Will Bar Harbor progressives sit out off-year election with ships, housing issues at stake
BAR HARBOR - The municipal election in Bar Harbor Tuesday may be the most consequential in years despite the lack of “hot-button” issues on the ballot, because the next town council will have a major role in shaping the questions of cruise ships and vacation rentals - with repercussions for the entire island.
The pro-cruise ship gang would like nothing better than to see council member Joe Minutolo’s head on a platter, along with Gary Friedmann’s scalp.
Cruise ship minions are also trying to stack the deck for the warrant committee, running several pro cruise ship candidates. One is Eben Salvatore, who operates the cruise business for hotelier Ocean Properties, and another is Stephen Coston, the only council member to oppose the ban on cruise ships during the pandemic in 2020. Kathy St. Germain, wife of pro-ship candidate Peter St. German is also running.
On the question of vacation rentals, the decision is a binary one. If you believe the record number of year-round rentals being transformed into vacation rentals is creating a housing crisis, then your choice for town council must be for the incumbents, Gary Friedmann and Joe Minutolo.
The other candidates recognize that there is a housing problem but they would prefer it to be solved by loosening the town’s “density” restrictions. That means more housing units per square foot.
Density restrictions exist for a reason. There is a capacity for sewers in downtown. An increase in density would have to be off set by more sewer capacity. That requires a study which would lead to a major capital expense to increase capacity. In areas without sewers, the density restrictions are even more important.
One candidate, Jennifer Cough, a self-styled “libertarian,” is trafficking in fear and untruths, like Donald Trump. In a full-page, color ad in the Islander newspaper, which costs about $2,500, she stated that if cruise ships are not allowed, “it will raise our taxes by one million dollars at a minimum.”
We have what lawyers call prima facie evidence that assertion is untrue.
In the fiscal year ended June 2021, the town collected a total of $9,819 in cruise ship revenue. That’s because from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, there were no cruise ships.
But the world did not end for Bar harbor.
Very few businesses failed.
And there was no $1 million tax increase.
On Monday, at town meeting, the citizens of Bar Harbor passed a 2022 budget with very little pushback.
The budget anticipated only $174,000 in revenues from cruise ships for the first half of 2022. If that is actualized, it will mean that from June 2020 through June 2022, Bar Harbor will have realized less than $185,000 in cruise ship revenue - a total collapse from two previous years of $1 million-plus each year.
Again, no $1 million tax increase. The world did not end.
Bar Harbor will see a 2.1 percent tax increase for FY22 but none of it due to the loss of cruise ship revenue.
Town Manager Cornell Knight in his budget memo wrote, “I anticipate an increase of .7% in the municipal portion of the tax commitment, 5% for the local school, 4.9% for the Hancock County assessment and 1.1% for the High School assessment. The overall tax increase is estimated to be 2.1% … The median home value of $289,600 would have a $74 increase in annual taxes.”
For better or for worse, QSJ knows how to read an income statement and a balance sheet. Jen Cough obviously doesn’t or doesn’t care. She is a loud mouthpiece for the cruise ship industry and has flooded downtown Bar Harbor with her signs and posters.
The same untruth about tax increase is being circulated by the local chamber of commerce. In a letter to members, Chamber director Alf Anderson wrote, “Local businesses employ residents, send their children to our schools, pay property taxes (which will increase for everyone this year due to the lack of cruise ship revenue in 2020), and offer the goods and services we all need to thrive in our well-balanced community.
Bar Harbor is enjoying a fiscal renaissance without cruise ships, for its second straight year. But the town is also imploding at the same time. Every business seems short on labor. The tourism workforce is being chased away by rising housing costs. And complaints from customers are ringing loud.
To which Jen Cough, who fancies the label “libertarian,” said we don’t need the town council to solve these problems. Libertarians despise government, until they need government.
Their intellectual muse, Ayn Rand, applied for social security and medicare benefits only after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
Her social worker Evva Pryor said in an interview in 1998,
“I had read enough to know that she despised government interference, and that she felt that people should and could live independently. She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like…. For me to do my job, she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory…. She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world…. She could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
Gary Friedmann, a town council member who is seeking re-election, said of the Jen Cough claim about the tax increase, “This is simply not true; and it's not an either/or choice we are contemplating.”
