BAR HARBOR–– Air pollution, water pollution, visual pollution, too many pedestrians clogging the streets and sidewalks of downtown, and greedy, mostly non-resident business owners making too much money that doesn’t benefit anybody but them.
Thank you so much for doing this research in an attempt to get out the story. Hope it works.
At this point I am tired of the whole controversy. The Town Council cannot seem to effectively get out theri side of the story. So we are faced with a situation where they are ham-handedly trying to "improve" regulation of cruise ships. Perhaps they are afraid of being caught in the middle of dueling lawsuits by APPL and Mr. Sidman. Your article is very helpful in toning down the discussion.
Obviously most businesses like the current volume of cruise ship passengers and would like to see more in April and November. Leave that aside, it is hard to imagine any change in Bar Harbor's economy that would replace the revenue, including the profits of business owners and the wages and tips earned by their employees, not to mention the revenue earned by town government that is used to make infrastructure improvements that benefit cruise ship passengers, other visitors, local businesses and local residents.
Our federal government is horrible with name calling, threats, violence, and threatened shutdowns of essential services. Bar harbor was never like that. Why is it becoming like that now?
Law suits are the reason. Law suits are adversarial. The outcome of a law suit is that one party wins and the other loses with the profits going to the lawyers. Law suits generate more law suits if someone on one side thinks out loud and says the wrong thing, hence the cautious fumbling discussions.
Here's hoping that we find a way out of this mess.
Considering that the TOTAL number of businesses in Bar Harbor is 532, It seems as though your survey only counts for 20% of all. That is not a huge endorsement for the small group of businesses that instead of making their case in a democratic fashion, chose instead to have a temper tantrum and sue the taxpayers of this town. Perhaps this vocal minority of businesses would make a bigger splash ( pun intended) if they made huge contributions to the new costly school.
Mr Farrar does not understand math. He claims 250,000 passengers are 16% of the 4 million tourists that come to MDI ANP. That is nearly a 3x exaggeration. The answer is 6%. Since only 77% get off the ships on average it is really only 4.8%. So it is over a3 x exaggeration.
Mr. O'Connell, thank you for bringing my math error to our attention. It has already been corrected.
Did you happen to see this part of the article, "a few minutes browsing Facebook, walking downtown, or perusing comments made at the end of Bar Harbor Story articles provides evidence of the vitriol being thrown around: name calling, negative stickers, protection orders, calls to boycott certain businesses, and general negativity from which no good can come for a small community." Personal insults are negative.
Thanks Shaun. Personal insults are negative I agree! Have you walked by the GEM car kiosk on Main St. to see the Sidman photo with the X through it? Or walk by the "Rebel Lobster" to see F...K Charles Sidman stickers on the post of the outdoor eating table? I haven't seen any negative stickers concerning APPLL around town but I have a good mind to boycott those businesses that display such negativity.
I appreciate the hard work required to put out a weekly journal such as The Bar Harbor Story and I generally enjoy reading your articles and essays. But while I don't doubt for a second the sincerity of your effort to poll the Bar Harbor business community I am afraid that I can't take the results of your informal survey seriously.
A few years ago I asked a lobsterman friend how his season was going and he cited the usual: high cost of bait, high cost of fuel, difficulty in finding dependable sternmen, and the endless traps he was losing to those damn cruise ships. In other words business was terrible and he was pretty near going broke!
Never one to pass up an opportunity I responded by asking, "Well how in the world did you afford that $30,000 truck?"
"Thirty thousand?" he replied, "That truck set me back $60,000!"
I've spent my entire life around businessmen. My Dad owned an engineering company, both my brothers have owned and operated several different businesses and I've owned 3 business myself. In my entire life I have seldom met a businessman who openly admitted making an even "acceptable" profit, nor have I ever met many businessman who would willingly turn away a single source of customers.
So an informal survey asking businessmen (and women) whether or not a reasonable cut in cruise ship visits was a good idea was pretty much doomed to failure right from the start.
There will never be enough business in Bar Harbor for most local businessmen to favor any restrictions whatever upon any potential source of additional income.
The danger is that this ofttimes blind pursuit of profits can not only potentially result in irreparable damage to the sense of community and "livability" of the town, it already has. Just ask anyone who lives in or attempts to travel within the downtown area between April 1 and November 1.
Naturalist/philosopher Edward Abbey once wrote,"We had a good thing in America but got carried away..." It ofttimes seems to me that Bar Harbor is suffering from the same problem.
So the headline says businesses but the first paragraph says:
PAR collected data and opinions from property owners, year-round residents, seasonal residents, and businesses with a goal “to provide data to guide the Town Council in setting limits on cruise ship visitation over the next seven years.”
Did they collect data from a variety of inhabitants or just businesses?
