Will Bar Harbor cruise ship survey clarify or confuse? Town council faces urgent deadline
Surprise storm hammers Acadia, brings much needed rain; alewife count hits record Ex-Tremont code officer: land-use rules inadequate
First of two parts
BAR HARBOR, June 12, 2021 - The cruise ship survey due to be delivered to town officials Tuesday is a Christmas tree over laden with ornaments about to keel over on its own weight.
It is a child of multiple parents with questions about how it was conceived, how it was distributed and who was allowed to participate. In the end it is a product with no owners.
No doubt, the town did the politically expedient thing by not releasing it before the elections June 8. But now it’s time for citizens to view the results and start the conversation, especially in light of Tuesday’s overwhelming support of the two incumbent council members and warrant committee members who favor limiting the cruise ships.
That might be a difficult task.
The survey had multiple hiccups. The town manager, apparently without town council approval, posted the survey questions online to all comers to download. The town council had explicitly sought opinions about cruise ships from only three groups: BH voters, BH taxpayers and BH business owners who don’t vote here.
But with Town Manager Cornell Knight unilaterally opening the survey question to all out-of-towners, we now have four classes of respondents to sort out, each with its own agenda.
QSJ asked Knight in an email whether his action to open the survey to all comers was approved by the council. QSJ got no response.
There are many out-of-state industry employees and anti-cruise ship groups around Frenchman Bay whose responses would skew the survey. The out-of-town responses will certainly have to be “weighed” according to their biases. But how is that being done?
Others have cast doubt as well. In a letter to the Islander April 22, Warrant Committee member Cara Ryan, wrote, “Once it was opened up to anyone anywhere—without the personalized code given to Bar Harbor residents, taxpayers and nonresident business owners—its credibility as an accurate reflection of local sentiment was lost.
“This isn’t what Town Council members agreed on, isn’t what was stated on the survey itself. Inviting (on the town website and in last week’s Islander) anyone and everyone to weigh in was like opening a darkroom door before the film is developed.
“Pity, because this survey, costing both time and money, was requested by our Town Council to give them a sense of where we as a town are in our thinking about cruise ships. Clearly, we’re going to have to vote to know what we really want. “
QSJ has written previously about the survey vendor, Portland-based Pan Atlantic Research, which received a black eye last fall when it released a poll only three weeks before election day showing Susan Collins trailing Sara Gideon by 7 points. Many polls had the same conclusion but none had that size of a difference that close to election day. Pan Atlantic received copious press coverage when the polls were released.
Was it a pure marketing ploy? What were the underlying data? QSJ got no response from the company.
Pan American was selected by Knight’s office to conduct the survey without very little pushback from the council members.
Knight manages cruise ship information tightly in other areas in favor of the industry.
The town website links to a 2017 study showing the economic benefit of cruise ships but not a 2019 study which raised questions about the previous study, saying the average passenger spent only $62 - which is not enough to buy two lobster rolls at Geddy’s Seafood.
Colin Woodard, the prize-winning reporter of the Portland Press Herald and author of “The Lobster Coast,” questioned the economic impact of cruise ships in Maine in a five-part series in 2018.
When the 2019 study by Portland-based DPA Consulting came out, Woodard quoted Knight:
“Bar Harbor Town Manager Cornell Knight said he was not concerned about the lower figures in the DPA study, because the recent Gabe study provided the town with what it needed. ‘We just had a study done a couple of years ago, so we have the information,’ he said.”
Here is Woodard’s article: CRUISE SHIP PASSENGERS SPENDING LESS THAN FIRST REPORTED1
Two members of the cruise ship committee who have not benefitted financially from the industry, scientist Jane Disney and Jeremy Dougherty, general manager of the Bar Harbor Inn, said in separate interviews that the municipal election this week was a loud voice from voters to move on the question of cruise ships.
“This frog’s been boiling for a while,” said Dougherty, who runs the landmark hotel which relies solely on land-based tourism. “This may turn out to be an important year … who knows, decades from now we may look back at this year as a major turning point.”
The two-year absence of significant cruise ship business will provide actual comparisons to test some of canards thrown around by both sides of the question of whether the town should continue to allow as many as 5,500 passengers a day in Bar Harbor to bolster its economy.
The idea that cruises ships are the major drivers of the fall shoulder season economy is an “old fable,” Dougherty said. “It’s been five plus years since that was true, that our season ended on Labor Day. The hotels are full all the way to Halloween, extending even to Veterans Day.”
Dougherty said this fall will provide businesses with true measurement of how important the cruise ships are. “We’ll be able to say, ‘at least here is some data.’ We’ll have an objective view so we can have a meaningful conversation instead of just screaming at each other.’"