Incumbent Joe Minutolo, who is also seeking re-election, said, “She forgot to factor in the costs of having them (cruise ships). Time for Police, Harbor Master, added Public Works, Just cleaning the bathrooms is a major cost. The loss of 51 parking spaces on Cruise ship Days, and the lost parking fees. ClIA dues, Maine Cruise Pro dues, Cruise Maine dues. The list goes on and on. It's like running a business, and the difference between gross and net profit.”
Bar Harbor is an extraordinarily progressive town but most of that sentiment is reserved for global and national issues such as Black Lives Matter and Climate Change. In the 2020 election, Bar Harbor voted 2,678 for Joe Biden versus 804 for Donald Trump.
The coattail of the presidential race enabled big wins for three women: Jill Goldthwait with 1452 votes, Valerie Peacock, 1043 votes and Erin Cough, 857 votes.
The losers were incumbent Stephen Coston, 578 votes, Christopher Strout, 570 votes and Kevin Desveaux, 534 votes.
But when it comes to local issues, the progressives are often AWOL. Whether they show up June 8 will determine the future of the town for a long time.
At one end are two candidates who are attempting to move the town toward reasonable containment of cruise ships, Friedmann and Minutolo.
Friedmann was the architect of the town-wide survey to measure voter sentiment on whether to curb visiting ships. Minutolo joined the 4-2 majority approving the survey. The other two were Jill Goldthwait and Val Peacock. Matt Hochmann and Erin Cough voted against the survey. Chairman Jeff Dobbs was absent because of illness.
If Friedmann and Minutolo are ousted it would be a big win for the industry, as the next board will have the task of developing language for the fall town meeting on the question. Or it could choose to not bring the question to a vote.
This is the first year warrant committee members are elected individually and by written ballot, ending the practice of a slate of candidates getting voted on at town meetings. All the terms will be for three years after this year, which has a confusing motley of one-year, two-year and three-year terms on the ballot
Seven candidates, including Salvatore and Coston, are running for five 1-year terms, just enough for them to influence the November vote on the cruise ship question.
The other hot button issue, housing, has the same candidates on opposite sides.
Between 2006 and this week, the number of registered vacation rentals in Bar Harbor increased from 185 to 523. By the end of 2021, Bar Harbor will have tripled its inventory of vacation homes in 15 years.
“Somewhere between 16.4% to 18.5% (includes pending applications) of the town’s 2,795 housing units (per the assessor’s record) are used as vacation rentals,” according to the town document “Regulating Vacation Rentals.” Some on the council want voters to adopt restrictions on vacation rental ownership transfers to get the town closer to a single-digit percentage of rental housing.
The trickle down effect of the conversion to vacation rentals is profound - perhaps even staggering - as landlords forsake year-round rentals.
No one compiles the data to support such conclusions, but anecdotal evidence abound - from the Facebook page, “MDI Rental resource,” to a landlord on Main Street in Southwest Harbor who told QSJ that vacation rental is the only way to maximize profit on MDI.
Bar Harbor began to ruminate on how to tackle the problem in 2019 and may have inadvertently exacerbated it as landlords rushed to convert their rentals from year-round to vacation before changes to the land-use ordinance are adopted.
Of course, the collision between year-round versus short-term is felt all over the island. Bar Harbor is the 600-pound gorilla on MDI. Half of its workforce does not live on MDI. Its housing policy, demand for seasonal workers and tourism traffic send ripples across the island.
Not everyone agrees.
“Affordable housing has nothing to do with vacation rentals,” Cough told the Islander. “Vacation rentals grew out of the fact that housing wasn’t affordable.” Cough said that people should do what they want with their properties and was against the proposed restrictions.
Peter St. Germain said the topic of vacation rentals is a waste of time. St. Germain runs Llangolan Inn and Cottages at Hadley Point and Deer Run Realty Company, according to MDI Islander. Nate Young, the last candidate, owns Emery Cottages on Rt. 3. The debate on vacation rental controls is a moth flick away from their businesses.
One note on Nate Young. He is the former police chief who was suing the town at the same time he was running for town council in 2016 for discrimination after he was fired in 2014. His case was thrown out by a judge in 2018.
Abby the bartender
Abby the bartender has been living in the same house on Bowles Avenue the last three years with three roommates. Her rent is $800 a month. All in, they pay $3,600 for a four-bedroom house.
