When Valerie Peacock braves the crowded Bar Harbor Hannaford parking lot to get groceries- her 10-year-old son insists on staying home.
Because every time she goes into town, Peacock is waylaid by fellow residents wanting to talk about cruise ships. As the Town Council chair, she’s a central figure in a contentious debate that never seems to end.
"I do care about it, and I have put a lot of time and effort into understanding it, but I think there are other issues that I would love to be talking about, and other work that we could be doing too," she said. "And you know, it's it is a small town, so it's impossible to get away from it."
The debate centers on a citizen's petition enacted by voters two years ago, that limits cruise ship visitors to 1,000 per day. It places the burden on dock owners to count people entering town — and charges the dock owners a $100 fee for each person over the limit.
But after two years of lawsuits against the town, from parties in favor and against the ordinance, Peacock said the town council started looking for a different way forward.
"And so, the question is, how much less do we want? And how do we figure that out? And then, how do we make that happen," she said.
The council arrived at a new proposal: a daily cap of 3,200 cruise ship visitors, with additional weekly and monthly limits.
So while there could be more people in town on a given day, there will also be more days with no ships at all.
It also shifts the enforcement of the caps to a process of licensing and contracts directly with cruise lines.
"It really does set us up with a very clear and direct way to manage visitation in the future," Peacock said.
But after years of arguments, fundamental rifts over the presence of cruise ships still sharply divide the town.
"I would definitely like to see a town that has no big cruise ships, but that doesn't mean no cruise ships," said Charles Sidman, sitting on a bench on the Village Green.
Sidman said he'd be okay with smaller cruise ships, the kind that used to tie up at the town pier and stay overnight.
"They're far more beneficial to the local economy, and they're not off putting to all the land-based visitors and the residents," he said. "So the future I would like to see for Bar Harbor cruise tourism is small ships, not no ships, small ships."
Sidman is one of the residents who submitted the citizen petition that became the 2022 ordinance, and he’s been involved in several of the lawsuits over it.
"They're turning our town, our beautiful town, into a Coney Island or a Times Square, and we are turning off, I believe, many more people than we're turning on," he said.
He argued that the large cruise ship crowds are a burden for most businesses. And that the benefits of the larger ships are enjoyed only by a few retail stores right next to the water, and business owners directly involved on the pier.
Among them, the Walsh family, which operates the dock and tender boat services, strongly opposes the 1,000 person cap.
"It wasn't meant to be a tool to fix something, it was meant to be a discouragement to come here," said Eben Salvatore, who works for the Walsh family.
He said a ship's capacity doesn’t reflect how many people are in town, not everyone on the ship disembarks, their arrival is spread across several hours, and is limited by the capacity of the tender boats bringing them to shore.
"The actuality and the reality of the visitation is it's very controlled," he said. "It's a slower pace than people can sometimes portray it, and it isn't 4,000 people coming in short once it's much less than that."
And Salvatore said the uncertainty surrounding the town's cruise ship policy is affecting business. He said Royal Caribbean canceled all its stops in Bar Harbor this year, which has hurt businesses that depend heavily on income from the fall season.
"A business model on a six-month operating window is very difficult," he said. "And any business in Bar Harbor will tell you they're paying off bills that have accumulated all year until the end of August or into September. And that's why our fall cruise ship visitation was so important to so many businesses, because that's when they started making their living."
Some residents see the debate over the role the cruise ship business should have in Bar Harbor as pointing to larger questions about the role of tourism, keeping space for residents in their town, and trust in local government.
For council chair Valerie Peacock, the 2022 referendum made it clear that residents wanted a significant change, and they wanted it quickly.
"Bar Harbor has changed a lot in the last 20 years," she said. "Visitation has gone up a lot. You can feel it in the cars. You can feel it in the sort of flavor and the feel of downtown, and folks are frustrated by that."
And no matter what the outcome of the cruise ship ordinance on the November ballot, it's likely that those frustrations will still be felt in Bar Harbor after election day.
