Sign pollution in Bar Harbor means it must be municipal election time
OTHER NEWS: SWH losing hope for Seawall Road repairs but opens Main Street to 2-way traffic
Sign, sign
Everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery
Breakin' my mind
- Five Man Electrical Band 1970
BAR HARBOR, May 19, 2024 - It’s appropriate that the annual municipal elections here come during mud season, when our beautiful island must endure winter’s last vengeance and as we await the arrival of black flies.
The rest of us also must endure Bar Harbor’s intemperate trench-war politics as it spills over to the common space we share as citizens of MDI.
This year, two business owners have pushed bad manners to a new level even for Bar Harbor’s low bar for good taste.
Over the next three weeks, a relentless, cognitive assault of tacky signs on both sides of Rt. 3 and Rt. 102 will greet summer residents and tourists as they drive onto the island. Those signs will follow drivers no matter where they go in Bar Harbor - from Town Hill to Norway Drive.
Most drivers will have no idea who ”NINA” or “Boland” are, only that the signs are more of the burlesque side show which has come to symbolize Bar Harbor along with its trinket shops and ice cream emporiums.
Since Wednesday, after the League of Women Voters held its vapid “candidates forum,” the QSJ fielded numerous complaints about the signs which seem to promote “NINA” and “Boland” as a team running for something.
That would be the Town Council. Nina St. Germain and Michael Boland are staunch members of the Chamber of Commerce, whose president Bo Jennings is also seeking a seat on the Warrant Committee.
This is the “Chamber slate,” with all the tone-deafness of a entitled sector which believes it can buy anything it wants in town, even if it has to hire an army of lawyers.
But some QSJ readers say they only reinforce the prevailing view that everything the tourism businesses does on MDI, they do it to excess - whether it’s cruise ship visitation, buying up year-round homes and stuffing them with their employees, overbuilding transient lodging and now defacing the beauty of our island with graffiti on virtually every public space and some commercial properties owned by like-minded business friends.
One reader and prominent citizen said the signs are so ubiquitous he believes they are creating unsafe driving distractions. “They are over the top,” he said.
Another said she hopes they will backfire, that residents will find them repulsive and repel the candidates with their votes.
Perhaps the candidates felt there is no better way to communicate their message.
Councilor Joe Minutolo, whose own signs are outnumbered a factor of 10 by the NINA/Boland tag team, said the signs are “a great way to remind people you are running, and we need your support.
“It's legal, but maybe some candidates are a little over the top. Hopefully people will know there are others running, and really it's about the issues.”
The LWV forum Wednesday was notably devoid of such substance. I watched it three times.
It asked the public for questions but did not submit any to the candidates. Thus, they were able to launch into self-serving generalities.
Boland, owner of Havana, Chart Room and numerous other restaurants, including some off island, said while he owns homes for employee housing, they are all year-round.
Oh, really?
How about listing all the houses you have purchased the last five years, Michael, that are occupied year-round?
Boland also said he supports local business taxes if there are “guardrails.” He didn’t specify.
The COA graduate is a large producer of trash. Would he support a new calculus of paying for trash disposal by volume instead of property tax where Havana pays the same as a homeowner on Ledgelawn?
And did “NINA” really say the land-use ordinance ought to be amended to favor residential development over transient accommodations, just as she and her husband are completing the biggest hotel in town in a decade.
This is part of the credibility problem the Chamber faces after its disastrous town meeting appearance last year when two board members told a serious untruth - that the chamber joined APPLL to support its “Bar Harbor for All” marketing campaign and voluntary reduction of visitation by cruise lines.
(The Association to Preserve and Protect Local Livelihoods is the collection of businesses suing the town.)
Here was the exact language of the chamber board vote April 2023, to join APPLL which I reported on June 24, 2023:
“To join APPLL and express support for their efforts in overturning the citizens petition through the active lawsuit; to work on messaging to members, the Town, and staff; and to consider Chamber membership in APPLL quarterly.”
Apart from NINA and Boland, the only other candidate who left a trail of bread crumbs and yet no trail was my friend Joe Minutolo, who is an enormously popular incumbent seeking his third term.
But where have you gone, the 2018 version of Joe Minutolo who, as a member of a ferry terminal advisory committee, stared down Town Manager Cornell Knight and council chair Paul Paradis and other proponents of a port authority?
“For this plan, a port authority is not needed, or wanted. The idea of a cruise ship pier is totally the wrong direction for our town that is being forced on this small community,” Minutolo wrote in a letter to legislators. “This is a big industry with tremendous power, and they have done a great job of suppressing” a multi-use facility plan.
