Will anyone remember the Village of Bar Harbor 10 years from now?

BAR HARBOR - I have this uneasy feeling that the vote Tuesday on Article 4 will only make things worse.

I said recently to a friend, born and raised here, that the toxicity of national politics has trickled down to the municipal level.

He said, “It’s the other way around. Bar Harbor is ground zero for toxic politics.”

And it’s been brewing for more than 20 years, long before the Tea Party first ignited the current abyss nationally.

“Whatever happens Tuesday, you’re gonna have a lot of pissed off voters and that’s not a healthy situation.”

And what will Bar Harbor look like 10 years from now irrespective of who wins Tuesday?

Forty-three years ago at Stanford University I met Wallace Stegner, dean of America’s western writers, during a seminar for journalism fellows when he was the guest speaker. He was 72 at the time. He lived to be 84.

He was a handsome in the western way, with a head full of white hair, stiff jaw and a little grumpy when he didn’t like the tone of a question.

Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize winner of one of my favorite books, “Angle of Repose,” wrote about how places are memorable, even if captured in fiction.

“Rip Van Winkle, though a fiction, enriches the Catskills.

“There are names carved in the trees there. Just as surely as do the quiet meadows and stone walls of Gettysburg, or the grassy hillside above the Little Big Horn where the Seventh Cavalry died, even a phony place like the Indian maiden’s rock grows by human association.

“No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments,” he had written.

In other words, no place is a place until it has poetry.

I can think no place on earth with less poetry than Bar Harbor, where everything is for sale, and every story is the product of the loudest carnival barker.

“In America the process of cumulative association has gone a good way by now in stable, settled, and especially rural areas of New England, the Midwest, the South but hardly any way at all in the raw, migrant west.”

“Many western towns never lasted a single human lifetime. Many others have changed so fast that memory cannot cling to them; they are unrecognizable to anyone who knew them twenty years ago. And as they change, they may fall into the hands of planners and corporations, so that they tend to become more and more alike. Change too often means stereotype. Try Gillette, Wyoming, not too long ago a sleepy cowtown on the verge of becoming a real place, now a coal boomtown that will never be a place.”

(Gillette is famous for the Devil’s Tower National Monument, which was the location of the move, “Close Encounter of the Third Kind.”)

Last year, I visited Gettysburg and was struck by how uncommercial it was.

I can’t associate Bar Harbor with anything memorable in a wistful fashion. In a way Bar Harbor is similar to many western towns. It was forced to do a hard reboot after the fire of 1947 destroyed much of it. More importantly it had to invent a new economic model as many wealthy rusticators never came back.

“The decision was … made because of the post–World War II rising affluence of the middle class to promote [Bar Harbor] as a tourist destination,” retired surgeon Bill Horner recently told journalist Clara Molot.

“So that’s what it has become,” said Horner, who served as president of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society for more than a decade.

“When I grew up in the 50s and 60s,” Horner told Molot, “there were three year-round automobile dealers, clothing stores, and a movie theater. All of that has gone away because the entire town is oriented for tourism.” 

On Tuesday, the Association to Preserve and Protect Local Livelihoods, the group suing the town over its current passenger limits, could apply the coup de grace to ensure that Bar Harbor’s amnesia is permanent. Approval by voters of Article 4 on the municipal ballot will complete the takeover of the town by the moneyed interests.

It will turn the Town Council into essentially a Vichy government. By its own doing, the council is ceding enormous authority to the cruise ship industry by asking voters to repeal their hard-won cap on passenger visitation on Nov. 8, 2022.

On Oct. 20, I reported that former attorney for the appeals board, Phil Worden, warned that the council’s proposed Chapter 50 of the Town Code would give the industry “equal footing” in authority on managing visitation.

Now comes the attorney for citizen petitioner Charles Sidman to assert that contacts proposed with the cruise ship industry under Chapter 50 “only serve to give the cruise line industry and pier owners entirely new ways to sue the Town.”

Attorney Robert J. Papazian wrote the council on Wednesday, “We fought side by side in federal court - and prevailed together - to preserve the Town's police power to regulate cruise ship visitation.

“Under the Reserved Powers Doctrine, the Town cannot bind future legislative bodies - or its citizens acting through the initiative process - through the Chapter 50 contracts to limit this police power or prevent the Town from passing legislation that imposes stricter restrictions on cruise ship visitation.

“Simply put, the Chapter 50 contracts are unenforceable and subject to whatever legislation is passed in the future, despite the contracts' attempts to immunize the cruise lines and pier owners from future legislation. 

“My sincere concern for the Town comes from the fact that the Town would still be held liable for monetary damages for breaches of the Chapter 50 contracts if subsequent legislation is enacted.

“I realize that there are powerful forces in Town putting undue pressure on the Council to pitch Chapter 50 to the voters as a preferred alternative to the existing Ordinance. What I do not understand is why Chapter 50 is purposely drafted to include glaring constitutional flaws. In addition to unlawfully bargaining away the Town's sovereign powers by contract, Chapter 50 is designed to directly regulate federal anchorages (raising preemption issues) and treat foreign flagged ships differently than U.S. flagged ships (raising Commerce Clause issues).

“This Council should know better - we had a federal trial over these same issues. I am sure that the Town's legal counsel has advised you of these dangers. But I am not sure the Council understands that these constitutional flaws expose the Town to disastrous litigation by the cruise ship industry and the pier owners. 

“I understand that we become entrenched in our respective positions and the Council wants to have a unified voice on cruise ship visitation. But it is not too late for individual members of the Council to break from their fraternity of Councilors and recognize the very real dangers that Chapter 50 poses to the wellbeing and financial stability of the Town. Make no mistake, the cruise ship industry and pier owners have the ability to sue this Town into oblivion if Chapter 50 goes into effect. I ask you, as individual members of the Town Council, to be a dissenting voice and encourage voters to Vote No on Article 4.”

Editor’s note: The history of Bar Harbor the last three decades is probably better told in a book. I will take leave of my blog and ponder that question. I plan to continue to post articles but they will be more infrequent as I collect string for a longer form of story-telling.

Citizens opposed to Article 4 in front of Parson’s Seafood. Will Bar Harbor ever heal from its open wound?