Dougherty does not hold much hope the Pan Atlantic survey of residents on the question of cruise ships will be helpful. “It’s too simplistic,” he said. As a hotelier, Dougherty is well schooled in survey techniques and said the ships survey was “too general.” He said he would have added numerical values to some of the questions, such as a scale of 1 to 10 on the importance of the answers. “The difference between a 6 and a 9 is huge.”
“For $12,000 I could have knocked this thing out on Google in 15 minutes,” Dougherty said at the cruise ship committee’s March meeting.
The cruise committee was set up by the town council to help it streamline and manage the onslaught of 250,000 passengers a year to Bar Harbor. It was not designed to answer the question of whether the town has gone too far with cruise ships.
To that end Jane Disney would like to see more town council members on the committee instead of having its views represented only by Matt Hochman. “We had two when I was on the council and I don’t know how one was eliminated.”
Disney said the cruise ship committee is the only town committee which serves to benefit the industry and not necessarily the town.
“It’s not their job to set policy. Their job is to help manage the cruise ships when they are in town. It’s our job to set policy,” said council member Joe Minutolo. Perhaps then the council can take back control of the process by throwing out all the responses from out-of-towners in the survey. Or it could discard the survey all together and not waste valuable time. The council is facing an deadline to write questions for the November referendum.
(The planning department was able to conduct a survey on vacation rentals at a fraction of the cost and with little sturm und drang )
Or the council could continue to let Knight do what he wants.
Part 2 next week: vacation rental policy
Good, bad and ugly of surprise storm
SOMESVILLE - We needed the rain. We just didn’t need six inches in four hours. Long Pond rose almost a foot by week’s end from the Wednesday morning storm. Acadia National Park was hammered. It posted the following alerts on its website:
Carriage Road Closures
Carriage Roads Closed Due To Storm Damage
The park service stated, “It may take two months to stabilize and repair damage to historic carriage roads from a severe storm June 9. All culverts and drainages were overwhelmed. Three layers of road were removed at multiple locations. The following carriage roads segments are closed between noted intersections: 11 & 10, 12 & 10, 15 & 10, 11 & 13. The list may expand further. Repairs are underway. Wild Gardens of Acadia also remain closed.”
“The Schoodic Mountain Road and all bike paths on the peninsula are closed for safety while extensive repairs are underway in response to a severe storm June 9,” the Park stated. The carriage road around Eagle Lake already was closed for construction.
“That is a lot of rain in a short period of time,” James Sinko, a meteorologist in the weather service’s Caribou office, told the Bangor Daily News. “There was a ton of moisture in the atmosphere.”
Most of the downpour occurred between the hours of 3 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, as a cold front moved southwest out of Quebec and then met warmer air that was moving in from farther south along the East Coast, Sinko said.
The storm dumped heavy rain in a narrow band in Hancock and Washington counties but spared many nearby towns, some of which got less than an inch of rain.
Rain aids alewife migration from Mill Pond in Somesville
The flip side was the benefit to Mill Pond in Somesville where the low-stream water due to the recent drought reversed itself in one night.
The lack of rain had created many pockets of freestanding water where alewives were trapped. Many died. And they created an unpleasant fetor around the Somesville historic bridge.
“The appearance and smell of this collection was certainly not what visitors to the bridge expected,” wrote Billy Helprin, director of the Somes Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary. “Many scavengers/recyclers have taken part in the odorous bounty, however, including turkey vultures, snapping turtles, eels, crayfish, eagles, crows, ravens, and many invertebrates in the stream. Not much wasted, just a longer processing time than our human noses would prefer (1 second is probably too long for most).
“We always lose hundreds of alewife to energy depletion, injury, and predation within the watershed during their journey.
“Being out of water for long is obviously a problem for most fish, combined with the extremely arduous, technical climb upstream due to low water and certainly lower oxygen in the water that is present (due to low volume and high water temperatures - as high as 83 degrees).
“The biggest challenge now is trying to get inbound fish to climb the fish ladder sides of the stream sections, not the spillway sides. This is pretty well impossible with the volume of water from Wednesday morning's rain, but once it subsides, I think we will have some fish herding and netting to the proper side to do.
“At the other end of the line, entering Long Pond, almost 22,00 have been netted and placed into the lake (mostly by Sanctuary Volunteer JF Burns). That puts us on the high side of our usual percentage who make the trip at least a mile and a half inland (41.5% vs. typical range of 10-30%). Our recent high at LP was 20,100 in 2016 (almost 61% of total incoming fish at MP). We may be seeing some of that big cohort and their descendants coming back this year.”
All this occurred as the annual alewives count at the Mill Pond fish ladder hit a record this year.