The plan was scuttled by a veto from then Gov. Paul LePage in March 2018.
That summer Minutolo won election to the council and began to play nice, even though he was still his scrappy self in private conversations. I cannot recall a single motion he made which resulted in a significant council resolution.
(Do councilors take a pledge to become pliant after they win elections?)
Agitprops are not a welcome characteristic of the Town Council, even though the town has seen plenty of such activity on ballots.
Which brings up Charles Sidman, the king of agitation and thorn to the chamber crowd. He has single-handedly emblazoned some of the town’s most significant public policies the last five years, by using the ballot box and personally financing campaigns. But Bar Harbor voters, while grateful, prefer their gadflies do their work on the sidelines. Sidman was crushed last year by Earl Brechlin when they ran for a two-year vacancy on the council.
He is unlikely to do better this year.
That leaves former police chief Nate Young and incumbent Gary Friedmann, with whom I have had my share of disagreements.
But Friedmann is the only current councilor unafraid of using his bully pulpit.
At the council meeting May 7, he took control after chair Val Peacock failed to do her job and shut down a 40-minute diatribe from lawyers for APPLL.
When the Jordan Pond House concessionaire kicked out long-time residents of Compass Harbor apartments to make way for their seasonal employees, it was Friedmann who called them out publicly.
Friedmann was the instigator for the townwide survey in 2021 which found overwhelming support to cap cruise ship visitation and then followed up with appropriate actions even though he had been a long-time supporter of cruise ships in his early years as a councilor.
Friedmann was the lone vote against a $150,000 item to acquire a back-up generator for the town, when a $10,000 Home Depot generator would have done the job.
On Tuesday night he may face defeat if the Town Council votes to halt the $5 million Higgins Pit solar array, but he won’t go down without a fight.
Friedmann will likely be elected in November to the state legislature, but he won’t be the first person to hold both a municipal and state office at the same time.
Despite numerous articles I have written critical of him, Friedmann always returned my calls. He told me once he feels an obligation, in a democracy, to answer questions from the press as a respect for the 5,000 regular readers of the QSJ.
Friedmann was often the only councilor who asks detailed questions.
He could use an ally.
Nate Young came close to a council seat last year when he received more than 600 votes.
With a Town Council paralyzed by inaction and residents facing double-digit property tax increases for years, Nate Young will not be a wallflower.
He would be the only Bar Harbor native on the council.
He knows every inch of Bar Harbor and had decades of managing a department budget.
Bar Harbor has crises on both sides of its income statement. It needs critical eyes on spending. No more $150,000 generators. And it needs new revenue. Most of the candidates running can only point to the false promise of a “local options tax” which has as much chance of passage in the state legislature as the Quietside Journal has of staying quiet.
The businesses and non-profits must pay their fair share of using the town’s infrastructure - from water and sewer, to public safety services and solid waste disposal.
And the Town Council must stop repeating the false narrative that losing cruise ship fees will result in a property tax increase. Those passenger fees will go down with visitation, but so will the cost to support those visits.
Voters may trust that Nate Young will not be afraid to ask impolite questions and that he will be an honest broker with their representation.
Quietside bracing for uneven traffic patterns coming season
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Mark June 15 on your calendar.
That’s the last day Main Street will be one-way until the fall, giving area businesses the last two weeks in June to cater to customers with a normal traffic flow. One third of a mile of the road from the edge of the village to the condos at the end of the harbor has been under reconstruction for storm water drainage and sidewalk construction for the last two years.
The contractor has essentially only two months before and after the tourism season to do the work, leading to its stop-and-go schedule.
Businesses were grateful to the select board for the two-week reprieve from the original work schedule which had the one-way traffic going to the end of June.
Debby Dubois, who owns the Upper Deck restaurant, the business most affected by the construction, said return to two-way traffic for the last two weeks in June was a reasonable compromise. “That would clear the way for Father's Day and Graduations and the buildup to the Fourth.”
The select board was not as sanguine about the town’s other major headache - Seawall Road, which has been closed since January because of damage from severe storm surges this winter.
Town Manager Marilyn Lowell said she doesn’t expect the state to repair the road this summer.
Traffic diverted to Acadia National Park’s Seawall Campground and two popular trails may hit a backup in Bass Harbor.
June 15 is also the day the state DOT is expected to start a roadside stabilization project on Rt. 102 and Shore Road which likely will exacerbate the traffic to Seawall caused by the closing of Seawall Road.
We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate."
- Thomas Jefferson
This poor old island. It doesn't deserve anything that is happening to it. It was far wealthier before money came it's way.