An executive session held Tuesday night by Bar Harbor’s town council was accidentally broadcast over the internet.
The board met in executive session — which by law is not supposed to be open to the public — near the end of its regular meeting Tuesday night. Council members met in private with James Smith, Bar Harbor’s town manager, to discuss an ethics complaint about Cara Ryan, vice chair of the town’s appeals board and a critic of cruise ships.
Only it wasn’t in private. Cameras in the council meeting room had been turned off, but microphones used for recordings and online broadcasts continued to feed audio of the discussion over the Internet.
Ryan chose not to attend the session, which lasted approximately a half hour. Contact information for Ryan was not immediately available Wednesday morning.
Ryan has come under public scrutiny because of the locally divisive issue of cruise ship traffic. The ongoing debate over the effect that cruise ships have on Bar Harbor have pitted many residents who want to sharply reduce visits that they say harm the local quality of life against the business community, which says cruise ships are an essential part of the town’s economy.
In December, Ryan recused herself from an appeals board hearing over a dispute between the town and Golden Anchor LC, which operates the Harborside Hotel. The town has sought to fine the company over the company’s refusal to get a disembarkation permit to allow cruise ship tenders to discharge passengers at its marina.
Ryan said at the time that she recused herself from the hearing because an ethics violation had been filed against her and she did not want an appearance of bias to tarnish the outcome of the hearing, according to the Mount Desert Islander.
At an earlier appeals board meeting in November, Ryan had voted not to allow Golden Anchor’s attorney, who had missed a submission deadline, to submit additional materials for the board to consider at the December meeting, according to meeting minutes posted on the town’s website.
After the December meeting, Ryan told the Islander that “she had been accused of being an outspoken critic of the cruise ship industry, which she freely admitted, and of contributing $100 to [Charles] Sidman’s GoFundMe campaign to help defray the cost of his legal fees,” the newspaper reported.
Charles Sidman has been the cruise industry’s chief local critic and spearheaded a 2022 citizen’s referendum that sharply reduced the number of cruise ship visits that Bar Harbor gets each year. Sidman has been actively involved in resulting litigation between the town and a business group that is challenging the new limits in court.
During the executive session, Smith said the town’s ethics commission had looked into Ryan’s publicly stated personal opinions about the cruise ship industry. He said he met with Ryan earlier Tuesday to discuss the matter.
Councilors said during the session that it can be difficult appointing people to serve on local boards because of perceived bias, which some would-be appointees have regularly acknowledged that they have. But they acknowledged that Ryan’s public opposition to cruise ships has complicated appeals board proceedings.
“Who doesn’t have opinions in this town?” Councilor Joe Minutolo said during the session.
Councilor Matt Hochman said he voted in 2022 not to appoint Ryan to the appeals board — which has previously been reported by Bar Harbor Story — because he had concerns at the time about Ryan’s public opposition to the cruise ship industry.
“I was worried about this sort of thing,” Hochman said during the session. “I did not feel she could be impartial.”
Later Tuesday night, Smith declined to comment on what was discussed during the executive session, saying it remains confidential.
He said a recording of that night’s council meeting was being kept off the town’s website until officials could be sure it did not include audio from the executive session. He said he is not sure how it happened, but it likely was an “unfortunate technology failure.”
Smith said the town would try to determine why the microphones kept broadcasting.
“We’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
