Report of April 24, 2021
Quietside State Rep harvests industry donations, pushes aquaculture agenda
SOMESVILLE - The Quietside’s two state representatives are polar opposites when it comes to regulating the aquaculture industry.
One is trying to toughen regulations. The other is fighting those efforts.
One of them is taking money from the industry. Guess which one?
State Rep. Genevieve McDonald, a Stonington lobsterwoman who represents Southwest Harbor and Tremont, received donations from the owners of Acadia Aquafarm, which is seeking a permit from the state to operate a 68-acre mussel farm in Frenchman Bay, according to filings from the 2020 campaign.
She also received contributions from a lobbyist, the Maine Aquaculture Association, and the operator of a mussel farm in Casco Bay, Matthew Moretti. Both the owners of Acadia Aquafarm and Moretti are board members of the lobbying group.
McDonald sits on the Joint Standing Committee on Marine Resources and worked against proposed legislation which called for tougher regulation of the aquaculture industry last week. QSJ could not find another member who took money from the industry. Most of the members received money from the Maine Clean Elections Fund, which forbids private donations.
Asked why she would take money from non constituents out of her district, McDonald replied, “Many of the bills we hear in the Legislature effect Mainers across the state, not just in a specific district. I remain a steadfast supporter of small businesses practicing sustainable aquaculture and appreciate the support I received from growers who share my values.”
QSJ asked if she would support the applications for fish farms in the middle of Frenchman Bay, she replied: “I have not received an invitation or had the opportunity to meet with American Aquafarms. I am concerned an operation of that size would displace existing users and plan to attend the public hearings that will be held as part of the lease application process.”
The Maine Department of Marine Resources is the permitting agency. There are two Frenchman Bay applications under consideration by DMR - one for a 68-acre oyster farm by Acadia Aquafarms, and one for two 60-acre salmon farm by Norwegian investors called American Aquafarms. Both would be within view from Acadia National Park.
McDonald raised questions only about the salmon farm.
The most curious donation came from Hannah Pingree, former speaker of the House who was named by Gov. Janet Mills to lead the Office of Policy Innovation and the Future in 2019. She is the daughter of U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree. Mills is a big proponent of aquaculture for Maine.
QSJ asked Pingree:
“Why would a state employee make such a contribution to a state legislator in Stonington? Did you make contributions to other state legislators? Are you a supporter of the aquaculture industry?
“Do you support American Aquafarms's application to build salmon farms in the middle of Frenchman Bay?”
Pingree’s reply:
“I have no opinion (or real knowledge) of that project. I live in Rep. McDonald’s district and used to be the Democratic state representative in the same district so I am supportive of her work broadly and for our island communities on a variety of issues. As the former speaker of the house, I stay politically engaged and supportive of state and national issues and candidates that matter to me outside of my state work.
“On aquaculture, I am supportive. I’ve got small oyster and kelp growers in my island community and I am very supportive of their farms and think it’s an exciting industry for our state. In my work on climate, we know that diversification of our fisheries and more local protein sources is important. And we also know that kelp and seaweed sequester a lot of carbon. So yes, aquaculture is a good thing, if done right, for our economy and environment and our communities.” Pingree lives on North Haven.
Meanwhile, State Rep. Lynne Williams, D-135 (Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Lamoine) is helping Friends of Frenchman Bay to oppose permitting a salmon fish farm in Frenchman Bay being sought by American Aquafarms.
Williams was co-sponsor of a bill which would require aquaculture leases to revert to the state after their expiration and have all transfers or renewals of leases to demonstrate compliance with current standards.
One of the more controversial pieces of the bill was removing the Natural Resources Protection Act and site location development exemptions for any leases larger than 5 acres. Another portion of the bill would limit leases to 50 acres and stop someone from holding ownership in more than 10 leases or a total of more than 100 acres.
The bill did not make it out of committee this week, partly because of McDonald’s efforts.
McDonald also has a side hustle as consultant for the private wind industry to try and convert her fellow lobster fishermen who have been hostile to plans to build off-shire wind turbines.
The donations from the aquaculture industry are small - hundreds of dollars. But they enabled McDonald to pay off her campaign marketing cost. You may see her filing here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VvDMobHPWQrinENEvWbQ_R3ACo5jyK67?usp=sharing
Correction: In an earlier version McDonald confused American Aquafarms with Acadia Aquaframs, which contributed to her campaign. QSJ had asked her whether she would support fish farms in Frenchman Bay
Ex-MDI School superintendent Liebow: Current structure is ‘crazy’
SOMESVILLE - You can take the boy out of the island but you can’t take the island out of the boy.
