A Bar Harbor cafe owner on Wednesday turned in a petition to the local town clerk’s office seeking a recount of ballots cast in last week’s close vote on cruise ship rules.
In a 1,776-to-1,713 vote, residents rejected the proposal to adopt looser limits for cruise ship visits and to cast aside a 1,000-passenger daily cap that was first adopted in 2022 by citizens referendum. The 63-vote difference represents less than 2 percent of all the votes cast in the referendum.
Kevin DesVeaux, owner of the West Street Cafe, turned in the petition Wednesday afternoon, according to Town Clerk Liz Graves. But Graves said she had not yet counted the signatures on the petition — which have to number at least 100 for it to be valid — or verified that all of the signers are registered Bar Harbor voters.
Graves said she expects to go over the petition to check those things on Thursday.
DesVeaux said earlier Wednesday that launching a petition drive on short notice is not an easy task. He said the town does not have recount petition forms on file and that he had to create one from scratch while making sure the format met state standards.
“We’re very confident we will have well over the [minimum] 100 signatures,” DesVeaux said.
DesVeaux said the 1,000-passenger daily limit will effectively prevent large ships from coming to Bar Harbor, which will continue to hurt local businesses that have grown to cater to their passengers. He said his cafe alone lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue this year because of a decline in cruise ship reservations that already has occurred as a result of the 2022 vote.
However, he said he doesn’t think his petition will reverse the outcome of the vote. He admitted he doesn’t have a “Plan B” if the result stays the same, but said businesses still might learn from what the recount shows.
“We want to have a closer look at the [ballot] data,” DesVeaux said. “It will allow us to review the data and see where the trend is going and how we can better approach that. I think what the Town Council [proposed] this year resonated with a lot of people.”
The issue of cruise ships has embroiled Bar Harbor for more than two years, pitting residents opposed to the industry against the local business community, and ensnaring officials who find themselves enforcing and defending in court a voter-initiated limit that they don’t readily agree with.
Town officials have not yet turned away ships that carry more than 1,000 passengers and made reservations before the 2022 vote. Town officials have said that they likely would be sued by cruise companies if they canceled visits that had been scheduled more than a year ago.
The town already has been facing legal challenges from a group of local businesses that say that the 1,000-passenger daily limit runs counter to federal law. With the rejection of the council proposal, the group is expected to continue contesting the strict caps in federal court.
Supporters of the current limit argued that adopting the new rules would scrap the will of the voters as expressed two years ago, and would prohibit residents from initiating more ballot measures on the issue without council support.
Along with a 3,200-passenger daily limit, the new rules would have established varying monthly limits and an annual limit of 200,000 passengers — all of which would have represented reductions from the monthly and annual totals of recent years.
