The National Park Service and the Maine Department of Transportation are moving forward with repairs to the battered Seawall Road in Southwest Harbor.
“We are close to finalizing the agreement with MaineDOT to reconstruct approximately 1,500 feet of Seawall Road.” said Amanda Pollock, deputy chief of interpretation for Acadia National Park and Saint Croix Island International Historic Site.
In 2024, after months of closure due to powerful winter storms that decimated the beloved road, the state agreed to let local businesses voluntarily do a temporary fix to get the road—beloved by MDI residents and tourists—back in working order.
Those community fixes to the looping road which joins Southwest Harbor to Tremont and also to Acadia National Park’s Seawall Campground, Ship Harbor Trail, and Wonderland Trail are considered temporary.
Since then, there’s been back and forth between the town, park and Maine Department of Transportation about how to pay for permanent repairs and upkeep.
In June, Acadia National Park received “supplemental funding from Congress to fund storm-related damages and is working with the state to fully fund the resiliency improvements at Seawall Road,” Southwest Harbor Town Manager Karen Reddersen wrote in her manager’s report at the time.
Acadia National Park Management Assistant John T. Kelly said in June, “The Park is receiving disaster supplemental funds and plans to use the Good Neighbor Authority under section 351 of the EXPLORE Act to help fund the reconstruction of the portion of Seawall Road damaged in the 2024 storms.”
Acadia will be the first national park to use this authority.
“The intent is to build it back in a way that has those mitigation efforts,” Reddersen said last June.
The park and Department of Transportation continue to discuss both the scope of the work and transferring supplemental “Good Neighbor” funding to the state.
The original estimate was approximately $1.5 million and the park is prepared to give that to the state, Reddersen told the select board via that funding to get the work done.
At Tuesday’s League of Towns meeting, Tremont Town Manager Jesse Dunbar said, “So the latest update was that the park is paying for the full repair that the DOT was planning. And I think it’s scheduled for late spring, June 2026.”
At the Southwest Harbor Select Board meeting later that evening, Reddersen said, “It’s not our story to tell, but, I know generally that they have come to an agreement with MaineDOT that this work will move forward. It should be late May next year and there is no future funding requirement tied to that agreement.”
The park has not officially released a start date.
“We have not determined when the work will begin,” Pollock said Wednesday.
This story was originally published by The Bar Harbor Story. To receive regular coverage from the Bar Harbor Story, sign up for a free subscription here.
