MDI tourism season under way with many businesses at only 70-80% staffing capacity
Other news: Nordic Aquafarm case heads to state high court; Pemetic pre-K to hold lottery for 16 slots; summer reads; live music in Bar Harbor
BAR HARBOR, May 23, 2022 - How long can employers on MDI sustain the fevered pitch of an overwrought tourism season with less than full staffs?
Many businesses are opening with only 70 to 80 percent of workers needed to operate at full efficiency.
Joe Minutolo, the town council member who owns a bike shop on Cottage Street, said he is down about 20-25 percent and believes that holds true for many businesses. The culprit is the lack of housing on MDI, he said.
Also, high gas prices for commuters from Ellsworth and Bangor are adding to the problem.
The National Park Service typically hires about 130-150 seasonal employees at Acadia National Park.
“This year, we were only able to hire about 120 seasonal employees,” said Katelyn Liming, public affairs specialist. “We’re still trying to pick up a few more employees, but we will be short on custodians, fee technicians, law enforcement rangers and interpretive rangers. We were not able to hire any lifeguards.”
“Workforce housing is critical to our ability to recruit and retain seasonal employees. We have about 33 housing units that can house about 80 seasonal employees—that leaves many seasonal employees on their own to find housing in an expensive and competitive housing market.
“We do see many candidates turn down positions at Acadia because we can’t offer them housing.”
Unlike the pandemic which will eventually ease, lack of housing is a critical, long-term challenge which has the potential to reshape the local economy at multiple levels.
As if to underscore the crisis, the Maine Association of Realtors announced this week that April saw the tenth straight month of declining sales but a whopping rise in price of 25.3 percent over a year ago. There simply is not enough inventory.
MDI has only 35 homes for sale, according to Zillow. “The supply and demand for single-family housing is out of balance,” said Madeline Hill, president of the Maine Realtors.
Hancock County reported the biggest decline of home sales in April with only 119 units changing hands, a 45.66 percent drop from 219 in 2021. The median price sold went from $278,500 to $350,000 - a 25.67 percent jump.
Such nose-bleed prices are pushing some landlords to forsake year-round and monthly rentals in favor of short-term rentals for tourists.
Airdna, which analyzes rental data, said MDI has 707 listings on Airbnb.com and VRBO.com, about 100 more than last year. Also, the other three towns on MDI now have more listings combined - 371 - than Bar Harbor.
One way to ease the pressure is the pull back the marketing throttle for Acadia National Park, but businesses are loathe to do that. Alf Anderson, director of the Bar Harbor Chamber, which conducts the lion’s share of marketing, did not return a call.
The Bar Harbor Employment Hub on Facebook has 10,000 members, about the same as the year-round MDI population.
Typical of the listings is one from Kebo Golf Club:
“Full time/part time shifts available. Head Chef up to $1200 weekly. Line cooks up to $25 an hour. Server/bartender starts at $9 an hour plus tips. Very few early mornings, very few late nights. Serving lunch 7 days a week, with membership events, golf tournaments. If you are looking for a place that values you as an employee and as a person then Kebo is the place for you.”
Megan McGrail asked if there is housing.
Answer:
“No I’m sorry no housing.”
Judge rules Upstream Watch has legal standing against aquafarm; case to state Supreme Court
BELFAST - The massive land-based salmon farm proposed for Penobscot Bay has been dealt a legal setback seen as a win for local citizens who oppose industrialized aquaculture.
On May 11, Superior Court Judge Robert Murray dismissed the city’s claim that the citizens group Upstream Watch does not have standing. He authorized its lawsuit to proceed to the state Supreme Court with Upstream as one of the plaintiffs.
The Belfast city council, unlike municipalities surrounding Frenchman Bay which are engaged in a similar fight, buys into Nordic Aquafarms’s economic promises and supports the project.
In 2021, the city asserted eminent domain over the intertidal land that is part of a conservation easement, and then conveyed an easement over it to Nordic Aquafarms, allowing it access for its pipelines installation and construction.
But on Dec. 23, Maine attorney general Aaron Frey sided with the citizens groups.
“A conservation easement may not be terminated or amended in such a manner as to materially detract from the conservation values intended for protection without the prior approval of the court in an action in which the Attorney General is made a party.