But the owner has decided to sell the house. Abby fears the buyer will do what many have done - turn the house into vacation rental where they can get $200 a night for each room, a seven-time return for about half the year.
Abby thinks her time as a full-time resident of MDI will be over. She wonders how businesses on the island will fare when more workers move off and eventually give up working here.
QSJ would like Jen Cough to say whether she has any empathy for Abby and what her thoughts are to sustain a workforce on MDI besides just the facile mantra, “government shouldn’t interfere.” She has refused requests from QSJ for an interview.
Peggy Rockerfeller Farms looking for manager to take over for C.J. Walke
TOWN HILL - C.J. Walke, the founding manager of the Peggy Rockefeller Farms, is leaving at the end of August after nine years, and the College of the Atlantic is looking for a replacement.
Walke said he and his wife had planned to move back to their home outside of Belfast after their daughters graduated from high school. The second one is graduating Sunday from MDI.
The ideal candidate, said Kourtney Collum, Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems, is someone who would like the experience of running a farm in hopes of being an owner/operator someday.
The job has one big benefit. It comes with a four/five-bedroom farmhouse built in 1930 so housing is not a gating issue.
David Rockefeller Sr. gifted the farms to the college in 2010, to be used in perpetuity for agriculture and conservation. The gift was accompanied by an endowment to help cover costs of management, maintenance and repairs.
The organic farm produces fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, broilers, turkeys, pasture and hay, as well as pasture-based beef and lamb.
It encompasses 125 acres of historic farmland with roughly two-thirds of the property covered in second-growth forest or wetland. It has a flock of 25 Romney sheep that are bred and raised for meat and wool, five Belted Galloway cattle that are bred and raised for beef, and 75 Rhode Island Red and Black Australorp laying hens. Seasonally, PRFs raises more than 400 organic broilers, as well as 100 organic turkeys for the Thanksgiving market.
COA has installed more than 100 solar panels, generating electricity far more than the farm consumes, with the surplus credited toward COA’s overall electricity use. All of these energy projects have involved student work from the planning stages to installation.
“The farm manager is responsible for overseeing all aspects of managing PRF including but not limited to livestock and pasture management, watershed management, sales and marketing, budgeting, oversight of work study students and seasonal staff, and maintenance of buildings, grounds, and equipment,” the job posting said.
Partnership offering MDI homeowners energy-saving heat pumps at steep discount
Bar Harbor, Maine - Sundog Solar, A Climate to Thrive, Versant Power and Efficiency Maine are teaming up to electrify MDI, said Lawson Wulsin, director of a Climate to Thrive.
The program is offering rebates of up to $1,500 for energy-saving heat pumps through Efficiency Maine.
“Heat pumps are very efficient and are one of the most economical ways to heat homes … heat pumps cost less to operate than a pellet stove and are significantly more economical than a propane boiler or oil furnace,” Wulsin said.
Two-thirds of Maine homes use fuel oil as the primary heating source, and most of Maine's energy dollars are leaving the state. If homes electrify and then source solar and other forms of renewable energy, it dramatically reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes the local economy, and saves money, he said.
"Our customers are thrilled by the dramatic reduction in their heating bills after installing heat pumps," says Chuck Piper, co-owner of Sundog Solar. "This is also an effective way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels."
The partnership, Electrify MDI, runs through June 30 and provides a streamlined process for installing residential heat pumps. To sign up for a free assessment, visit aclimatetothrive.org/electrifyMDI.
Halibut season moving fast and furious
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - The fish was swimming in the morning and sold out by the end of the day.
Jeff Dutra, who has added retail seafood to his gardening business at Seawall, filleted a 76-pound halibut on the deck at Dysart’s Marina Wednesday morning and by nightfall he was sold out.
Maine’s halibut season is only one-month long, ending on June 14. Many lobstermen add halibut to their catch for that time, like Ariel Gilley of Seal Cove who fishes off her boat F/V Queen B out of SWH.
She took up fishing for halibut for the first time and caught a 57-pounder. Halibut, like flounder, is a bottom feeder. The catch can depends on how much food the fish can feed off the bottom, like soft shell lobster and other prey. But this is the time of year for buying fish caught the same day.