QSJ reached former MDI Superintendent Rob Liebow during Maine’s school vacation week, thinking he might be in Florida, or the Bahamas, or some such hot spot. Instead he called back from Northeast Harbor, where he has spent his spring vacation for years helping to captain the mail boat to the Cranberry Isles.
“This has always been home to me,” said the man who led MDI’s schools from 2008 to 2012 when he left for the head job in Rockport, Mass.
QSJ caught up with him because he was in charge when MDI adopted its current Alternative Organizational Structure, which some school committee members would like to modify because “it’s burning out our administrators, “ said one committee member.
Opponents of efforts to streamline the current structure have pointed to Liebow as someone who was able to manage the AOS system without fuss. But Liebow said that was an inaccurate impression.
“The system is crazy,” he told QSJ in a wide-ranging interview during which he used that characterization several times. Liebow was surprisingly candid and loquacious.
“That's not the reason I left, but it would have killed anybody. It's six nights a week.
“Just in the high school, you have the high school board, you have the board of trustees … you have the overall AOS board and then you have a Trenton school board and you have a Southwest Harbor, a Mount Desert, a Bar Harbor, a Tremont, a Swans a Frenchboro, a Cranberry. So that's 11, 12, every two weeks, all year round, all re-inventing the same issues over and over and over again. And they're all separate employers, which to me is crazy.”
A subcommittee recommended two changes to the school board last week - a centralized budget and centralized hiring and firing, but giving the towns a strong voice in the process.
Liebow’s opinions won’t sit well with teachers.
“If you had like a rogue teacher that was causing unrest, you could reassign him … ‘You're going to fifth grade in Bar Harbor, dude. You're not going to destroy this place. I'm reassigning you.’
“And they could transfer easy. They wouldn't have to go to the bottom of the hiring.”
As opposed to the current system. “They're all separate units. So if you were working in Southwest, it would not be in your best interest to go to Mount Desert because you'd be at the bottom of the totem pole. And therefore if times got tough and they had to cut somebody or the enrollment dropped, you'd be the first person cut. So we'd be stupid to do that.
“Southwest Harbor would have its own board, but they'd be the same people who were on the big board, they would just sort of splinter off to have one meeting a month or whatever when necessary. And the principal would advertise for a staff member interview and hire. And that little local board would say, yes, we approve. And then hand it up to the bigger board to rubber stamp it.
“But the person would be a central unit employee with central insurance and the same pecking order that everybody else has. So that it would be much smoother, but you still have some local control. You decide locally who your principal is.
“When it comes to firing the person ... I'm not sure they've talked about the way out the door. The way in the door is one thing, the way out the door is one question they'd have to wrestle with, but they could do that the same way the local group could say, hey, we don't want this principal anymore. And maybe they get transferred by the big superintendent, transfers them to a place where there are a better fit. Well right now you can't do that.
On Payroll:
“One huge payroll. Yep. Yep. Because you have one contract. They're all employees of that bigger unit. Just the hiring of them was local, but their payroll is just one big operation. So that central office doesn't need three and four different people handling different payrolls. And there may now even be different days of the week. And it's just crazy, you know?
Liebow wasn’t done. On the subject of sharing teachers, he said:
“If you're a Spanish teacher in Mount Desert, you might be an 0.8. And if you're a 0.8 and you're only four days a week, well then you could be lent to the Island who then fills out the person's full employment status. But that's really messy. I'd rather have it be that you're a central employee and you get on the MailBoat two days a week and you go out to Islesford and teach Spanish and we’ll shift the schedule around at Mount Desert.
“So your Spanish classes here are at the different time, and you're just going to two different schools, not two different employer locations.
“You could even do that with a principal. There's no reason why Islesford needs to have a principal, or why Swans needs a principal. They could share … the principal of Tremont could do Swans, even though right now, I think they've got a pretty good setup because they have a teaching principal. So that works pretty good. But a Frenchboro a one day a week principal is crazy. Paid $40,000 or whatever for one day, a week or $30,000, whatever, they built into it.
“And with all this sort of remote stuff that's going on, they could do some Spanish classes out to Frenchboro. They really mastered that. I mean, we have in Massachusetts, so there's a whole new world of maybe sharing advanced kind of courses. If you have some kids on the Island that are, really accelerated in math, maybe they zoom into that classroom at Mount Desert where there's the algebra 2 class for eighth graders or whatever. So rather than that, rather than have to get on a boat, come across and wait for the next boat, they just zoom into it. Like now that's what we do down in Massachusetts. We have some kids that don't come in because of COVID. So they zoom into the classroom live stream and the teacher has some live kids there and has a bunch of zoom kids on a screen. And there's one big class and it works just as slick as can be. “
Liebow said he supports the proposed changes but that it’s going to take time to “sell” the idea to each town.