“Inbound fish paused during the last two days of May, but then resumed their migration inland, now totaling more than 51,000 - a record number for the past 20 years or so, maybe longer,” Helprin reported. “In 2005 there were only 361 that entered the mill pond.”
Alewives are anadromous fish that spend the majority of their life at sea but return to freshwater to spawn. In May and June they swim upstream, spawn and run back into the ocean. Last week, there were alewives going both directions at the Somesville ladder.
Ex-Tremont code enforcement officer: town land-use ordinances inadequate
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - John Larson, under whose watch the Acadia Wilderness Lodge got its first permit in 2019 for 11 campsites, said rural towns in Maine such as Tremont lack the wherewithal to deal adequately with campground and other commercial use applications.
“The town’s comprehensive plan said maybe we should rethink our zones and what’s in those zones, but that never happened,” Larson said from his office in Southwest Harbor, one of three towns where he rotates as code enforcement officer.
“I can tell you the history behind most of these ordinances. They came from some other town. They just adopted them. The whole state of Maine does not have a planning office. They closed it. There is no one to help towns write ordinances … try to take care of every scenario that could come up.”
The planning board seemed to agree. “The world has changed around us, and we haven’t changed,” said member Geoff Young at the board’s Wednesday night meeting. The board is scrambling to catch up.
In January it asked the Board of Selectmen to put a moratorium on the town meeting agenda on future campground applications to give it time to sort out the ordinances. The select board refused.
This week, Planning chairman Mark Good returned with the same request but was told to come back with a proposed change to the land use ordinance regarding campgrounds by Sept. 1, the deadline for a question on the November ballot.
The planning board then agreed to come up with proposed ordinance ideas for its June 22 meeting. Any change to the ordinance in November would not affect current applications, including one for a smaller campground at Pointy Head.
John Larson said the town isn’t totally powerless to govern campground applications. The second 154-site, 72-RV Acadia Wilderness Lodge application - not the 2019 11-site approval - is clearly a “high impact” development and all sorts of considerations come into play, including traffic, storm water drainage and others.
When told that Acadia Wilderness Lodge claimed the campground idea came from him, Larson said, “That’s not true.”
Larson said when Acadia Wilderness first presented its plan, he told a company representative that the cabins could not include “cooking facilities” lest they would be considered “dwellings.”
“So that was based on the ordinance saying you needed an X amount of space for every dwelling unit. It defines a dwelling unit as a room or a group of rooms, including sleeping, eating and cooking facilities.
“Take the kitchen away it’s not a dwelling unit anymore. So it’s just a cabin.”
In an interview with QSJ in March, James Hopkins said he inherited land on Kellytown Road and was searching for an idea for a business there when Larson recommended a campground. He has repeated that assertion in public meetings.
“In Tremont there is no definition of what constitutes light commercial, medium commercial or heavy commercial,” said Larson.
The ordinance: “The purpose of the Residential-Business Zone is to preserve the integrity of the residential uses while allowing for maritime related and light commercial activity which are compatible with the physical capability of the land.”
Tremont does have one advantage other towns on MDI don’t. It does not have sewers, limiting the size and volume of any large commercial use to “the physical capability of the land.”
Soup Kitchen to open only 3 days
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Common Good Soup Kitchen, the pulse and conscience of the community, is opening June 25 but only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for now.
“Because of a scarcity of volunteers, we need to do the best we can, and hope that as the summer residents arrive, that among them we can find more volunteers,” said Arnold Weisenberg, chair of the board.
“We have the honest intention to add days when we are able to do so, in a manner consistent with guest and staff safety.
“We are an outdoor operation in which it is likely that our guests will be an intermingling of persons who are fully vaccinated, or partially vaccinated, or not-yet vaccinated, and those who are anti-vaccine among locals and among visitors from states that do not have as enviable a record of a high percentage of persons being vaccinated as Maine has.
“We hope to grow our crop of volunteers in order to populate a 4-day week, and perhaps more. We hope to meet this target in July.”
The soup kitchen offers popovers in exchange for donations to distribute soups to more than 100 households on the Quietside.
Lincoln’s Log …
A very strange 10 minutes at the start of the Mount Desert select board meeting this week when what should have been a largely ceremonial, feel-good session with five elementary school kids seeking a rainbow crosswalk - like thousands of other towns in the US, including neighboring Bar Harbor - turned into a lecture on the dangers of such projects by select member Wendy Littlefield, who voted against the request to support LGBT rights. The Federal Highway Administration under Donald Trump raised similar concerns which was ignored by many local governments.
I found one of these critters inside my wetsuit last fall after my swim. It was too late.I developed a rash which still has not gone away after eight months. Thanks to Gail Marshall who spoke at the Mount Desert Select Board, I finally know what I’m up against.