The Bar Harbor business owner and investor who led the effort to curtail local cruise ship visits knows he’s controversial.
Charles Sidman has often been at odds with town and business officials. Some of his detractors have made their frustration clear by posting stickers around town with an expletive followed by his name.
But Sidman stands by his efforts to block cruise ships from dropping large numbers of visitors in town. He’s best known for leading the November 2022 citizen referendum that set a daily limit 1,000 passengers.
Now he’s taking on what he sees as feet-dragging by the elected town council in implementing the new limit. In addition to suing the town last spring, he’s also looking to get voters to approve what would be the first recall ordinance for local officials, with a goal of collecting enough signatures this fall to get it on the ballot in 2025.
Sidman is not the first person to resort to the courts or citizen-initiated referendums to circumvent town officials or other voter-approved measures. But in a community that’s become so divided over cruise ships, few other citizens have been as effective in using those tools to change the status quo, while also facing the backlash that comes with that activism.
In an interview, Sidman said that the council is defying the will of the voters and too swayed by local businesses with a vested interest in cruise ship visits.
“They have resisted from the beginning,” Sidman said of the seven members of the council. “These people think they’re rulers, not public servants.”
Town officials say they are moving to adopt the voter-approved limits by crafting a system to enforce them, despite vigorous but so-far unsuccessful legal challenges from the other end of the spectrum: a group of local businesses that cater to cruise ships. The town is delaying enforcement to allow cruise lines to honor pre-existing reservations before the caps go into effect in 2026.
Sidman, a former scientist at The Jackson Laboratory who finances start-up companies and co-owns a local art gallery with his wife, sees the council’s delay as a stalling tactic. He sued the town in the spring in an attempt to get it to enforce the daily limit this summer.
“They say they are enforcing it, but there’s not any evidence of that,” he said. “It’s all about money and self-interest.”
Sidman says he is not opposed to the cruise industry as a whole and doesn’t think Bar Harbor gets too many visitors, but he thinks that cruise ships don’t fit well in the tourism hotspot, where downtown streets and sidewalks are overly congested whenever they’re anchored in the bay.
Sidman and his wife objected a few years back when the town experimented with having tour buses discharge cruise ship passengers on Mount Desert Street, where their gallery is located. The idea was to get those passengers to walk past downtown shops on their way back to the waterfront and spend more money in town, instead of having them disembark right next to the piers where tenders ferry them back and forth to ships.
The gallery owners did not like the fumes and noise the buses made idling outside their business. But Sidman said that was “just an annoyance” and not a major factor in his feelings about the industry.
Sidman’s greatest successes have come in the form of citizen petition drives.
The November 2022 vote to set daily limits on cruise passengers up-ended the town’s own planning efforts, circumventing a more gradual approach toward reduction that officials had pursued with local cruise ship interests. Those efforts followed a 2021 community survey in which more than half of respondents said the ships were harming the town.
Prior to that, Sidman was involved in two other 2019 local citizen referendums that also aimed to restrain the industry.
One vote banned the development of cruise ship berthing piers in Bar Harbor, as such a pier was under consideration for the CAT ferry terminal on Route 3. The other, which was aimed at limiting the power of cruise ship business representatives on town committees, required any voting members of those groups to be Bar Harbor residents.
But that success in rallying voters has not extended to two bids Sidman has made to get elected to the council since the 2022 referendum. He lost each time by a few hundred votes. Those campaigns, he said, were meant to hold the council’s feet to the fire on the cruise ship issue.
“I never really wanted to be on the council,” he said. “It may be that people with firm views can’t be elected.”
Since the passage of the 2022 referendum, many have blamed Sidman for the divisiveness of the cruise ship debate in Bar Harbor.
The backlash has turned vulgar at times. Critics have targeted Sidman anonymously by posting stickers with crude messages for him around town. Some have also used fake return addresses to mail him packages that contain crass messages and contents, such as chocolates molded into the shape of penises.
Someone who has been open and direct in his criticism is Matt Hochman, an elected town councilor who himself has cursed at Sidman in posts from his Facebook account.
Hochman usually welcomes citizens who get involved in policy debates, either through advocacy or volunteering their time on committees, he said. But he thinks the citizens’ petition and lawsuit approach employed by Sidman often ignores the nuts-and-bolts challenges of local policymaking.
“I do not believe in governing by citizens’ initiative,” Hochman said. “It can be a useful tool when used as a scalpel, not when used as a broadsword.”
Hochman disputed Sidman’s claim that cruise ship interests have undue influence on the council, and he said giving voters recall power would be counter-productive.
“As a general rule, we as a council cannot please 100 percent of the people,” Hochman said. “Now we will have the possibility of an ordinance that could seek to recall a councilor any time we do something that makes someone upset.”
Sidman said the criticism, insults and harassment — whether anonymous or not — will not deter him.
If Bar Harbor residents suddenly demonstrated broad popular support for heavy cruise ship traffic, he would drop his opposition, he said. But as long as he is standing and local residents say they are unhappy with the ships, he plans to keep pressure on local officials.
“A town council cannot win against its citizens,” Sidman said. “It just can’t.”
