Portland apes Bar Harbor cruise ship cap; town manager to unveil his 'compromise' plan

Other news: Caterer leases Sips; SWH gets new harbor master; Will MRC survive Zero Wasters, PFAS?

BAR HARBOR, July 30, 2022 - The above map illustrates the value of Bar Harbor to the cruise ship industry. It is one of nine East Coast routes offered by Seabourn Cruises, the luxury brand of the Carnival Corporation.

Seabourn stated its ships “call on popular Canadian ports like Halifax and Quebec City and highlight New England attractions such as the mansions of Newport or Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor. Passengers see rugged coastlines guarded by lighthouses, quaint villages and fishing boats bobbing in picturesque harbors.

Bar Harbor is in all nine packages. Portland is not in any.

Perhaps that’s why the industry has ignored the recent move by Portland activists to copy the citizens petition in Bar Harbor capping cruise ships visitors to 1,000 per day.

That Portland is not in the sights of the industry may effect a quicker outcome than in Bar Harbor, the Portland Press Herald reported this week.

The Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is using Bar Harbor petitioner Charles Sidman’s model for its petition filed in Portland which has been certified as having enough valid signatures to be put on the ballot, a move the City Council is expected to confirm on Aug. 8.

Portland officials said they haven’t heard anyone raise constitutional issues about the cruise ship referendum in the city, as they have in Bar Harbor, where council members Matt Hochman and Jeff Dobbs have begun an effort to prevent the petition from appearing on the ballot, taking the cue from industry lawyers.

The Press Herald also reported Bar Harbor Town Manager Kevin Sutherland has worked out a “compromise” with the industry which he will present to the council Tuesday. The proposal would limit the number of passengers visiting Bar Harbor to around 4,000 a day in the fall, the Press Herald reported. Sutherland said that would help cut down on the influx while averting the threat of a lawsuit, the Press Herald reported. (Some have reported the number is 3,850)

Sutherland seemed driven to avoid a lawsuit at all cost, even if it means giving the industry what it wants.

The 4,000 number is not even halfway between the current 5,500 a day cap and the council’s own 2,500/day plan, which was scuttled after the council cowered under the threat of lawsuits from the industry.

The work on the plan last year was one of best moments of this council, truly a collaborative and thoughtful effort, including several highly visible workshops.

Council chair Val Peacock, then just a freshman member, took the lead, drawing up what I later dubbed the Val Peacock Plan, which to this day is the best option for Bar Harbor because it carved out “non cruise ship days” so residents dared to come into town, shop at Hannaford’s, grab a seat at the counter at Jordan’s and perhaps even order a baked stuffed lobster (my favorite) at the West Street Cafe.

The Peacock Plan is as follows:

We won’t know until Tuesday whether Sutherland’s compromise includes non ship days. The citizens petition does not.

Assuming the Sutherland plan has the same non-ship days as the Peacock plan, then it would allow 152,000 visitors in the aggregate for September and October, as opposed to the 72,600 in the Peacock plan and 61,000 in the Sidman Plan for September and October.

Without those days, the number would balloon to 244,000 - a non starter and certain to be crushed by the petition in November.

Sutherland and Sidman have a strained relationship, as the QSJ reported last week. Sutherland told the Press Herald the Sidman’s proposal will create problems, particularly since it puts enforcement in the hands of the town’s harbor master or code enforcement officer. Neither office has any experience policing large crowds of people to make sure that visitor limits are not exceeded, he said.

“Regardless of whether or not it’s invalid or illegal, it’s really bad policy,” Sutherland said. “How would we enforce this? It would require additional people.”

Sutherland has shown repeatedly through his actions and words that his biggest concern is how much work he and the town staff have to bear, instead of tackling the question of what is best for the town and its citizenry.

In 2013, Ocean Properties got approval to build the entire West Street complex, which included multiple hotels, restaurants, tenders to ferry passengers from the ships and whale watch and other daily excursions. It has millions of dollars at stake.

The Press Herald reported the cruise industry itself had been under fire for years for dumping garbage and sewage at sea and for promoting over-tourism in parts of the world. Four years ago, the paper ran a series raising questions about how much of an economic impact it really has in Maine written by the award winning Colin Woodard.

SWH caterer leases Sips Cafe space

Huyen Tran mixes the filling for shrimp and pork dumplings. PHOTO BY LIZ GRAVES for the Islander

SOUTHWEST HARBOR — Asked what she intended to do with the space she is leasing starting Aug. 1 which housed the former Sips Cafe, Huyen Tran said, “I don’t know. I’m too busy to think about it now. I’ll think about it over the winter.”

Asked what motivated her to lease the space, she said, “It was an impulse.”

In Huyen Tran’s impulse, we trust - that she will bring an exciting culinary experience to round out the offerings on the Quietside, which has become MDI’s top destination for diverse dining.

The Quietside has the most and best waterfront restaurants on MDI - Nor’Easter Lobster Pound, Asticou Inn and Abel’s Lobster Pound in Mount Desert; Claremont Hotel, Beal’s Lobster Pier and the Upper Deck in Southwest Harbor, Thurston’s Lobster Pound and Seafood Ketch in Bass Harbor.

