Towns battling cruise ships focus mostly on pollution - but not in Bar Harbor
OTHER NEWS: Zoning changes for Somesville, Otter Creek, Seal Harbor? Parking ban at Charlotte's Lobster Pound back on select board agenda; Annlinn Kruger still seeking justice
BAR HARBOR, Oct. 8, 2022 - Resident David Manski shot the above photo from the ferry landing here on Oct. 2, and no, that is not an early sunset on the lower horizon. That is noxious cruise ship emissions forming large yellow clouds drifting northeastward toward Sorrento and Gouldsboro.
How anyone with only the slightest understanding of what’s happening to our planet may look at this photo and not be gripped by revulsion?
Such blatant destruction of Mother Earth is the central issue driving the debates in Key West, Juneau, Alaska, and Portland, Maine.
But here in Bar Harbor, cruise ship pollution is mentioned only in passing, and only by a handful of local activists and in letters to the Islander.
Over-crowding has been the sole issue. Residents want their town to be less crowded. Trinket shops and ice cream parlors want their credit card machines to continue humming.
Perhaps one reason for this lapse is that Bar Harbor ships do not tie up onshore. They are anchored behind several of the Porcupine Islands so their massive smokestacks billowing the foulest carbon emission made by man are not as apparent, as, say, in Portland where the ships dock a hundred yards from the city’s historic district. The pollution is actually worse in Bar Harbor because tenders ferrying passengers from the ships also burn diesel fuel. All the tenders are operated by one company.
The Islander published Manski’s photo this week but only to illustrate the busyness of the waterfront. It did not disclose the true intent of his distribution.
In an email to the Town Council which accompanied the above photo, he wrote in part, “I have regularly noticed the cruise ship smokestacks billowing various emissions as they remain powered during their time in port. Yesterday (October 2, 2022), I was out photographing and there was a significant plume of yellowish pollution emanating from both the Norwegian Pearl and MS Nieuw Stantendam.
“I am very disturbed by the negative impacts of this air pollution and hope that you will take this issue into account as you continue to work on improving the management of cruise ships visiting Bar Harbor.”
Manski spent most of his adult life as a marine conservationist and protectionist, including stints for the National Park Service.
He did not get a single reply. Only council member Gary Friedmann referenced it Monday night.
The prevailing southwest wind in these parts means that the pollution generated by the ships are more likely headed to towns north and east of Bar Harbor, across Frenchman Bay. Do citizens there have a legitimate legal grievance against Bar Harbor for hosting these polluting behemoths and fouling their air?
Portland has a citizens initiative on the November ballot similar to one in Bar Harbor mandating a 1,000-visitor cap per day.
But the cruise ship opponents in Portland have opted for a different tack. They recently inked an agreement with the Longshoremen and the local construction industry to rebuild Portland’s electric grid to allow for shore power for the visiting ships so they don’t run their engines while docked. Visitor congestion is not as big an issue there because Portland does not have a national park.
See this article by Evan Edmonds of the Portland Phoenix. https://portlandphoenix.me/pollution-questions-greet-portlands-late-summer-cruise-ships/
In Juneau, Alaska, where the industry and the city have been battling in the courts for four years, both sides recently reached agreement on several issues, including a promise to develop shore power.
Meanwhile, Key West activists continue to pound away to prevent ships from destroying their habitats and coral reefs.
According to the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union in Germany, one cruise ship emits as many air pollutants as millions of cars. This is because sea-going vessels use heavy fuel oil for their engines, a fuel that on land would have to be disposed of as hazardous waste. “Heavy fuel oil can contain up to 3,500 times more sulphur than diesel that is used for land traffic vehicles,” Nabu stated. “Even more, the ships don't have any exhaust abatement technologies like diesel particulate filters or SCR-catalysts, techniques that are built in trucks or passenger cars as a standard.”
https://en.nabu.de/topics/traffic/cruiseships.html
“Huge amounts of dangerous air pollutants like black carbon, sulphur dioxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) are emitted. Those substances contribute massively to global warming. For example, almost 50 percent of the warming of the Arctic is attributed to black carbon.”
In May 2022, I wrote an article on how a federal judge was monitoring the industry and in particular Carnival Cruise Lines and its “Caribbean Princess,” which was fined $66 million for deliberately evading pollution laws. Caribbean Princess is a regular visitor to Bar Harbor. Carnival, the largest cruise operator in the world, sends up to 70 ships to Bar Harbor each season.
https://theqsjournal.substack.com/p/us-judge-keeps-short-leash-on-cruise
Because the ships are anchored, Bar Harbor has no easy way to provide shore power.
The Town Council’s proposed Cruise Management Plan, which finally got a public hearing of sorts Monday night, attempted to mitigate the visitation problem but did very little to abate the pollution problem.
