Report Suggests Bar Harbor Expand Some Premium Parking Areas
Charles Sidman issues statement about APPLL's cruise ship case appeal
BAR HARBOR—Tax Collector Betsy Spear presented the Town Council with an analysis of the town’s parking spaces last week and Tuesday night, councilors will meet again at both a workshop and their regular monthly meeting.
Paid parking in Bar Harbor’s center drew a lot of public debate in 2016, 2017, and then again in 2019. The town has a Parking Solutions Task Force which advises the Council on parking. In 2016 Bermello Ajamil & Partners Inc. (B&A) recommended the town install both meters and a parking garage. The town eventually installed meters. This season the town is converting those meters to kiosks.
Currently, parking rates range from $2 to $4 per hour. Premium areas have the highest cost and have time limitations of four hours. Parking is enforced between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. on all days except Sundays (12-9 p.m.) and enforcement occurs from May 15 to October 30. The fees go to specific items in the town’s budget.
At the last Town Council meeting, Vice Chair Gary Friedmann called Spear’s report really helpful for looking at the parking program for its purposes, which is not just to create revenue but to also reduce congestion.
Spear wrote, “Paid parking was implemented in the Town of Bar Harbor with the goal of creating an efficient system and thus limiting congestion on the roads.”
Her presentation to the Town Council was geared toward whether or not the system in Bar Harbor is efficient, not on the tax and financial implications of the program, which has also been discussed as both the councilors and Warrant Committee members look at the town’s budget.
There are standard ways to look at the efficiency of a municipality’s parking program, she said.
“The parking industry uses the 85% rule to help determine how constrained or efficient a system might be. The rule says if you are somewhere between 70% to 85% occupancy then it is an efficient system. This would mean that there would be some open spaces still available for visitors to find when they come to Town. If you are over this percentage then you have more of a constrained system which could lead to congestion. If you are below this percentage, then there are a lot of available parking spaces,” Spear explained.
And Bar Harbor? It’s doing okay if the goal is to become a more efficient parking system for those who need to park in the downtown area.
Spear’s analysis investigated how the average occupancy rates changed between 2022 and 2023, for two months, making special note of where the average occupancy rates fall within the 85% rule. She chose a high-volume month, August, and a shoulder season month, October, for the comparisons.
In August, the areas where parking was constrained decreased from 14 to 8, out of a total of 18 areas. Efficient sub areas increased from 1 to 7.
In August of 2022, the occupancy was about 91% and in 2023 it was at 82%.
“Ideally, according to the 85% rule, we would want to find a way to continue to decrease the number of sub areas in the constrained system,” Spear wrote.
The average number of cars in spots decreased in October. The town had two constrained areas in 2022 and none in 2023. In October, in both 2022 and 2023 the town spots were at a lower occupancy rate: 62% and 56%.
“It didn’t change too-too much,” she said.
“Ideally, a good goal here would be to try and move some of those under-utilized sub areas to moderate use,” Spear wrote.
To do that, rates could be lowered in those under used sub areas.
She recommended the Council expand the Cottage Street Premium area and no other hourly rate changes. She suggested waiting for more data since the last rate increase occurred mid summer.
That area currently extends from Main Street to Rodick Street. An expansion of premium spots (which are more expensive) could be from Main Street to Bridge Street, including the Casino Lot.
“We are recommending that it would be best to have an entire season completed to get a better picture of average occupancy rates and what factors might be driving the changes,” she wrote.
Lower visitation numbers, less personal vehicle use, people staying outside of downtown and walking in, could all impact those numbers. Councilors said that they’d heard visitation numbers were down from 2022 to 2023 anywhere from 2.5% to 5% depending on the source of the numbers. The two main sources being the Bar Harbor Chamber and Acadia National Park.
At the end of the presentation, Councilor Kyle Shank asked how long the town would lose the designated RV parking on lower Main Street, by the ball fields, because of construction on the road. Police Captain Christopher Wharff was unsure.