There is no finer dining on MDI than the Claremont, Red Sky and Rogue cafes.

And then is the cluster of rooms in the village of Southwest Harbor - Hearth and Harbor with its brick oven pizzas, Drydock Cafe and Next Level Bar and Grill.

How Huyen Tran will fit into this mix is unknown. Sips was more than just a restaurant. It was the Quietside’s heartbeat which kept the community intact, welcoming and engaged, especially in winter.

“I know that,” she said when reminded of Sips’ legacy before she ducked back inside her commercial kitchen on Clark Point Road, a five-minute walk from Sips, where she has operated a catering business the last six years.

We talked about her Vietnamese and French influences. “And Chinese,” she said. “I’m Chinese Vietnamese.”

Liz Graves wrote an extensive profile in 2017 for the Islander of Huyen Tran, who came to this country as a “boat people” refugee, on how food became central to her life. https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/living/living-food/huyen-tran-recalls-odyssey-vietnam-u-s/

Clark Point Catering was born out of fundraising projects for the local school and nonprofits. Before her first official job, a nonprofit fundraiser event, had ended, she had several others booked.

She, like many other seasonal businesses, faces the challenge of a worker shortage, which was blamed for Sips’ eventual demise.

But by November, when she can come up for air, the creative mind will stir. Here is hoping for great beginnings in 2023. In Huyen Tran we trust.

Zero Waste, PFAS big head winds for MRC’s Hampden plant

HAMPDEN - The City of Boston will launch an initiative next week which could have implications for the 115 towns of the Municipal Review Committee and its steadfast commitment to a 10-year-old concept for solid waste disposal.

Boston will begin to collect food waste door-to-door in a citywide composting initiative in a partnership with Portland-based Garbage to Garden and Boston-based Save That Stuff.

What’s collected will be sent to a site in West Bridgewater, Mass., to be turned into compost that will be made available to Boston gardens, parks and schools, and sent to a pre-processing facility for codigestion to generate energy.

Composting at this scale, if successful, could reduce trash which otherwise would go to landfills and incinerators which has been the case for MRC towns the last 26 months because its “state-of-the-art” solid waste disposal plant in Hampden failed spectacularly.

Yet the MRC wants to reprise that failed effort in its exact form and announced this week it has found a financial partner, Revere Capital Advisors in New York which has been given a two-month exclusivity to negotiate ownership and operating rights to the plant.

What does Revere know that we don’t?

Here is what we know:

A decade ago the Municipal Review Committee, which was started about 30 years ago to guard the interest of its member towns against the incinerator in Orrington, began to explore technologies which would free it of its dependence on the incinerator.

Around the same time “single sort” became the mantra of the day, much as Zero Waste has captured the imagination of environmentalists today. The promise of the MRC plant here was, “ Don’t worry about your garbage. Just throw all of it into a single bin, and we’ll sort it out.”

That lasted six months in early 2020, when the MRC Hampden plant collapsed on the weight of its own enormous overhead.

Since then, Zero Waste initiatives have seized the day.

Portland-based organics recycling service Garbage to Garden won the bid to manage Boston’s ambitious composting project.

“It is our hope that other communities begin to realize that the savings they would experience on tipping fees through diverting the roughly one-third to one-half of household waste that is compostable could be used to fund and jump start more such organics curbside collection programs,” said Marketing Director Annika Schmidt in an email to the local NBC affiliate.

Schmidt said the company hopes that if the scale of Boston’s program goes according to plan, it could serve as an important model for others.

“While we make every effort to keep our program accessible to all residents regardless of income through our volunteer and referral programs, the most effective approach to reach all communities would be through city- or town-wide curbside programs with municipally supported marketing and educational outreach,” she added.

Problem is the MRC’s agreement with its towns which lasts until 2033 strictly prohibits any composting effort by municipalities to ensure the MRC gets the highest tonnage irrespective of the damage to the environment. It wants as much garbage as it can get to sustain its fees by tonnage received.

Except that a private residential service, or a non-profit effort under A Climate to Thrive, may not operate under the municipality gag.

I asked GtoG whether it would service Coastal Maine. A senior executive said the demand is so great that it has decided to focus on the region between Portland and Boston for now.

But there are other companies.

Andy Brooks, CEO of Bootstrap Compost, which offers residential and commercial food scrap pickup service throughout New England, said his company had planned to participate in previous iterations of the Boston program, but those plans were partly derailed by the pandemic.

Black Earth Compost, which previously won a contract to service the city’s Project Oscar bins, said it bid on this new collection contract but was not selected.

At its outset, the Boston pilot will be capable of serving buildings with seven or fewer units. Many Boston Housing Authority properties fall into these parameters, Theresa Savarese, Boston’s Zero Waste manager, said. 

The pilot will not be restricted to particular sections of the city, though the city will work to encourage environmental justice communities to participate, Savarese said. Public Works recognizes a lack of route density may be an initial challenge, but she anticipates this can be solved as marketing and outreach efforts increase interest in the program.