Only the citizens initiative on the ballot will do that. A cap of 1,000 cruise ship visitors a day will reduce air pollution here significantly.
Two council members, Val Peacock and Jill Goldthwait, were champions of significant cruise ship reductions a year ago. (Goldthwait at the time questioned whether cruise ships aligned with the local culture of a New England village.)
Their metamorphosis to becoming a mouthpiece for the industry started shortly after the hiring of Town Manager Kevin Sutherland in January. He was the chief architect of the town’s Cruise Management Plan which doesn’t take full effect until 2024 and then has to be re-negotiated every year.
Neither council members has expressed much concern about pollution.
Others are more blatant in their disregard for the truth or in outright prevarications about pollution. Some council members continue to say air monitors at Acadia National Park have not detected pollution from cruise ships.
In fact, the park’s own website stated, “Over 30 years of air quality monitoring has shown that Acadia NP receives some of the highest levels of pollution in the northeastern U.S. Air pollution can harm ecosystems, scenic vistas, and public health. This is one of the most important environmental issues facing the park.”
https://www.nps.gov/articles/airprofiles-acad.htm
The only true way to monitor cruise ship pollution is with a device called a “particle counter” at various points on a ship.
Ryan Kennedy, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, spent two years incognito on four cruise ships using a “P-Trak Ultrafine Particle Counter” and published his undercover report in 2019 which concluded the pollution on cruise ships are so bad they endanger the health of passengers, staff and port communities.
Peacock was a well-intentioned legislator when she came into office in 2020. She is now the archetypal Bar Harbor politician. This town has normalized behavior and actions few other local governments would tolerate, such as council and board members’ elastic definition of “conflict of interest” and other such ethical niceties.
A member of the Warrant Committee who publicly stated that his business gets a 30-40 percent bump when cruise ships were in town was allowed to vote against the citizens petition. (It was disclosed a year ago that almost half of the Warrant Committee members own vacation rental homes, blamed for driving down the year-round housing stock.)
Last month Peacock led the 5-2 council vote to approve the cruise ship plan, one of the most consequential actions ever taken in town history, without a public hearing.
Finally, the council, at member Joe Minutolo’s request, held a “question and answer” session Monday night on the cruise ship agreement it already had passed. In 25 years as a journalist, I’ve never seen a retroactive public hearing with no binding consequences.
The labeling of the hearing as a QandA gave member Matt Hochman license to muzzle speakers such as Jim O’Connell, one of the few residents consistently calling out cruise ship pollution.
Hochmann shut down O’Connell, a signatory to the citizens petition, when it became apparent he was going to talk about issues disagreeable to Hochman, who ran a business which relied heavily on cruise ship dollars.
Minutolo said the so-called hearing did not turn out as he expected.
To counter the argument the council’s cruise ship plan did not receive proper vetting, Peacock said Monday night that she has had hundreds of conversations with citizens about cruise ship issues. Only those were in private. She doesn’t seem to understand the fundamental difference in government between private conversations and a public hearing where everyone is speaking on the record. Council members don’t seem to understand the historical importance of archiving comments for the record. That’s why we keep minutes.
An elected official in Bar Harbor said to me, “She (Val Peacock) talks too much. At least with (Jeff) Dobbs, we knew what we were dealing with. Val is more dangerous because she’s smart.”
The Town of Bar Harbor sold its soul to Lucifer more than two decades ago.
If it wants to be just a giant ATM machine for tourists, it has that right. It does not have the right to destroy the planet.
The next time you dutifully haul your bottles to Clynk at Hannaford’s, install solar panels, buy an electric car, flatten a cardboard for recycling or compost your trash, keep in mind that your efforts - while admirable - are not keeping up with Bar Harbor’s reckless disregard for the only planet we have.
FOOTNOTE: Council member Friedmann tried to throw Peacock a lifeline at the council meeting in mid September to resolve the public relations nightmare of the town manager harassing a 73-year-old protester of Leonard Leo. Only Friedmann put it more cryptically by asking Peacock to respond to protester Annlinn Kruger’s questions.
But instead of taking care of matters, Peacocks doubled down on Sutherland’s outlandish pursuit of someone from whom hundreds of Bar Harbor residents learned for the first time who Leonard Leo was and how he operated his base on MDI for raising dark money to weigh down our judicial system with right-wing, religious zealots.
For them Annlinn Kruger is a local hero.
Several council members told me that Sutherland made a mistake, but none has said it publicly.
Simple solution: Have Sutherland apologize to Kruger and move on.
But that was not what Peacock chose.
She sent Kruger this officious statement: (Was it written by Sutherland?)
“Under Maine statute 17-A M.R.S.A. §805, the town has the authority to look into instances of property damage such as permanent painting of public sidewalks and streets. In this unique and new situation, in which your protest campaign medium included writing on the sidewalk, the goal was, and is, to work with you to make sure that your work was/is not permanently applied to town streets. Thank you for working to meet that goal within your project.