“It's going to take a while to sell it though. I mean, cause they're not going to be able to just turn it around and then... they have to find a superintendent next year. And the new person is not going to be available til the following July.”
During the interview, Liebow allowed how he, like Marc Gousse, will also retire in 2022 when he qualifies for Massachusetts’s 10-year pension.
Which led QSJ to recall in 2012, before Gousse started, that MDI hired back Howard Colter as an interim superintendent. Colter was MDI superintendent from 1992 to 2004 and left for a job in New Hampshire.
With almost 20 superintendent openings in Maine and 60 in Massachusetts, MDI will certainly be challenged to find someone willing to take on this spaghetti system. Why not name Liebow an interim superintendent and hire a deputy superintendent for one year?
What better way to introduce a new system and a new superintendent?
“I sort of grew up here. I knew what I was getting into.”
But to a superintendent candidate, “You'd say this one has its own budget, this one has its own this and its own principal and its own special ed director and its own art teacher and art teacher can't be shared between the two. I mean, it's just crazy. It's inefficient. Every town has to have its own complete report to the state. It's just crazy. It's outdated.”
QSJ will run the rest of the interview next week.
MDI school curriculum director to retire
SOMESVILLE - The head of curriculum for MDI schools has become the second senior administrator to file for retirement.
But unlike Superintendent Marc Gousse, who will likely retire after the 2022 school year, Julie Meltzer will leave at the end of this year’s session.
Kristi Ballard Losquadro, the new chair of the AOS 91 school committee, said Meltzer talked of retiring a few years ago but decided to stay on, especially during the pandemic. Meltzer could not be reached. This was school vacation week.
In 2019 she was named curriculum leader of the year for the state of Maine.
Meltzer coordinates K-12 curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, leadership coaching, mentoring and induction, certification, supervision and evaluation, and educational technology for teachers and principals in nine schools, all content areas.
She also manages federal programs and grants and coordinate partnership projects.
Losquadro said the administration will seek to replace her for next year.
Susan Collins’s keen political skills shown in Senate bill passed 94-1
SOMESVILLE - Their population makeup couldn’t be more divergent. A senator from Hawaii, the state with the highest percentage of Asian Americans, and one from the state with the fifth lowest percentage, Maine, forged an unlikely partnership this week to enable overwhelming support to strengthen federal efforts to address hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans.
The vote, 94 to 1, was an extraordinary show of bipartisanship in these times which received the support of Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, who earlier had vehemently opposed the bill, and showed the keen political skills of Susan Collins.
Watch her speech on the Senate floor and how she thanked several Democratic senators.
While Maine’s Asian American population make up only 1.3 percent of its population, Acadia National Park draws a higher percentage of Asian visitors, including foreigners.
The bill provides grants to local police departments to help them better prepare for hate crimes against Asians. Bar Harbor police and park rangers would be natural candidates to receive this training.
Look for Democrats to lean on Susan Collins for more statesmanship as they seek to pass the multi-trillion infrastructure bill. QSJ wrote several weeks ago that Collins would be sitting in a pole position to benefit Maine’s marine industries and Acadia National Park’s much needed funding to upgrade.
We can only hope.
MDI Hospital CEO: No waiting list for vaccines; flu cases disappeared
SOMESVILLE - MDI hospital reported no cases of flu this year, as in zero, nada, nil, nothing, not a single one …
Typically, the hospital receives 40 to 50 cases a year.
A generation of hospital workers can’t remember a year with not one case of the regular flu.
The reason? “Masks,” said hospital CEO Chrissi Maguire. The Covid-19 protocol effected an unlikely benefit in a very odd year - Maquire’s first as CEO and president. “People forget how bad the flu can be, and it can be fatal sometimes. The vaccine for the flu also isn’t nearly as effective as the one for Covid.”
A year ago, as the hospital headed toward the end of its fiscal year April 30, no one knew what they were facing. As a precaution, Maguire cut her budget by 20 percent. “We were cutting everything from travel expenses to supplies.”
That was followed by four months of shutting down essential services, as the hospital went into telemedicine mode. A $5 million grant from the Payroll Protection Program helped to stave off laying off of doctors. “Once you lose a doctor, they don’t come back,” Maguire said.