By his May 11 action, Murray moved the matter to the higher court to determine whether the conservation easement is valid and to prevent Nordic Aquafarms from using the disputed intertidal land until the court decides.
The principal objection to Nordic’s proposed plant is similar to that of Frenchman Bay United, another citizens group which argues that the nitrogen dumped into the bay will forever compromise its ecology to the detriment of all incumbent species.
Unlike Frenchman Bay, Nordic has received the necessary local and state permits to proceed.
Besides the legal action, it faces opposition against ratepayers having to shoulder the $63 million cost to upgrade the electric grid to power the plant.
The QSJ previously reported that four large aquafarms proposed for Downeast would dump 13,000 gallons of nitrogen into the surrounding bays a day.
The Maine chapter of the Sierra Club has determined that they would “release over 4 billion gallons of effluent per day into waters that Maine’s lobster industry rely on to be clean, and would add 1,870,000 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere, equivalent to adding 406,500 cars to Maine’s roads.
Key: *Mil lbs. = Million pounds of fish produced per year, MT = metric tons produced per year. **Mgd = million gallons of effluent per day to be discharged directly into coastal waters ***MT/yr. = metric ton (MT) CO2e generated per year. Carbon emissions for RAS (recirculating aquaculture systems) vary between 16.7 and 23 MT CO2e/MT fish produced. CO2e is estimated using a conservative 18 MT CO2e/MT fish for each of the 5 projects. ****Aquabanq decided to shift to zero effluent
“These carbon emissions represent 15.7 percent of Maine’s 2030 greenhouse gas target, not to mention dumping 13,082 pounds of nitrogen per day into Downeast waters.
“A proposed facility in Belfast would release a 7.7 million gallon/day waste water plume, containing 11-times more nitrogen than the Belfast City Sewer. Sea life including lice will be attracted to the odors of the plume while any viruses and diseases discharged could threaten endangered salmon recovery.”Nordic Aquafarms is a Norwegian-owned company that announced in January 2018 plans to produce 72.7 million pounds (33,000 metric tons) of salmon a year.
Raising all those fish will require a lot of water.
The Bangor Daily News reported, “When fully built out, the project will use roughly 1,205 gallons per minute of fresh water drawn from three sources: the Belfast Water District municipal supply, groundwater wells on site and surface water from Belfast Reservoir No. 1, a 55-acre containment pond near the mouth of the Little River. The reservoir is owned by the water district and served as a water source for the city until 1980. Additionally, the project will use nearly 4,000 gallons per minute of seawater from Belfast Bay.
“For comparison, at the proposed rate of water usage, water taken from these sources would fill an Olympic-size pool every two and a half hours.
Separate from the easement issue, another lawsuit is challenging the ownership of the underlying land needed to support Nordic’s pipes.
Pemetic School holds lottery for 16 pre-K slots for Tremont, SWH children
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - The Pre-K program at Pemetic School is going to a full-day program next year but that leaves only 16 slots available which has some parents on edge, sources say.
A lottery will be held for the 16 spots - eight for Tremont and SWH - out of the 21 children who were screened as acceptable candidates.
This school year, the program was half day which allowed Tremont and SWH to alternate mornings and afternoons for half the school year.
But regulations capped the capacity at 16 at any given time, and the full-time program could no longer accommodate all the screened children.
The free program is a boon for working parents, with child care at a premium. Pemetic Principal Michele Gurtler referred all questions to Superintendent Mike Zboray, who did not return a call.
‘Salmon Wars’ leads my summer reading list … what’s yours?
SOMESVILLE - I have placed my order for the July 12 release of “Salmon Wars,” which is at the top of my list for summer books.
According to the advance press release from publisher Macmillan, “A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and his wife, a former private investigator, dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told.
”A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different.
”In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet.
Frantz and Collins document how the industrialization of Atlantic salmon threatens this keystone species, endangers our health and environment, and lines the pockets of our generation's version of Big Tobacco. And they show how it doesn't need to be this way.
Here is a link to the Introduction. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QDl6-6iSYQQ-K51m-tHfDbrhTEHAKY5XOL0ohYjrHAY/edit?usp=sharing
My summer reading recommendations:
Beneficence: A Novel
I’m two-thirds the way through this book, recommended by our own Christina Baker Kline, a Southwest Harbor summer denizen. Every year the Maine Humanities Council asks a Maine author to recommend two books, one fiction, one nonfiction. The novel chosen was Meredith Hall’s book about a Maine farming family which lost its emotional center. She took me through peaks and valleys of unexpected joy and sadness. I’m definitely planning to read her 2007 best-seller Without a Map.