“The town is committed to upholding first amendment free speech rights. And, the town has no opinion, in its official capacity, on the issue that you are protesting.
“In regards to documents, I'm not sure what you might be referencing. If there are specific documents that you'd like to request, please reach out to Maya Caines, our new town communication coordinator, at communications@barharbor.gov and she will work to retrieve them.
“In a previous email you also requested information about the ethics complaints process:
“The Town's ethics complaint process requires you to fill out a form identifying the specific violation of the ethics ordinance. The complaint may be made through the town clerk's office.
“Here's a link to the form:
https://www.barharbormaine.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1700/Ethics-Complaint-Form?bidId=
“Here is a link to the ethics ordinance:
“Let me know if you'd still like to schedule a phone call or meeting. Regards, Val”
Kruger is not going away. She appeared Monday at the Town Council meeting asking the council again to account for Sutherland’s actions - how much of the town’s resources were spent pursuing her protest graffitis on town streets?
The QSJ found through a Freedom of Access Act request that Sutherland, in his zeal to hound Kruger, sought legal advice from the town counsel to fortify his pursuit of police action against Kruger. How much did that cost? The amount Kruger is seeking to be disclosed is easily in the thousands of dollars, if you add up all of Sutherland’s own time discussing the issue with the police, council members and looking up criminal statutes, and his assignment of highway personnel to harass Kruger.
Should Mount Desert villages be rezoned to allow for more commercial activity?
SOMESVILLE - Nothing arouses the local citizenry more than a whiff of change to the land-use ordinance.
The QSJ received several inquiries from readers asking about three “village planning workshops” in flyers sent to residents of Somesville, Otter Creek and Seal Harbor. I drive through Somesville every day to the post office but did not get a flyer. Folks in Pretty Marsh and Hall Quarry also did not receive one.
The idea for these meetings came from the Land-Use Zoning Ordinance committee, a standing committee which reviews and updates the town’s zoning laws on a continuous basis. It is led by consultant Noel Musson of Southwest Harbor, considered one of the state’s foremost planning and zoning experts.
Musson said the committee in the past has received inquiries and suggestions from residents in the town’s villages on how they might be reflected in the zoning ordinance.
“What's happening in Mount Desert right now is we're just getting started on the comprehensive plan,” Musson said.
“We're starting with Otter Creek, Somesville and Seal Harbor because there's some villages that haven't had as much attention as Northeast Harbor, for example,” Musson said. “It's not like we're not going to get to Northeast Harbor. It's just that we're starting in other parts of town first.
“So it’s really more of an exercise. Let's get people together and really talk about what's up with your village. Tell us what you love about it. Let's identify those you know, some special places in your village. Let's talk about some things that you wish were there that aren't there.”
“Are things in the land use ordinance that need to be reviewed in order to help facilitate what people in these communities or these village communities actually want in their villages?” Musson asked.
Town Manager Durlin Lunt asked similar questions:
“Do we need to do some work on the zoning to allow more commercial activity? Or are you happy with the way things are or you'd like to see a little and not too much.?"
“So we're trying to get to gauge a balance whether there is community interest in some zoning changes that might allow for some more commercial activity, and, if so, what type of commercial activity?” he said.
The issue of commercial zoning in the villages has been lurking for years, Select Chair John Macauley stated in an email.
He cited an ordinance change 15 years ago to allow a business to lie fallow for up to two years, as opposed to one. “This started a discussion around having commercial zoning in OC. It is now being revisited.”
But stakeholders in these villages go well beyond year-round owners in a tight, immediate circle.
Summer residents make up most of the town’s tax base. They may not have a vote, but they have a stake.
I am looking forward to these village planning meetings. The first one is Tuesday at 5 at the Seal Harbor fire station. I hope they will be on Zoom so the summer residents may participate.
Like Jason in “Friday the 13th,” Charlotte neighbors are back with their parking ban
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Even though the previous select board declined action, the town manager has placed the proposed ban on parking on the state road where Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound is located back on the board’s agenda for its consideration Tuesday.
“I received an email with documents regarding the No Parking on Route 102A. The landowners would like to discuss with the Select Board the reconsideration and resolve of putting “No Parking” signs along both sides of Route 102A from Trap Mill Road & Balsam Way,” Town Manager Marilyn Lowell wrote in an email yesterday to board members.
“Should you wish to authorize the placement of the “No Parking” signs, I respectfully suggest passage of a motion to approve the placement of “No Parking” signs along both sides of Route 102A from Trap Mill Road & Balsam Way.”
The principal agitator for the ban is the sister of select member George Jellison, who has been working more than a year to restrict parking near the restaurant.
