MIDWEEK SPECIAL: While Bar Harbor proclaims, dithers, Ellsworth acts
OTHERS NEWS: A local hero emerges to solve bottle recycling challenge
ELLSWORTH, Nov. 21, 2023 - “We don’t want to be Bar Harbor.”
That refrain is common on MDI, expressed in public meetings in Tremont, Southwest Harbor and Mount Desert.
Now comes Ellsworth, the hard-scrabble gateway to Acadia National Park to show a sense of urgency about its housing crisis.
The QSJ wrote on Oct. 29 on how Ellsworth was starting to rival Bar Harbor for the number of listings on AirBnB.
The City Council, with two new members who were elected earlier this month on a promise to make affordable housing its top priority, wasted little time when it adopted four amendments Monday to the land-use ordinance. They were the final say and required no town meeting approval. Two amendments were for changes to comply with the state law LD 2003 for high density zoning.
Another barred any use of the state’s new statute to moderate zoning density by placing a 10-year ban on short-term vacation rentals to be used in any expansion of accessory dwellings.
It also placed a cap of 30 occupants on any new bed-and-breakfast inns, as opposed to Bar Harbor’s allowing its former Planning board chairman to construct a 44-room hotel on a permit for B&Bs, with no such cap.
Bar Harbor Code Enforcement Officer Angela Chamberlain confirmed there is no occupancy cap for the hotel being constructed at 77 Cottage Street by Tom St. Germain, the former PB chair, and Stephen Coston, a former Town Council member.
They could stuff four or more persons to a room as far at the town is concerned. Who’s to know whether that “hotel” could have 150 or more occupants during high season?
These are the uncomfortable subjects that Bar Harbor’s officialdom prefer not to excavate.
Best to deal with the small stuff as evident by Tuesday night’s council meeting - the first in five weeks - during which not a single word was uttered about its most pressing challenge - the housing crisis. The council took up items like a proclamation to support Lewiston, three weeks after every other government entity did it. Never to let a hot mic go to waste, councilor Matt Hochman felt compelled to fill the air with a predictable, trite pronouncement without any substance.
Read the ProPublica article posted below for true substance about Lewiston.
The meeting ended with 90 minutes left on the clock, and no eagerness to re-engage in the topic of a proposed tourism management plan.
The human vacuum cleaner Carrie Jones had her usual, exhaustive report of the council meeting.
The Ellsworth council meeting was a professional, efficient confab managing the city’s urgent challenges.
The two new councilors, Patrick Lyons and Nancy Smith were the top vote-getters Nov. 7 for two seats on the seven-seat council. Both made their impact on the agenda felt immediately.
Smith is the chief executive of nonprofit organization Grow Smart Maine. Lyons is partner at Eaton Peabody, which shows not all lawyers there are created equally.
Lyons has served on the board of Ellsworth-based Healthy Acadia since 2017 and since 2020 was been a member of the Planning Board. Smith, who was a state representative for eight years in Monmouth, serves on the city’s comprehensive plan steering committee.
LOCAL HERO: Katherine Emery, steward of Sargeant Drive
MOUNT DESERT - Could a town dump have a champion? Or a guardian angel?
Technically the facility on Sargeant Drive is a transfer station, except that some items were not transferring very well this past summer.
For those of us devotees of recycling, they were dreadful experiences each time we went and found no room in the bin for our bottles and cans.
The Boy Scouts who volunteered for years to empty the bin were no longer availing.
What’s a public works director to do?
Enter Katherine Emery as the deus ex machina of our multi-act play. She’s also part of the leadership team of the Mount Desert School PTO.
PW Director Brian Henkel, who also happened to be chair of the school board, was familiar with all the volunteering work by the PTO to raise grant money for teachers at Mount Desert School. She and Emery connected just before the start of school.
He didn’t have to ask Emery twice.
Act 1: Four hours for $40
Using bags provide by the town, Emery was able to corral a volunteer truck owner and haul 20 bags of cans and bottles to the redemption center behind the market in Trenton.
“From door to door it was four hours and we left with $40, probably wouldn't even cover much gas on his truck let alone our time,” Emery said,
“This tells me our bottle bill is ancient and hasn't been updated. There's a reason that all of the redeemable centers have closed.
“We would empty that container and it would fill up in days. And it was me and one other woman coming over and filling 20 to 30 bags at a time and I very soon realized it was way too much for me to handle.
“School hadn't even started. We have a new principal. There are a lot of things that need to happen in the course of the school year for the school to be able to engage and have service learning projects be part of their curriculum. None of those things were in place.
Act 2: Volunteerism is contagious
As more parents joined the effort, Transfer station users began to to notice the volunteers.
“They said, oh my God, we've been wanting this to happen for so long. Do you need help?” Emery recalled. “So I started to get community members who would come.”
“There's a really, really lovely couple named Jim and Sally Black, and as it turns out, Jim was my husband's softball coach when he was a little boy. And they both went to MDS as high school students when it was a high school too.
“One day they pulled up and they have this beautiful white truck and Jim goes, you need some help? And I said, I need a truck. And then Sally popped out of the truck and said, we have a truck, what do you need?
“And so I call if I need a trailer or a truck, he and Sally would come meet me once in the mornings, and we would take everything over to Hannaford. And they said we love the school. We love our community.”
