Will quadrennial voters swing cruise ship vote in Bar Harbor?
BAR HARBOR, Oct. 25, 2024 - More than 14 percent of the voters who cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election here did not vote two years later when the citizens petitioners won their referendum 1,780 to 1,273 to cap daily, disembarking cruise ship passengers at 1,000.
And about 40 percent of those presidential election-only voters did not participate in the local questions for a town charter change in 2020.
The national elections traditionally captures the largest municipal turnout for an election. In 2020, it was 71 percent of the town’s 5,016 registered voters. Joe Biden won 2,678 votes, or 74.9 percent, and Donald Trump received only 804, or 22.5 percent. Three other candidates totaled 104 votes.
On the other hand, off-year municipal elections in June 2023 and 2024 were only able to generate a 31 percent turnout.
How many of the quadrennial voters will cast ballots on the local questions on Nov. 5 is anyone’s guess. But there are enough of them to make a difference.
There are six local questions, including Article 4, the Town Council’s initiative to repeal the 2022 citizens cap.
Handicapping the quadrennial voter is tricky, but there are safe assumptions to be made.
This is one of the most progressive cohorts in the country. No doubt they will give Kamala Harris a huge margin of victory, perhaps even surpassing’s Biden’s edge four years ago.
That progressive sensibility will no doubt help State Sen. Nicole Grohoski’s re-election bid and councilor Gary Friedmann, who is running to replace Lynne Williams as the state rep from the 14th district, which includes Bar Harbor, Mount Desert and Lamoine. Democrats have a big advantage in the district. Grohoski and Friedmann also are well-known climate activists. Will the quadrennial voters make the connection and vote against Article 4’s profligate support of the cruise ship industry, one of the most penalized polluters on record?
To do that, voters would have to overcome the published recommendations of town boards on the ballot, including that of the Town Council. They did that in 2022. Will there be a repeat?
The decision may already have been made. An overwhelming percentage of the votes in this town is by absentee ballots. In 2020, there were 3,559 votes cast, including 2,979 by absentee ballots.
Managing cruise ships has become the most polarizing issue dividing the town between residents who seek to arrest the decline in their quality of life wrought by overtourism and the local business establishment which reaches all the way to a United States Senator, Angus King.
King was the third largest recipient of donations from the cruise ship industry in 2023-24 as reported by Open Secrets.
His long-time former chief of staff, Kay Rand, is the co-chair of the “Vote Yes of Four” committee and wife of former Town Manager Cornell Knight.
Restaurant and shop owners in a direct line of traffic from disembarking passengers form the bulk of support for liberalizing cruise ship visits as proposed by the council from 1,000 passengers a day to more than 3,200 for most days in the busy months of September and October. They are getting collateral affirmation from bankers who lend money to them, Mount Desert Hospital which fills its emergency room with sick or injured passengers on cruise ship days, the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce and the most unlikely of them all, the College of the Atlantic.
Their message is singularly self-referential, rarely considerate of the collateral damage to the community at large.
One owner of multiple eateries in town recently posted on social media, “Our livelihoods depend on maintaining the similar number of people coming to our town year after year in order to not only repay our debts, but to maintain the quality of life that we have built for our families.
“In my particular case, 30 boats equates to $300,000 in revenue in one of my businesses. That is over 30% of my gross revenue. How would that feel to you if you were me?”
Many of these “mom and pops” have grown into big businesses with multiple outlets and extended credit lines. The sense of entitlement is palpable.
Thank you Winston Shaw for your comments that highlight the hypocrisy of some of these BarHarbor business owners who imply they are living on saltine crackers so they can help Bar Harbor make sure Big Cruise can overwhelm and pollute our waters, downtown, and Park. It would be informative to know what houses and business they own (or have mortgaged), and the vehicles registered under their names or their corporate entities, including those out of state and country. This information might put their self pity in perspective. The woman I believe you may be referring to, once caught my attention with her comments at a public hearing: it struck me as odd comments that had no relation to the topic being discussed. She expressed some distress at having too big a house and too many children. At the time, I felt some compassion for someone who apparently was overwhelmed by life, and hoped her children were not aware of her comments. I wonder if town of Bar Harbor is at a similar place: a town of 5,000 that has taken on such a level of Uber tourism that it is just too much to reasonably deal with anymore, and desperate solutions are being promulgated without much thought to the future consequences.
You hit the nail on the head when you wrote "A palpable sense of entitlement"in relation to the attitude of far too many Bar Harbor businesses. One of my absolute favorite examples of this was the woman living in a house assessed at $1,237,700 dollars whose husband owns multiple Bar Harbor businesses (including a 44 room B&B) who claimed she was forced to illegally rent a room in her house weekly to "be able to afford to be a stay at home mom." Naturalist/novelist/activist Edward Abbey authored two quotes that fit modern day Bar Harbor to a T: 1) "We had a good thing in America (Bar Harbor) but got carried away, in a nation devoted to the proposition that too much is not enough..." and 2) "Growth for growth sake is the ideology of the cancer cell." Reading many of the comments made by local business people in defense of ever increasing cruise ship traffic it would be easy to assume that numerous bar harbor businesses are hanging by a thread when it comes to profits. Yet every time one turns around said businesses are building new buildings, expanding retail outlets and building themselves million dollar homes. To paraphrase Shakespeare, Me thinks the good businessmen of Bar Harbor protesteth too much!