Owner Charlotte Gill said drivers who stop in the middle of the road to photograph deer in front of Aimee Jellison Williams’s house pose a much bigger safety issue than parking in front of her restaurant. I took this photo below on Nov. 3, 2021 showing cars parking on the wrong side of the road in front of Williams’s house which didn’t seem to upset Williams nor her brother nor the local police. George Jellison also owns a house at 426 Seawall, and select member Jim Vallette owns 400 Seawall. Both are in the no-parking zone being proposed.
Lincoln’s Log:
How a convicted felon got the white glove treatment from Maine
SOMESVILLE - In light of this week’s news that the founder of American Aquafarms was once again accused of fraud and had $1.6 million of personal assets seized in Norway, the QSJ is republishing this article I did in April questioning the state’s role in recruiting foreign investors without proper vetting.
https://theqsjournal.substack.com/p/how-a-norwegian-felon-managed-to
Case of arrested protester set for Dec. 15
Eli Durand-McDonnell’s arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct by Mount Desert police in late July is headed for a “disposition hearing” Dec. 15 in district court in Ellsworth, although his lawyer just suffered a stroke and it’s unclear what’s next. The 21-year-old protester was arrested after he yelled an obscenity at Leonard Leo from a car in which he was a passenger. Leo, the dark money operative (see above), lives at 46 South Shore Road in Northeast Harbor where there have been numerous protests this year.
TRIBUTE: Harold Niel Hall
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - A ceremony honoring Harold Niel Hall Jr., 90, was held Oct. 1 at Southwest Harbor Fire House, where he was a volunteer and captain, with military honors from his service in the Navy. A flag was presented to his widow Anna Barnes Hall.
He died Sept. 19 in Bar Harbor. He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., June 25, 1932, the son of Harold Niel and Edythe L. (Harlow) Hall Sr.
After school he enjoyed open water diving and owned and piloted his own Cesna 150. He joined the Navy and served four years on the USS Piedmont AD-17. He belonged to the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary and took many advanced courses, which included U.S. Power Squadron, Exemplary Service in 1959, National Fire Academy, which involved LifeFlight training, ground safety course, Fire Attack School and State Emergency Response. Harold belonged to the National Rifle Association, was a life member of V.A. Membership, belonged to Plumbers Union Manhattan and Bronx and was Southwest Harbor civil defense director and Southwest Harbor fire captain. He served as a member of the American Legion, Eugene M. Norwood Post No. 69, Southwest Harbor, was a professional marksman and a member of the National Rifle Association.
Besides his wife, he is survived by nephews, Frank and Scott Nastro, and Sean Hall; niece, Tracy Mills, and children; half-brother, Thomas Hall; stepdaughter, Diane Muzeroll and husband, Edward; stepson Daniel Barnes, step-grandchildren and spouses Tyler and Juli Muzeroll, Erik and Tiffany Muzeroll, Zachary Barnes, Cameron Barnes, Alyssa Barnes and step-great granddaughter Eve Muzeroll. He was predeceased by his parents; brother, John; sister, Edythe Nastro and former wife, Carol Metzler.
Contributions in Harold’s memory may be made to the Southwest Harbor Department, 250 Main St., Southwest Harbor, ME 04679.
TRIBUTE: Karen Benore
BAR HARBOR - Karen Benore, 60, died on August 31, 2022. She was born on March 29th, 1962 and was a beloved daughter, mother, sister and friend. Her talents were extremely vast, she was a brilliant fiber artist and crafter, educator, and animal lover who regularly volunteered at the SPCA of Hancock County. She was a second-generation Bar Harbor resident who brought her many skills to all her jobs, she worked at the Bar Harbor Inn for many years and then for private properties around the island as a detail cleaner and a jill-of-all-trades. Karen’s skillset was really sought after, she could create extremely beautiful décor for any occasion, and delighted in making finely detailed, handcrafted pieces of innovative art. Karen was a constant learner who loved to explore the island, she learned to weld, learned to clam, recently ran the Mount Desert Island Marathon, and had been practicing watercolor for the first time. Karen was truly a gift to this world. She was an avid gardener who befriended all the animals she came in contact with. She cared for creatures great and small, even the bear that would regularly march through her yard. Words cannot express her spiritual connectedness, she loved God with all her heart and bestowed a love of learning; a connection to a higher power; and the power of true, childlike joy on her children and all those she came in contact with. A celebration of Karen’s life will meet at 1 p.m. on October 21 at the entrance to Little Long Pond, where she loved to walk dogs, and sometimes even her cat, with her daughter. Karen is survived by her three children, Em, Charles, and Harrison, her brother Dave, and her parents, Charlie and Patty Benore.
Arrangements by Jordan-Fernald 113 Franklin St. Ellsworth.
Condolences can be expressed at www.jordanfernald.com.