“And the community was incredibly generous,” as donations were one of the few revenue categories which saw an increase. “Because of that, we were able to offer free vaccines.”
By the summer, the surgery center re-opened and “we opened essential services back up.”
This year, creeping up to the end of another fiscal year, the hospital will report gross revenues declining between 10 to 15 percent, but about 3 percent above budget.
Both the hospital and the island fared well, entering the penultimate stage of the pandemic. The hospital itself reported slightly fewer than 100 positive cases (96 as of this writing) since the pandemic began. The Maine CDC, which adds residents who tested positive elsewhere, reported 79 cases of Bar Harbor residents, 20-49 cases in SWH, and 6-19 cases in Mount Desert and Tremont. The CDC does not disclose exact number for smaller Maine towns.
This week, the hospital reported it has given 8,000 vaccinations to area residents which include off-island recipients. Almost 3,000 have received a second dose. The number does not include persons under 17 which make up about 20 percent of MDI’s population, Maguire said.
In Hancock County, 45,000 doses of vaccines have been given to a population of 65,000, Maguire said.
Without the vaccines, MDI would not be in its current stable and improving situation, Maguire said.
This week, for the first time, there is no waiting list at the hospital for vaccinations.
The hospital is looking forward to a busy summer which also is its high revenue-generation period. Maguire might be able to take a breath and look forward to some normalcy.
But the pandemic is like the character Jason in the movie Friday the 13th. Just when you thought …
There was the slight spike this week of a case a day. “We’re seeing more young people - 20 to 40 years old - which is very consistent with the national trend.”
“And I worried about the current school vacation week,” she said. Schools re-open Monday. It’s anyone’s guess how many Jasons await.
Quietside zoning fights to get Zoom sessions and parking lot hearing
SOMESVILLE - The Quietside is about to get noisy. The coming agendas for various planning and zoning boards in Tremont and Mount Desert resemble a truck pull with the gnashing of gears and abundant drama.
Two of these will be on Zoom. Another will be an in-person hearing at the high school parking lot.
Tuesday (April 27) will be the smackdown in Tremont, starting at 5 p.m. when the public hearing of the application for the Acadia Wilderness Lodge for a 154-site campground will commence. The application file now contains the town’s review of storm water drainage and traffic study, and briefs filed by opposing lawyers, including one seeking a DEP permit and oversight from the Army Corps of Engineers. Also, some of the opponents have filed a brief challenging the applicant’s view that this is a small business appropriate for a residential/light commercial zone. You may view all those documents here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DmGxFrx6vStPIxAXUC-jTOOvEysz9kgv?usp=sharing
The Pointy Head Campgrounds managed to sneak in its application for permission to operate its cottages on Harbor Drive which was shut down by the town for a violation of ordinance. QSJ is betting that item will have to be rescheduled.
Meeting ID on Zoom is 899-857-7726. password Tremont
On May 3 at 6 p.m. the truck pull becomes reality when the Town of Mount Desert will conduct its business in the high school parking lot, inviting all parties to a drive-in hearing for the 7-year-old dispute over the quarry operation in Hall Quarry. QSJ will be there in his Ford Ranger.
The asphalt top is an appropriate surface for the verbal jousting over the the noise-rattling stone extraction business which was shut down by the code enforcement officer in 2016.
A third attorney for the opposition who represents a couple across Somes Sound, Hans Utsch and Julia Hazzard Merck, filed a report from an independent consultant saying the quarry owner must assure that the road meets fire and other standards. Here is the report from attorney Matthew D. Manahan:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DC5Mx8Ibwc5RK5JgNY8HD99kMMWQrwm9?usp=sharing
Finally the battle of the one-percenters in Northeast Harbor will reconvene May 11 at 5 p.m. on Zoom, assuming the Zoning Board of Appeals can muster a quorum which it has been able to do only once in the last year.
Like Lucy with the football, the appeals board has been teasing the applicant Heather Evans (Otium LLC) since last summer with promises to hear her case, only to cancel multiple meetings. The meeting in March was canceled the night before.
Evans wants to built a third house on her campus on Barnacles Way which would the envy of a prep school, next to a house owned by the scions of the W.R. Grace fortune, William and Marjorie Grace, who oppose the application. Evans is the former wife of the president of Alibaba. William Grace dialed in and sat in the Zoom room by himself for 15 minutes until QSJ told him the meeting was canceled.
Zoom address https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88975016470?pwd=UlBhbFlTTDJFeGlWWUwvRjU2OWhGQT09
Meeting ID: 889 7501 6470
Passcode: 853615