ACT 3: Enter Clynk from Stage left
Emery was using Clynk bags because that was what she used at home.
“So I thought that we should do Clynk because it's a natural drop-off and the school already had a clink account internally.
“I wrote to Clynk and asked for help, and I have to say that they're a pretty phenomenal organization. I have not met a person who wasn't receptive, responsive, eager to figure out a solution with us.”
Emery was able to convince Clynk to come to Sargeant Drive once a month. A shed was procured to house the bags.
Volunteers still empty the bin’s content into bags, but they don’t have to be trucked to the bin at Hannaford’s in Bar Harbor.
During the summer the bin would fill up in days. “Right now it's filled up maybe every month,” Emery said.
So the true test will come next summer. In the meantime, volunteers and donors may leave their information at the school in Northeast Harbor.
EPILOGUE
Select member Martha Dudman said Emery is a “marvelous” example of the best of volunteerism and community service.
Her husband grew up in Somesville. The couple moved from San Francisco to Somesville during the pandemic year of 2020. They have an eighth grade daughter in Mount Desert School.
Emery is a photographer. Her website features examples of her work and her profile:
“I have worked in many different jobs over the years and every one of them has influenced the work I do today: I had a paper route, I mowed lawns. I sold PVC piping and made keys at the local hardware store. I worked in a library. I worked at the university post office. I peeled carrots in the cafeteria in the mornings before classes. I babysat, I waited tables. I was a dishwasher. I taught French in Mississippi through Teach for America. I was an assistant-editor in a publishing company. I taught swim classes. I answered phones for a mail order party favor company. I was a nanny. I managed animators creating a feature-length animation (think Bugs). I worked with a former National Geographic photographer on a global project involving data visualization and human connection. I oversaw a million dollar grant and developed content for engineering educators in Silicon Valley. I tutored students in creative writing.
“I am grateful for these opportunities, as they have shaped how I see and how I move in this world.”
The transfer station on Sargeant Drive is now “Emery Way.”
How a Maine Businessman Made the AR-15 Into America’s Best-Selling Rifle
Republished from ProPublica
By James Bandler and Doris Burke
Nov. 21, 2023
Outside Healy Chapel on the campus of Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, the American flag swayed at half-staff. Inside, candles flickered, and the dying autumn light filtered softly through stained glass. A nursing student sobbed as a small group of mourners read aloud the names of the 18 people slaughtered with an assault-style rifle in late October at a bowling alley and a restaurant up the road in Lewiston. The college had shut down for two days as police sought the killer, whose body was found in the woods after he turned a gun on himself.
Saint Joseph’s is sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy, a 192-year-old society of nuns that has accused the firearms industry of “profiting from these killings.” Toward the end of the vigil, a graduate assistant asked the mourners to pray for political leaders.
“Give them insight, wisdom and courage,” she implored, “to address the epidemic of gun violence.”
Several months earlier on the same campus, as fog enveloped Sebago Lake and rain poured down in sheets, a larger crowd celebrated the life of a man who did as much as anyone to make assault-style rifles — like those used in Lewiston and other massacres — ubiquitous in America. After cocktails and crudites, they bid farewell to one of Maine’s own, Richard E. Dyke.
As a digital photo tribute flashed images from his life, family members, friends and former employees praised Dyke’s kindness and generosity. Beside a framed proclamation by Maine’s state Legislature declaring that Dyke would be “long remembered and sadly missed,” they recounted his rise from mill-town poverty to multimillionaire philanthropist and friend of powerful politicians.
“When he walked into a room, it became his room,” a former colleague told the packed hall. “It’s difficult to drive around Maine and not see something that Dick touched. … He touched thousands of people’s lives.”
What the heartfelt tributes to Dyke that day omitted were the human costs of the industry that allowed him to be so generous — costs that the fellow residents of his beloved home state would soon be the latest to bear.
When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.
Series: Under the Gun: How Gun Violence Is Impacting the Nation
As America emerged from the pandemic, communities continued to experience a rising tide of gun violence. School shootings and the rate of children and teens killed by gunfire both reached all-time highs since at least 1999. ProPublica’s coverage of gun violence reveals how first responders, policymakers and those directly affected are coping with the bloodshed.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
CLARICATION: Texas State University mystery explained
MOUNT DESERT - Well, this was embarrassing. How was I to know that the reason both the previous finance director here and the new one named earlier this month attended the same Texas university was because THEY ARE MARRIED?
An acquaintance sent me the above photo but not before having a hearty guffaw at my expense.
I wrote about Mae Wyler being named the new finance director in Mount Desert Nov. 4, replacing Jay Wight who become the controller at MDI Bio Labs. They both attended Texas State University. I marveled at the coincidence in the opening paragraph (scroll to the third article).
The QSJ’s skills at unearthing public information have not transferred well over to the private sector.
Keep shining light into the corners and holding both MDI’s elected and self-important to account.
"The human vacuum cleaner Carrie Jones had her usual, exhaustive report of the council meeting."
That's just nasty.
It's also specious rhetoric.
In her 'Bar Harbor Story' Carrie Jones covers her beat. Exhaustively. And we all benefit by her diligence.
Bar Harbor Story and The QuietSide Journal fill very different needs and different niches.
We are extraordinarily lucky to have both.