well founded and getting support from other members.
Nonetheless, the proposed straw poll questionnaire, in its current form, starts with the assumption that cruise ships tourism is here to stay and that the only issue remaining is how to manage it.
The responses of the survey “will be used to create a plan for management of cruise ship tourism,” it states.
The questionnaire also gives equal opportunity for negative comments about land-based tourism, as if the two were on the same footing.
Pan Atlantic Research, the small Portland firm hired to conduct the straw poll, has attempted to load the questions with positive information about the cruise industry, using, for instance, a 2017 study which claimed a $20 million benefit to Bar Harbor businesses. “In your opinion, how important is this economic impact” to the town, you the citizen, friends, family and neighbors, and your business, it asks?
What it doesn’t ask is how many residents avoid the hordes in the village, and it doesn’t attempt to account for the loss of revenue by businesses which aren’t t-shirt shops and ice cream parlors.
The methodology used by the University of Maine economists in previous cruise ship studies was questioned by Colin Woodard of the Portland Press Herald, the award winning journalist and author.
“The only previous study of passenger spending in Portland was conducted by a team led by tourism researcher Todd Gabe of the University of Maine and released in 2009. It claimed each passenger spent $109.68, but failed to properly account for cruise ship occupancy, the number of passengers in a party, and for the fact that at least half of the money passengers spend on cruise line-sponsored shore excursions is taken by the cruise lines as a markup, and never reaches Maine.”
Woodard cited a more recent study in 2019 paid for by the state which had passenger spending onshore as low as $61.76, or about the price of a lobster roll, an ice cream cone and an extra large t-shirt. https://www.pressherald.com/2019/08/26/cruise-ship-spending-lower-than-first-reported/
Woodard’s 5-part series on cruise ships in 2018 may be read here Series.
Bar Harbor Town Manager Cornell Knight clearly was not interested in the less favorable study. He told Woodard, “We just had a study (UMaine) done a couple of years ago, so we have the information.”
Not surprisingly that’s the one Pan Atlantic chose to invoke, and the only one.
Why not ask the same question of land-based revenue where the matter is much more straight forward? In 2019, Bar Harbor began charging parking fees. In 2020, the pandemic year, the fees tripled beyond all expectations. It was a huge windfall, the biggest jackpot rung up by the town government in its history and without the onerous encumbrances placed on its use like the cruise ship money. The $1.4 million in parkings fees in 2020, and the $315,000 in 2019 (partial year) will enable Bar Harbor to spend $1.65 million on its roads and other infrastructure this fiscal year. So why isn’t the town council asking voters about that? Tit for tat?
This hot mess hit its nadir when council chairman Jeff Dobbs revealed he had no idea how much the cruise revenues generated for the town. “Isn’t it $1.5 million?” Dobbs asked in a February council meeting. When told the revenue was slightly above $1 million, Dobbs said, “Oh.”
That did not stop him from berating Peacock March 16 when she was making a point about the specificity of the straw poll question. “Cornell, could we please turn off Val’s microphone?” Dobbs asked of Town Manager Cornell Knight. “THAT WAS A JOKE,” he followed.
The intended jocular moment was awkward as it sounded more like intimidation from the chairman who has stated he supports a scaled-down schedule of cruise ship visits. Would Dobbs have directed such a joke on a male member? In an email, he wrote, “I run the meeting and use humor from time to time to move things along and for other reasons. Val is her own person and I have the greatest respect for her, she even saved the day on a suggestion that she made during the weekly rental discussion.”
But clearly the council is moving to preserve some cruise ship business, even if it’s smaller.
The same body of government created a Task Force on Climate Emergency in 2020 “to recommend climate goals for our town with the objective of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and reducing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by Dec. 31, 2030,” according to task force chair Brian Booher.
It made for a nice press release and resulted in a passel of positive stories in the local press.
The year before Bar Harbor allowed 179 of the foulest polluting agents on earth to anchor in its harbor. Guess what question was not included in the propose straw poll?
Proposed campground petition includes many out-of-state signatories
661 Tremont Road, the entry to the proposed 154-site campground. QSJ ran the wrong photo last week.
TREMONT, March 19, 2021 - The opponents of the proposed 43-acre campground have overtaken the proponents in the dueling petitions on change.org, and judging from the comments written, also seem to have a higher percentage of island residents.
As of this writing, the proponents have 836 signatories and the proponents have 649. The petitions are on change.org.
Of the 17 comments on the opponent petition, 11 are MDI residents. In the petition by the campground proponents, only two of 10 comments were from MDI residents. Both were Bar Harbor residents, whereas nine of the opposing signatories were Tremont residents.
“We've just been driven out of Bar Harbor and having the privilege to once again join a small community. I was more than disappointed to see such a proposal over here,” wrote Joshua Kane. “We just purchased the property next door to the site. It all looks good on paper but one or two people from that campground will purchase a house here every year, probably more.
“In no time it's all gone, the children cant afford a home and the fabric of your entire place no longer exists. Just watched it happen to Bar Harbor. I’m all for neighbors living next door or a frisbee golf place on the land or something, but an industrial campground isn't light commercial activity. Moved over for the quiet, only to find out 3 months later that they want to build a giant camp ground.”
The proponent petition was started by Becky Hopkins, mother of the applicant James Hopkins, who invoked populist rhetoric instead of specifics about the camp: “There are people who have moved to Tremont who are attempting to tell us that we can no longer do what the ordinances allow us to do with our land. We can't have a small business, we can't make a living for our family. This is not how America works.”
Tim Lunt from White Oak, N.C. wrote, “Nobody should be restricted in earning a living on their own property. That is about as socialist as you can get.”
But Jessica Wascholl of Bernard countered, “Keep the Quietside quiet.”
