The joke about “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” is offered fairly frequently now about downtown Bar Harbor in peak season, especially on cruise ship days. A cruise-industry-funded study on “Cruise Tourism and Traffic Congestion in Bar Harbor” completed last month went over like a lead balloon. Some town councilors hurried to distance themselves …
Last week saw the second local meeting of the summer where lobster fishermen had their say on a set of changes intended to reduce risk to endangered right whales from fishing gear. The first meeting was in June at Trenton Elementary School, where someone had placed homemade signs along the driveway reading “Ship strikes kill …
Roughly 2.5 million rural Americans (about 7 percent of the total rural population) report having no friends or family nearby to rely on, according to a recent poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An additional 14 million rural residents say they only have a …
As the summer begins to wind down and kids prepare to go back to school, some students are steeling themselves for an unfortunate prospect: confronting bullies. And while bullying still happens in school hallways, locker rooms and playgrounds, kid-on-kid torment increasingly has gone digital. And bullying that happens via text, Snapchat, Instagram messaging or video …
Bar Harbor recently enacted, by citizen initiative, an ordinance change requiring anyone holding a voting seat on an appointed town board, committee or commission to be a registered voter in the town. The Town Council sought guidance from the town attorney on how best to implement the change. Since the new ordinance conflicts with several …
In Southwest Harbor, the Manset dock and adjacent gravel parking lot known as the Hook property are a collection point for many people going many different directions: lobstermen, mooring holders and their guests, visitors and workers heading to the Cranberry Isles and customers at the newly-reopened restaurant across the street. The town’s selectmen have been …
Mount Desert Island continues to grapple with a shortage of affordable, year-round housing. In watching recent trends and sorting out what government or other groups could to that would make a difference, vacation rentals and seasonal employee housing appear as twin challenges. Neither is a bad thing in its own right, but the growth of …
Statewide in Maine during the seven-year period from 2006 to 2012, nearly 398 million prescription hydrocodone and oxycodone pills were distributed, according to Drug Enforcement Agency data compiled by the Washington Post. Hannaford in Ellsworth sold more than 4.2 million of the pills. Carroll Drug in Southwest Harbor, seventh in volume among the distributors listed, …
On Mount Desert Island, we live far from the interstate highway system. Our state highways here double as local roads: they carry residents, commercial traffic and visitors to and from our towns from the mainland, but they also have school bus stops, people walking their dogs, joggers, cyclists and crosswalks. Visitors used to freeways have …
Friday marks the 200th anniversary of the vote to separate the District of Maine from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Statehood didn’t come until nearly seven months later on March 15, 1820. At a time when the nation was embroiled in controversy over slavery, Maine’s admission to the union was a feat of political compromise so …