All this simply suggests that a tsunami is headed toward the MRC as it prosecutes an old concept that never was accepted by the marketplace. It should be the leader in composting instead of regurgitating failed concepts.

But it has yet to meet its most threatening thundercloud on the horizon, PFAS, the “forever chemical.”

Revere executives gave facile and vague answers at the MRC quarterly meeting Wednesday when asked about PFAS.

They expressed confidence that they would successfully mitigate the PFAS problem once they have the plant restarted and running. They offered no details.

How would they do that when they hose down all the trash and produce enormous amount of waste water?

The QSJ emailed chief operating office Nigel Ekern, but he did not reply. Nor did Michael Carroll, executive director of the MRC.

The Boston Globe reported this month that 200 neighbors of an organic composting facility in Westminster, Mass., just north of Worcester, had their water sources contaminated by PFAS. It was the largest of such PFAS contamination in Massachusetts.

Obviously, Revere Capital Advisors has calculated these risks and is prepared to move forward.

Coast Guard SWH Chief is new harbor master

Jarrod Kushla

SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Out of the embers of a bad situation, the town has landed on a trifecta, or so it appears.

Jarrod Kushla is the new harbor master. He is the commanding officer of the Coast Guard station here.

He knows the water.

He has a law enforcement background.

And he is local (Somesville).

He is taking advantage of his 20-year military pension at exactly the same time as the town’s vacancy.

Kushla starts in November, and there is a lot o do.

It’s unclear whether he accepted the requirement of a seven-day week in the summer which was the issue that prompted Oliver Curry to resign as harbor master in May. The town hasn’t had a harbor master during the summer for two years.

COA grad seeks to fill Planning Board seat

Calistra Martinez

BAR HARBOR - College of the Atlantic continues to spread its influence on town government which is a good thing.

Calistra Martinez, a June graduate, is seeking appointment for the seat vacated by chairman Tom St. Germain. That might seem like a steep climb until you delve into St. Germain’s record, which includes trying to develop a hotel on Cottage Street while as the sitting chair.

So why not? Bring on the innocent, the ethically correct, the morally centered. The town could use more of their unvarnished perspective. (Martinez is a member of the comprehensive plan committee).

Report: Private equity emasculates fishing families in New Bedford

SOMESVILLE - New Bedford has been the No. 1 commercial fishing port in the United States the last 20 years. In 2021 it hauled in $451 million worth of fish.

But less and less of it is actually going to the fishers and their families.

A quiet shift is remaking the city and the industry that sustains it, realizing local fishermen’s deepest fears of losing control over their livelihood. Blue Harvest and other companies linked to private equity firms have dramatically changed the economics in their favor against the fishers.

It’s a cautionary tale for Maine as the Mills Adminstration has worked hard on behalf of foreign investors and corporate entities such as Cooke Aqua Farms against the interest of the state’s traditional fishers who have operated as generational small business ownersd.

“As already harsh working conditions have deteriorated, the new group of owners has depressed income by pushing expenses onto fishermen,” according to an investigation by ProPublica and The New Bedford Light. “Blue Harvest has also benefited from lax antitrust rules governing how much fish it can catch.Since it was founded in 2015, Blue Harvest has been acquiring vessels, fishing permits and processing facilities up and down the East Coast. It started with the self-proclaimed goal of “dominance” over the scallop industry. It has expanded into groundfish, tuna and swordfish, as well as becoming a government contractor, winning a $16.6 million contract from the U.S. Department of Agriculture this past February to supply food assistance programs. The acquisitions are backed by $600 million in capital from Bregal Partners, a Manhattan-based private equity firm. Bregal is an arm of a firm owned by a Dutch billionaire family, who are best known for their multinational clothing company, which maintains a steady track record of environmental philanthropy and low-wage labor around the globe.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/fishing-new-bedford-private-equity

Weekly protests at Leonard Leo’s NEH abode

NORTHEAST HARBOR - The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, to whom Donald Trump outsourced the nomination of all federal judges, is not having a quiet summer. Every week, and sometimes several times a week, protestors with signs have stationed themselves at 46 Shore Road asking cars to honk their horns. Police have been called numerous times. Members of the Fleet next door have had to walk past the protestors to reach the yacht club parking lot.

Lincoln’s Log

SOMESVILLE - Acadia Senior College reached out and asked me to teach a course which I agreed to do called How I Got That Story.

The zoom class starts Sept. 7 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. and runs five weeks.

Each week, the class will deconstruct a story from The Quietside Journal, and in the process, students will learn how to get information, conduct interviews, and write a coherent article. Ethics, legal boundaries, freedom of the press, and the state of journalism will be discussed. During this course, students will also get a full view of MDI's recent history and its challenges from the perspective of an investigative reporter.

ANP corrects QSJ photo

The Park Service forwarded the following after the QSJ published a snarky comment about the lack of images of non-whites in promotions of Acadia National Park. Thanks for the clarification!