Town Council Fails To Come To Agreement with Cruise Lines
No MOAs set for town and cruise ships.
BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Town Council has announced that it has failed to come to agreements with the cruise ship industry. The Council met in executive session about the agreements on Tuesday, December 19. That session was not open to the public.
The statement from the Bar Harbor Town Council, December 20, 2023, reads,
“Through the MOA Working Group, the Town of Bar Harbor has been meeting with representatives from Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) and the cruise ship industry to attempt, in good faith, to renegotiate the MOAs beyond December 2023. While the conversations were productive, helping each group understand our positions, we were not able to reach agreement at this time.
“The council remains committed to reducing cruise ship visitation. The anticipated court ruling in APPLL et al vs. Town of Bar Harbor will help us figure out the path forward.”
Town Council Chair Valerie Peacock explained during a September meeting that while the federal case against the town’s cruise ship limits is in court, the town is running two parallel threads as it tries to determine how to deal with upcoming seasons in two different scenarios.
In the first scenario, the changes are upheld and the town wins the lawsuit. That would mean that the disembarkation rules limiting cruise ship disembarkations to 1000 or less a day (without fines) are upheld or partially upheld. Those plans have been discussed in executive sessions because of the litigation, but they expect a draft to be made public in October. Town Attorney Stephen Wagner said it will be a stand-alone ordinance and include updates to the Harbor portion of the land use ordinance as well as updates to standard operating procedures.
In the second scenario, the town loses the case and the changes are not upheld. If that occurs, the town said that it would continue with the new memorandums of agreement (MOAs) that the town began in 2022. Those MOAs also limited cruise ship visitation, but were not based on passenger disembarkations.
The memorandums of agreement are the town’s agreements with cruise lines about when they can visit and other details. These documents are currently being used as the town waits for the federal court decision, but have not been renewed per the statement above.
The last time the MOAs were negotiated, it was by two councilors, former Town Manager Kevin Sutherland, Harbormaster Chris Wharff, and Cruise Maine Executive Director, Sarah Flink. This time round it was Peacock, Minutolo, Finance Director Sarah Gilbert, Wharff, and Town Attorney Stephen Wagner as the working group.
We will be updating this story as it continues and investigating its implications.
Kevin Sutherland gave the cruise industry the final say in changing the amount of passengers allowed to come ashore. He got away with selling out the town right under the nose of our naive Town Council. Unless Judge Walker rules in favor of the citizens vote for 1000 Max per day we are screwed