Two years after voters passed a citizen’s initiative to sharply reduce cruise ship traffic — leading to an ongoing stream of legal complaints — Bar Harbor officials hope that another vote next month will bring the resulting lawsuits to an end.
But voters will have to agree to repeal the limits they approved in November 2022 for that to happen.
The town council is asking voters to approve a new measure — Article 4 on the town’s Nov. 5 ballot — that would set a daily limit of 3,200 passengers a day, which is more than twice the current 1,000-passenger daily limit but less than caps that existed two years ago. The proposal also would change how the town enforces the cap by establishing agreements directly between cruise lines and the town, rather than by imposing sanctions against pier owners who allow more than 1,000 passengers ashore.
The question of how much the town should restrict cruise ship visits has embroiled Bar Harbor for more than two years, pitting residents opposed to the industry against the local business community, and ensnaring officials who find themselves enforcing and defending in court a voter-initiated limit that they don’t readily agree with.
For members of the council, the issue is not just about what the daily passenger cap should be. They want a system under which the cruise lines have to contractually agree to the new limit, which would have to be approved by voters, so the industry stops suing the town.
“Am I for 3,200 [passengers] a day? Not really,” Joe Minutolo, one of seven members of the town council, said this month at a forum. The 1,000-passenger limit puts the town at risk of more lawsuits, he continued, adding that he personally would be happy if no cruise ships came to town.
“There’s a lot less risk and a lot less [legal] exposure when you have a contract that is willfully signed by all the parties,” Minutolo said. “It comes down to the reality of the cost of constant litigation. Having an agreement that gives this town the power to make changes under our terms, I think, is a pretty strong agreement.”
But even if voters approve higher limits, it seems unlikely to eliminate the rancor and division over the issue.
Supporters of the current 1,000-passenger daily limit are urging voters to reject the council plan. Not only would it scrap the will of the voters as expressed in 2022 and raise the daily passenger limit, but it also would prohibit residents from initiating more ballot measures on the issue without council support, they say.
Plus, if the council plan is approved, it would take six years to enact any changes to the cap — a measure that town officials say is designed to give cruise lines, which plan their itineraries far in advance, adequate time to adjust their schedules.
Charles Sidman, the resident who spearheaded the 2022 citizen’s initiative and has since filed related legal complaints against the town, says the cruise industry has too much sway over the town council. He also accuses the council of being dishonest in describing the town’s proposal.
The council is proposing to use industry estimates for how many passengers are on each ship that stops in Bar Harbor, instead of counting passengers as they come ashore, even though the actual number could be significantly higher, he said. And those estimates will not include smaller ships that carry 200 hundred passengers or less, which are exempt from the daily limits.
Sidman said that any change in the daily passenger limit will not make the legal challenges go away. The town does not have legal authority to contract with cruise lines to establish limits that conflict with the 2022 referendum vote, he argued, and he will pursue further legal action if they try to implement their plan.
“The town is willing to abandon all honesty on this issue, and even more troublesome, is willing to sacrifice basic democratic rights and principles to achieve their commercial backers’ goals,” Sidman said. “The values of honesty and democratic rights and governance are at stake and worth fighting for here. Cruise numbers are now only a sideshow.”
But the council’s proposal has support on the other side of the cruise ship debate.
A local business group called APPLL, which is suing the town over the 1,000 passenger limit, supports the proposal and is expected to drop its legal challenge if voters approve the new daily cap.
“Our support for Article 4 is based on the stability of the agreements that its passage provides,” said Eben Salvatore, an officer with the group and an executive with Bar Harbor Resorts, which gets business from the cruise lines and passengers. “The citizen’s petition was essentially a ban on cruise ships, disguised as a passenger cap. The long-term impacts of this citizen’s initiative are already harming small businesses in Bar Harbor.”
David Paine, longtime owner of Jordan’s Restaurant on Cottage Street, said the council’s proposal is a “balanced” solution that will help support small businesses like his and preserve up to $1 million that the town typically collects in passenger fees each year.
With local property taxes expected to increase, in part to help pay for a new $63 million elementary school, the town should do what it can to preserve residents’ incomes, he said.
“The Bar Harbor economy is a tourist-based economy,” Paine said. “It doesn’t make sense to me to do away with the income from passengers getting off the cruise ships, and raising taxes.”
The debate over cruise ship visits in Bar Harbor, which gets millions of tourists who arrive overland each summer and fall, simmered for years before COVID brought it into sharp focus. In 2020 and again in 2021, all cruise visits to Bar Harbor were canceled because of the pandemic, which for many underscored the impact the ships and their passengers have when they are in town.
In July of 2021, more than half of respondents to a town survey said that cruise ship congestion has a negative overall impact on the town. And in November of the following year, voters approved the referendum that set the daily limit of 1,000 cruise ship passengers a day — which effectively bans large ships from visiting.
In 2022, prior to that referendum, the town had daily limits that changed with the season. The daily passenger limit in Bar Harbor was 3,500 from April through August, and 5,500 in September and October, when local cruise ship traffic spikes to coincide with Maine’s fall foliage season.