Orphan Train
After reading Christina Baker Kline’s most recent work Exiles and A Piece of the World, I glomped onto Orphan Train, about the transport between 1854 and 1929 of thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck or chance. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adolescence of hard labor and servitude? (The book has a strong local connection.)
Frankie’s Place
I have read this book probably three or four times since it first came out in 2007. Here was the original publisher’s blurb:
“Frankie’s Place is the tale of a summer cottage and the story that unfolds under its roof. Jim Sterba is a down-to-earth newspaperman who charms the New York sophisticate, Frances FitzGerald, after several visits to her writer’s retreat on Mount Desert Island. Although they couldn’t have had more disparate childhoods—Jim grew up on a struggling Michigan farm while Frankie lived in a Manhattan town house and an English country estate—their shared summer rituals have them falling in love before our eyes.” Try listening to the audio version.
The Lincoln Highway
A Gentleman in Moscow
The name drew me to “The Lincoln Highway” and then a friend told me about Amos Towles’s tour de force, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov, who was banished to live in a hotel after the Russian Revolution. You may detect the clear influence of Dostoevsky. I plan to read Towles’s breakout novel, “Rules of Civility.”
These Silent Woods
Where the Crawdads Sing
Read these two books as companions and you’ll get an entirely difference feel for what is truly “off the grid.” Delia Owens’s monster best-seller has been made into a movie and will be released this summer. I read “These Silent Woods” first. Kimi Cunningham Grant’s story about a father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains has resonance for those of us who love rural Maine.
M Train
The Seed Keeper
I am an itinerant reader, juggling multiple books at the same time. I almost never read one book from beginning to end without my ADD kicking in. I am in the midst of two books, one by “punk poet laureate” Patti Smith, whose “Because the Night” is a treasured anthem. “M Train” is the odyssey of this legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world.
The “Seed Keeper” was recommended to me. A haunting novel spanning several generations, it follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. I love learning about native cultures and the fight to preserve them.
Other re-reads and half reads: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau, Coming into Country by John McPhee.
Please send me your list and I will post.
Tremont, SWH select chair rushing to close online public access
SOMESVILLE - Former Hancock County Commissioner Ant Blasi, after listening to Friday’s WERU broadcast of my comments on “news deserts” and their impact on democracy, wrote to ask:
“Are you planning to write about how citizens aren't motivated to run for office due to lack of knowledge of the local issues. An extension of that would be why aren't they informed?”
The pandemic opened local democracy to a new order of transparency. On MDI, Bar Harbor led the way, opening multiple channels for citizens to participate - from Spectrum Cable, to Town Hall Streams and the ubiquitous Zoom Room. There were multiple ways to access public meetings.
No one likes to be put under a microscope, but that’s the pact of public service - the public business must be conducted in public.
With the pandemic on the wane, several town boards have pulled back from that commitment, and slunk into to the darkness of the past. Most notably, Jamie Thurlow, chair of the select board in Tremont, clearly still smarting from a year of upheaval from a citizens uprising in his genteel meetings, has stopped Zoomcasting of select board meetings, forcing residents to come into the town office building to participate, just as they did 200 years ago.
In Southwest Harbor, Chair George Jellison held a special board meeting this week at 1 p.m. in the afternoon to approve funding of designs for a new town garage - two years after voters rejected a $1.9 million proposal. This was an odd way to win support - in virtual secrecy with very little public input.
The Zoom meetings during the pandemic was a galvanizing medium. It allowed participating by residents fearful of contagion, but more importantly, not having to drive 20 minutes through Maine’s brutal winters. It allowed summer residents to participate.
Greater participation is healthy for town governance. Jamie Thurlow and George Jellison, trust citizens participation!
Buskers of the world, unite! Bar Harbor offering more live music
BAR HARBOR - City Councilman Matt Hochman and I share a passion: We are champions of paid opportunities for musicians, who too often are exploited and abused in society.