If you read the article, you'll hopefully see that it's both the PAR opinion from 2022, often shown in pull quotes with attributions as well as the hours of comments just from downtown businesses that Shaun did throughout the last few weeks.
PAR collected data from whoever responded to the online survey. Shaun (going door to door) collected comments from mostly downtown retail and restaurants this summer.
"I have been selling things in town for 33 years, a hugely well-respected collection, even by museum standards" This one made my day, I needed a chuckle. thanks.
“(Cruise ship passengers) challenge the peace of small-town life whereas car passengers come to escape into the environment.” I would love someone to articulate how this is "small-town life". We are a physically small town, but we have more "big town" issues than most cities do. Do people retire to here thinking this is a laid-back place?
I am not aware of many ads sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce or its allies touting MDI as a desirable place for overland visitors to come during the shoulder seasons, so I would have to question just how fact-based some of the points expressed by the business respondents are.
There is nothing about the most lucrative business in town. The lodging industry does not appreciate the Town parking 15 story hotels in their customers view shed. I have gotten complaints.
Look. We paid $25,000 for Pan Atlantic and they said Bar Harbor broke the record for the number of responses making it the most accurate survey ever. At the end of that survey is 250 pages of comments. 50 pages of short statements claiming cruse ships were positive and 200 pages containing some well thought out negative comments.
Ok - I just re-read it and I see that. I’d be curious if the non business owner residents surveyed in 2021? 2022 had such a positive outlook or what they would have said to Shaun now. I appreciate the work you and Shaun do and how objective you are. This piece seems slanted to me.A survey is one thing but as someone married to a journalist for many years I also know it’s easy to find a source to prove a point.
No worries, Laura! We'd be curious, too. Sadly, we don't have the money or ability that the town did to survey all segments of the population, which is why Shaun focused on one segment and stressed that throughout the article and used quotes from people within that segment (and attached data) from both sides as well as pull quotes from the original story.
Thanks - I appreciate your response. It seems the businesses voices have been amplified repeatedly (not just by you) and it’s the voters who are not businesses who have voted but whose votes have been disregarded. My house is not in BH so I don’t really have a dog in the fight. I do know we used to go to BH for restaurants and shopping regularly and no longer do. That’s anecdotal but I wonder how many other island residents have also changed their habits and taken their business elsewhere. Again thanks for the work you do to keep people informed.
Thank you so much for doing this research in an attempt to get out the story. Hope it works.
At this point I am tired of the whole controversy. The Town Council cannot seem to effectively get out theri side of the story. So we are faced with a situation where they are ham-handedly trying to "improve" regulation of cruise ships. Perhaps they are afraid of being caught in the middle of dueling lawsuits by APPL and Mr. Sidman. Your article is very helpful in toning down the discussion.
Obviously most businesses like the current volume of cruise ship passengers and would like to see more in April and November. Leave that aside, it is hard to imagine any change in Bar Harbor's economy that would replace the revenue, including the profits of business owners and the wages and tips earned by their employees, not to mention the revenue earned by town government that is used to make infrastructure improvements that benefit cruise ship passengers, other visitors, local businesses and local residents.
Our federal government is horrible with name calling, threats, violence, and threatened shutdowns of essential services. Bar harbor was never like that. Why is it becoming like that now?
Law suits are the reason. Law suits are adversarial. The outcome of a law suit is that one party wins and the other loses with the profits going to the lawyers. Law suits generate more law suits if someone on one side thinks out loud and says the wrong thing, hence the cautious fumbling discussions.
Here's hoping that we find a way out of this mess.
Considering that the TOTAL number of businesses in Bar Harbor is 532, It seems as though your survey only counts for 20% of all. That is not a huge endorsement for the small group of businesses that instead of making their case in a democratic fashion, chose instead to have a temper tantrum and sue the taxpayers of this town. Perhaps this vocal minority of businesses would make a bigger splash ( pun intended) if they made huge contributions to the new costly school.
Mr Farrar does not understand math. He claims 250,000 passengers are 16% of the 4 million tourists that come to MDI ANP. That is nearly a 3x exaggeration. The answer is 6%. Since only 77% get off the ships on average it is really only 4.8%. So it is over a3 x exaggeration.
Mr. O'Connell, thank you for bringing my math error to our attention. It has already been corrected.
Did you happen to see this part of the article, "a few minutes browsing Facebook, walking downtown, or perusing comments made at the end of Bar Harbor Story articles provides evidence of the vitriol being thrown around: name calling, negative stickers, protection orders, calls to boycott certain businesses, and general negativity from which no good can come for a small community." Personal insults are negative.
