It’s been nearly three years since the town of Bar Harbor, Maine voted to limit cruise traffic. In the years since, the citizen-led initiative has spurred lawsuits, an attempted repeal, and uncertainty about the future. While not entirely parallel, the case bears striking resemblance to Sitka’s, where an initiative to limit cruise traffic will be considered in a special election on May 28.
Bar Harbor, Maine is a picturesque coastal community, not unlike Sitka. It’s a small waterfront town of around 5,000 people, accounting for around half the population of Mt. Desert Island.
Charles Sidman is a scientific researcher and a small business owner who has lived there since the 1980s.
“Our mountains are not the size of Denali, but they’re nice little mountains,” Sidman told KCAW on a call in late May. “It’s beautiful outdoors. I mean, you can hike, and boat, and camp, and picnic and do all the things that people do.”
And, like Sitka, Bar Harbor is a popular tourist destination – millions of people visit the island every year to tour Acadia National Park. Most come by car, but some visitors come by cruise ship – until recently, the number of cruise visitors had grown to around 300,000 a summer.
And, like Sitka, that didn’t sit well with everyone in Bar Harbor, including Sidman.
“For every Bar Harborite or land visitor on the street, there would be 10 people from a cruise ship. You couldn’t walk down the sidewalk. And that was really killing the town and its experience for the residents, the land visitors,” Sidman said. “This temporary, just absolute innundation.”
Unlike Sitka, where cruise traffic has been a part of the local economy since the 1970s, the industry has only been in Bar Harbor for around 30 years. In 2008, the community drafted a cruise plan and worked with the industry to limit visitors to around 5,000 a day.
Bar Harbor’s current Council Chair Val Peacock said at that time meeting those caps seemed far away. But in the last decade that started to change.
“They could see people liked coming here. They’re getting good reviews,” Peacock said. “The town was accepting more and more reservations in that space, and we started to get increased visitation. And around 2018 and ’19, it started to get really steep.”
The cown council discussed its options in a long, public – sometimes messy – process. Ultimately the council negotiated an agreement with the cruise industry. But Sidman felt the council wasn’t going far enough. So he organized a citizen petition to limit numbers to 1,000 passengers a day.
“We were the first ones, to my knowledge, to actually legislate serious limits,” Sidman said. “Some towns have been fighting it for a long time. The West Coast and your region has been agitating about it. Venice has been sinking and trying to keep them further away. But nobody has really taken the legislative approach.”
In November of 2022, the initiative to limit cruise traffic won with 58% of the vote.
“It went into effect in December, and on New Year’s Eve we had a lawsuit filed against us,” Peacock said.
The lawsuit was not from the cruise industry, but from the Association to Preserve and Protect Local Livelihoods, or APPLL, an organization of local businesses – restaurants, gift shops, tour operators and the pier owners, Golden Anchor, that formed in response to the initiative.
“There’s nothing wrong with people visiting your town,” said Eben Salvatore in a phone call with KCAW on May 23.
Salvatore is a member of APPLL and runs pier and tender operations in Bar Harbor.
“These people knew that 95% of our cruise ships would not come anymore, and that 95% of the ships that visit Bar Harbor are over 1,000 passengers,” Salvatore said. “So they knew full well that this was a ban, this was an extermination, and they didn’t care.”
In federal court, APPLL argued that the ordinance violated the US Constitution by restricting commerce and interstate travel. The council held off on enacting the ordinance at the time.
In February 2024, more than a year after the suit was filed, a federal judge in Maine District Court upheld the cruise limit. APPLL appealed the decision, but the town finally moved to enforce the 1,000 visitor limit, with just a few months until the 2024 cruise season.
“Any reservation that we had, we sort of kept, but we stopped taking more,” Peacock said. “And then we started to try to build up the rules to actually enforce the ordinance, which requires the town to count passengers.”
It was a bumpy summer. The pier owners allowed passengers to disembark without permits, and the town sued them. Sidman also sued the town council for delaying its implementation of the initiative.
With industry support, the council tried to replace the cruise cap with a higher limit last fall. Peacock, who isn’t a fan of cruise ships herself, hoped they could find a middle ground to manage cruise traffic.
“What’s the best way for us to do that without having all of this massive litigation and angst in the community,” Peacock said. “There’s a trade off there that I thought was worth putting in front of the voters.”
That repeal referendum failed by a little over 60 votes last November.
Peacock said before the lawsuit, the city was budgeting around $40,000 a year for legal fees. Now that budget is closer to $350,000 a year.
“We’ve also lost revenue because we’re not having as many cruise ships come. We were getting revenue from that,” Peacock said. “There’s two hits to the budget that way.”
“We went from 70 cruise ships last year, down from 170 to 70, and this year there’s only 17, because the cruise lines understandably won’t come if they can’t welcome all their passengers ashore,” Salvatore said. “So they’re not coming.”
APPLL’s appeal of the limit is being considered by a panel of federal circuit court judges right now. The court heard oral arguments in January, and now it’s a waiting game to see whether the initiative will be overturned.
“Bar Harbor is very desirable, and we worked hard to make it that way and try to keep it that way,” Salvatore said. “So all we can do is hope that when this is resolved, whether it’s through the courts or referendum or some other structured settlement, that the cruise lines will return.”
Peacock worries that, if the initiative is overturned and the ships do come back, the town no longer has leverage to negotiate. If she could do it over, she’d try harder to get out ahead of it as a Council, and work with the community to find a solution.
“We could see this coming from a long ways away, and we let it get too far, get to the point of petitions, and then forcing the town’s hand in really uncomfortable ways,” Peacock said. “The key to it, I think, is to try to figure out how to help people understand that you are doing what they’re asking you to do, but you might be doing in a different way, or you need to adjust the way.”
Sidman is satisfied- the voters have been heard, cruise traffic is down and he thinks the town can weather that change, especially considering the other four million tourists that visit by land every year.
All cities around the planet, some want more cruise ships, the better, and some would like them to go away entirely, and then there’s some in the middle,” Sidman said. “There’s no one size fits all, and I think the business of local determination is an important principle.”
And Sitkans on both sides of the issue would probably agree with that.