Charles Sidman issues statement about APPLL’s and Pilot Association’s cruise ship case appeals
On Friday, the Bar Harbor Story reported about the appeal of a federal decision upholding the town’s new cruise ship disembarkation limits. We updated the story to include defendant intervenor Charles Sidman’s response and statement. Because the updates do not also go out to subscribers via emails, many people did not see that, so we’re printing it here as well.
On March 30, Defendant-Intervenor Charles Sidman responded as below to the Bar Harbor Story’s request for statement(s) regarding the plaintiffs’ appeal of the Federal District Court’s February decision that the 2022 Bar Harbor Cruise Ship Ordinance is constitutional:
”In quoted remarks, Eben Salvatore and fellow APPLL officers claim that the initiative had a ‘secret intent’ that would have led to a different result ‘if the true purpose and effect of this petition had been fully disclosed to the voters.’ Such statements could not be more false and misleading, and resemble what Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters from an American blog of March 29 wrote, that ‘Russia’s only strategy for success in Ukraine is to win the disinformation war in which it is engaged’, and ‘that disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs.’ Truth check – the initiative and now ordinance clearly and explicitly intended to drastically reduce cruise ship traffic and disembarkation, a sentiment supported several times by the majority of Bar Harbor citizens (and businesses), and then enacted by voters in full awareness at the ballot box.
”APPLL’s members have evidently drunk their own Kool-Aid and simply cannot believe that our town does not support what is so beneficial to them, and largely to them. In this vein, they claim that ‘1.4 million in annual cruise ship fees that the town could receive are going away because of this petition. That lost revenue must be replaced with tax dollars and that is a major reason why we are seeing such a massive tax increase in Bar Harbor.’ In fact, Bar Harbor is not slated to receive anything like $1.4 million in annual cruise ship revenue, income that in any case is legally required to be spent directly for the benefit of cruise ship passengers rather than general town expenses. If and when we are relieved to be deluged by fewer cruise ship passengers, their associated expenses should also go away and do not need to be replaced by tax dollars. This delusional revenue thus has little or nothing to do with the real tax burden on Bar Harbor citizens, and is simply more disinformation by the oligarchs!
”Lastly, the ordinance that APPLL contends is a major contributor to the town’s tax dilemma could be a significant solution instead. APPLL members receive and pocket many times more from cruise passenger tendering than the town sees from its meager fees (easily demonstrable or refutable by public release of APPLL members' accounts.) As a game-changer for taxpayers, the town could and should immediately remove the improperly granted monopoly and return to the tender-receiving business as the initiative clearly anticipated and ordinance allows, and put this income toward general town benefit. The over-reservation fees collectible from disembarkation landowners that the ordinance establishes could also make a major contribution to Bar Harbor’s budget (if and when the Town ever gets around to implementing them.). These possibilities are clearly major reasons why Ocean Properties through APPLL opposes the ordinance, and demonstrates the inconsistency between their public stance and private benefits.
”Overall, therefore, let us recall Shakespeare, as in, APPLL ‘thou doth protest too much.’ Or follow the common maxim to ‘consider the source’ of all claims and statements. Finally, there is a Latin proverb translating as ‘False in one thing, false in all.’ Everyone should be clear on who and what we are dealing with.”
The original story with APPLL’s statement is linked below.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Bar Harbor Parking Information
The link for resident permits is www.thepermitportal.com
APPL. Sheesh.
But oh how much work it takes to refute lies.
ThankYou Charles Sidman. For your diligence and wit.
I think Sunday parking is free until 12 noon. That was hard fought for. It didn't make sense to give people a parking ticket because they went to church. Even less sense when at the time Portland, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Orlando, San Francisco, Houston and New Orleans have free parking on Sunday. Just call me crazy but even though Christians from away call us the frozen chosen doesn't mean we have to be Scrooge on Sundays.