Thanks Shaun. Personal insults are negative I agree! Have you walked by the GEM car kiosk on Main St. to see the Sidman photo with the X through it? Or walk by the "Rebel Lobster" to see F...K Charles Sidman stickers on the post of the outdoor eating table? I haven't seen any negative stickers concerning APPLL around town but I have a good mind to boycott those businesses that display such negativity.
I appreciate the hard work required to put out a weekly journal such as The Bar Harbor Story and I generally enjoy reading your articles and essays. But while I don't doubt for a second the sincerity of your effort to poll the Bar Harbor business community I am afraid that I can't take the results of your informal survey seriously.
A few years ago I asked a lobsterman friend how his season was going and he cited the usual: high cost of bait, high cost of fuel, difficulty in finding dependable sternmen, and the endless traps he was losing to those damn cruise ships. In other words business was terrible and he was pretty near going broke!
Never one to pass up an opportunity I responded by asking, "Well how in the world did you afford that $30,000 truck?"
"Thirty thousand?" he replied, "That truck set me back $60,000!"
I've spent my entire life around businessmen. My Dad owned an engineering company, both my brothers have owned and operated several different businesses and I've owned 3 business myself. In my entire life I have seldom met a businessman who openly admitted making an even "acceptable" profit, nor have I ever met many businessman who would willingly turn away a single source of customers.
So an informal survey asking businessmen (and women) whether or not a reasonable cut in cruise ship visits was a good idea was pretty much doomed to failure right from the start.
There will never be enough business in Bar Harbor for most local businessmen to favor any restrictions whatever upon any potential source of additional income.
The danger is that this ofttimes blind pursuit of profits can not only potentially result in irreparable damage to the sense of community and "livability" of the town, it already has. Just ask anyone who lives in or attempts to travel within the downtown area between April 1 and November 1.
Naturalist/philosopher Edward Abbey once wrote,"We had a good thing in America but got carried away..." It ofttimes seems to me that Bar Harbor is suffering from the same problem.
So the headline says businesses but the first paragraph says:
PAR collected data and opinions from property owners, year-round residents, seasonal residents, and businesses with a goal “to provide data to guide the Town Council in setting limits on cruise ship visitation over the next seven years.”
Did they collect data from a variety of inhabitants or just businesses?
And thanks for asking!
Hey, Laura!
If you read the article, you'll hopefully see that it's both the PAR opinion from 2022, often shown in pull quotes with attributions as well as the hours of comments just from downtown businesses that Shaun did throughout the last few weeks.
PAR collected data from whoever responded to the online survey. Shaun (going door to door) collected comments from mostly downtown retail and restaurants this summer.
"I have been selling things in town for 33 years, a hugely well-respected collection, even by museum standards" This one made my day, I needed a chuckle. thanks.
“(Cruise ship passengers) challenge the peace of small-town life whereas car passengers come to escape into the environment.” I would love someone to articulate how this is "small-town life". We are a physically small town, but we have more "big town" issues than most cities do. Do people retire to here thinking this is a laid-back place?
I am not aware of many ads sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce or its allies touting MDI as a desirable place for overland visitors to come during the shoulder seasons, so I would have to question just how fact-based some of the points expressed by the business respondents are.
There is nothing about the most lucrative business in town. The lodging industry does not appreciate the Town parking 15 story hotels in their customers view shed. I have gotten complaints.
532 is the number of Bar Harbor businesses listed. 117 ( downtown businesses) were surveyed.
Look. We paid $25,000 for Pan Atlantic and they said Bar Harbor broke the record for the number of responses making it the most accurate survey ever. At the end of that survey is 250 pages of comments. 50 pages of short statements claiming cruse ships were positive and 200 pages containing some well thought out negative comments.
I would not pay 2 cents for this survey!
We voted 58-42. Move on. Quit denying reality.
Percent that is, just to be clear.
Ok - I just re-read it and I see that. I’d be curious if the non business owner residents surveyed in 2021? 2022 had such a positive outlook or what they would have said to Shaun now. I appreciate the work you and Shaun do and how objective you are. This piece seems slanted to me.A survey is one thing but as someone married to a journalist for many years I also know it’s easy to find a source to prove a point.
No worries, Laura! We'd be curious, too. Sadly, we don't have the money or ability that the town did to survey all segments of the population, which is why Shaun focused on one segment and stressed that throughout the article and used quotes from people within that segment (and attached data) from both sides as well as pull quotes from the original story.
I hope you have a great day!
Thanks - I appreciate your response. It seems the businesses voices have been amplified repeatedly (not just by you) and it’s the voters who are not businesses who have voted but whose votes have been disregarded. My house is not in BH so I don’t really have a dog in the fight. I do know we used to go to BH for restaurants and shopping regularly and no longer do. That’s anecdotal but I wonder how many other island residents have also changed their habits and taken their business elsewhere. Again thanks for the work you do to keep people informed.