The town council approved special amusement permits Tuesday night for the Lompoc Cafe on Rodick Street and the Travelin’ Lobster on Rt. 102, and heard concern expressed by a neighbor about late night music from the Lompoc, which had six complaints since 2016, Town Manager Kevin Sutherland reported.
Hochman assured the neighbor that Bar Harbor has a solid noise ordinance to assuage her concerns.
Police Chief Jim Willis told the QSJ that noise from live music is not a big problem in town because the ordinance is specific on how to remedy a problem. “And we use a noise meter which is calibrated,” he said.
In his nine years, he said there has never been a permit revoked.
It’s been two long pandemic years since I played at the weekly Open Mic at the Tailgate on Cottage Street. For those of us who had an errant childhood much to the chagrin of our parents, jamming to the thump of a bass pedal and the hard plucking of a skilled bassist is sheer bliss.
I dodged Bar Harbor’s Finest the last two seasons in the village parks, hiding my tip jar from plain sight when a man in blue was in my sight. Busking, the practice of playing music for tips in public places, is illegal in town, although humans have been doing this dating back to Antiquity.
Bar Harbor’s ordinance is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment. Similar cases have been upheld in the courts across the country. Cities like Portland grant permits and stipulates conditions like not blocking emergency egress.
But who wants to be a test case? Not moi.
The good news is that I will be playing this summer at the Ivy Manor Inn, which has a great outdoor space. I start Wednesday at 2.
TRIBUTE: Dolores Bierman Barmat
1928 - 2022
Dolores Bierman Barmat
1928 - 2022
MOUNT DESERT - Dolores (Bierman) Barmat, 93, died May 18 at her home in Maryland, surrounded by her four daughters. She was born July 4, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Stella (Strahl) Bierman and Morris Bierman.
Dolores was a singular and exceptional woman, whose characteristic wit charmed all those who knew her. Her sarcastic quips were equally bestowed on everyone around her – from her closest friends and family to the clerk at her local grocery store. Her sharp mind persevered until the very end. Dolores was a natural saleswoman; she worked in her mother’s shop in Brighton Beach, New York as a young woman, found easy success at various high-end retailers including I.Magnin and Lily Rubin during her career, and later became a mainstay at her daughter’s store in Great Falls, Virginia. Her true passion was raising her children and grandchildren whom she fiercely loved (despite sarcastic quips to the contrary). Dolores and her husband Melvin met at Hofstra University; Dolores attending as the first collegiate woman in her family, Melvin returning from service in WWII. Throughout their 62-year marriage they lived in New Jersey and Maryland, following Melvin’s career in telecommunications and building and sharing their lives. Dolores and Melvin’s home in Bethesda, Maryland where they lived for 44 years had a gravitational pull, known for large gatherings of family and friends at holidays. Dolores loved to travel; she and Melvin went to many far-flung destinations for work and pleasure, and eventually took their children and grandchildren back to their favorite places – London, Italy, Santa Fe, the Caribbean, and most of all, to their home in Mount Desert, Maine, where their family spent joyful and memorable summers together. Dolores was a born storyteller, who shared her life, experiences, and advice with her children, grandchildren, family, and friends. She will be sorely missed by all of those who knew, loved, and revered her.
Dolores’s husband Melvin Barmat passed away in 2012 in Mount Desert.
Dolores is survived by her four daughters, Joan Barmat, Alison Barmat, Betsy Stires and husband Mark, and Hope Hill and husband Peter; seven grandchildren, Samantha Altmann and husband Eben, Meredith Steinfels and husband Trevor, Ethan Steinfels and wife Monisha, Nathan Stires and wife Caroline, Victoria Steel and husband Tyler, Sarah Hill-Yeterian and husband Benjamin, and Nicholas Hill; and four great-grandchildren, Milo Moorman, Mabel Altmann, August Altmann, and Eleanor Stires.
Funeral services will be held 10:00AM, Monday, May 23 at Jordan-Fernald, 1139 Main Street, Mount Desert with Rabbi Siemers. Interment will be at Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert immediately following the service. Shiva will take place in Baltimore, Maryland on May 24th and 25th at 110 East Lake Avenue.
In lieu of flowers, contributions in Dolores’s memory may be made to K.U.R.E (Kids’ Uveitis Research and Education), at https://secure.jhu.edu/form/wilmer on the drop-down menu or donate by phone at (410) 955-2020.
Condolences may be expressed at www.jordanfernald.com