The matter will be taken up at the planning board meeting Tuesday at 6 when the board will try to establish whether the application has “completed” all the requirements. Once that’s determined abutting neighbors will be notified of a public hearing. “All attendees must access through Zoom - Meeting ID is 899-85i-7726. Password Tremont.”
Response times help drive effort to relocate ambulance to Somesville
SOMESVILLE, March 20, 2021 - When it comes to emergency public calls, speed is everything.
The Mount Desert Fire Department has a goal of 4 minutes from receiving a call to leaving the firehouse, said Chief Mike Bender.
But the drive from Northeast Harbor village to Pretty Marsh is anything but speedy. NEH is the only firehouse in the town of Mount Desert which has responders on call. It takes 10 minutes just to get to Somesville and then another 5 to 7 to Pretty Marsh, at the edge of the town. Somesville responders must first drive from their jobs or homes, race to the firehouse and respond with equipment.
So it comes as great news that the town is considering turning the Somesville firehouse as an on-call station with two full-time firefighter/EMS personnel.
The idea is the result of a meeting March 3 of four of the most pragmatic public safety managers on MDI to seek a solution of who should assume responsibility for the ambulance service in 2023 when the non-profit agency which has been operating since 1938 ends.
Mount Desert residents have the luxury of being served by town managers who identify problems before they get magnified and offer fixes.
So it was that the Northeast Harbor Ambulance Service came to the conclusion recently its non-profit model was no longer sustainable and recommended the town take over the service by 2023.
"That led us to take a look at the response times," said Police Chief Jim Willis, who met with Town Manager Durlin Lunt, Fire Chief Mike Bender and EMS head Basil Mahaney. The chart below was sketched by Willis from ambulance responses and clearly showed the problem as laid out by Mahaney, who said the number of year-round residents in Somesville and the Quietside were strong and growing.
(MD responses are the blue dots and the Bar Harbor ones in brown. The two towns have a mutual assistance pact.)
The idea is to split the on-call staff of four in NEH to two each in NEH and Somesville.
"I think it would be a big benefit for the town," Mahaney said.
Chief Bender provided the chart below showing fire responses in Mount Desert with more than 50 percent of the calls in NEH village. About 50 percent of all calls in town are false alarms - triggered by smoke alarms which automatically prompts a call into the station. NEH’s homes have installed a higher percentage of these devices.
The proposal also has the benefit of decreasing the cost of the new public safety addition to the town office building in NEH because there will be less of a need to house equipment and staff which will be moved to a re-purposed firehouse in Somesville. The select board is evaluating the cost now and hope it will come well under $5 million. At one time, the expansion proposed had a $10 million price tag.
Mount Desert's management has always had a practical streak and a willingness to share services mutually beneficial with other towns, especially Bar Harbor, with which it shares Jim Willis as police chief. Town bosses in Southwest Harbor and Tremont are more tribal and unwilling to cede their brands. SWH, for instance, insists on having its own police chief and dispatch staff. The SWH/Tremont ambulance service faces the same challenges as it continues to operate as a non-profit. It had difficulty ensuring full-tome coverage last year.
Bender said the EMS staff would be offered the opportunity to train as firefighters. Personnel going forward would be able to respond to both fire and EMS calls.
SWH seeks to use $180,000 rescue money for sidewalk project
SOUTHWEST HARBOR, March 20, 2021 - Acting Town Manager Dana Reed is proposing to use the money from the American Rescue Act to reduce the borrowing cost of the sidewalk project south of the village.
That would not be in keeping with the spirit of the law. It certainly would be morally and ethically divergent from the intent which is to help towns, businesses and people harmed by the pandemic.
QSJ and Reed had a pleasant conversation, and he readily acknowledged that he had only a cursory understanding of the bill.
To his credit, Reed is trying to solve one of the town’s most intractable capital problems - SWH seems to have more of them than any other MDI town - which is burgeoning cost of the sidewalk project which extends from the lobster pound at Apple Lane to the condos at Western Way.
But what does that have to do with pandemic relief?
“Due to Congress’ passage of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus recovery bill, it looks like Southwest Harbor will likely receive about $90,000 by mid-June 2021, with another equal payment at the same time next year,” Reed wrote in his proposal. “You can spend it on almost any legal use, as long as it’s approved by Town Meeting.
“It seems that the Town’s biggest need is funding for the Main Street Project. My draft article included in the Town Meeting Warrant assumes this use of the grant, but we can certainly change it, should you feel that there are better uses for this money.”
Reed is incorrect. You may not use the money to lower taxes, or lower pension costs. This week, Republican attorneys general from 21 states challenged those provisions based on “states rights.”
QSJ would like to suggest other ways. Many restaurants - a sector clearly hurt by the pandemic - will not receive any money from the restaurant relief section of the Rescue Plan because they must deduct previous PPP grants.
For instance, a restaurant that had $500,000 in total gross sales in 2019 and had just $250,000 in 2020 would be eligible for a grant of $250,000. However, the restaurant has to deduct the amount they received, if any, in PPP loans/grants. Restaurants are among the most labor intensive businesses in town. Let’s give them cash grants.
SWH also should spend the money on non-profits providing essential needs - such as the food panties and soup kitchens. I can’t think of anything worse than food insecurity wrought by the pandemic.
The Harbor House has been a haven for working parents. How about a special grant?
Any parent who lost his/her job could get a grant matching their unemployment benefit, provided they can show a stub from recent checks.
A section of the ARP does allow for use of the funds for broadband, and water and sewer projects. The sidewalk project does have a drainage component and I suppose the town could technically make that work.
But I hope the select board, which meets Tuesday at 6, seriously consider the appropriate course of action for neighbors in need. Bar Harbor will receive $550,000, Mount Desert $220,000 and Tremont $160,000. I hope they do the right thing as well.