Hundreds of thousands of cruise ship passengers head to the small town of Bar Harbor, Maine, from May through August, swamping the quaint streets and infusing local shops with cash.
Residents concerned about air pollution from the ships and the crush of tourists brought forth a ballot initiative two years ago meant to slash the number of visitors to 1,000 a day. Though lawsuits from local businesses stymied much of that effort, village officials now hope a compromise bill limiting numbers to 3,200 will be approved on Nov. 5.
Jackie Levesque, a retired nurse practitioner and an outspoken cruise ship critic in Bar Harbor, population 5,600, is still pushing back.
“Those cruise ships sitting in the harbor spewing their foul air is just one more step towards destruction of this beautiful area,” Levesque told GBH News. “You take a small, pristine harbor like we have, and you have as many as three ships running, I just can’t think there’s any good that can come from that.”
The controversy over the benefits and harms of cruise ships is being felt in popular destinations from Bar Harbor and Key West, Florida, to Barcelona, where local residents made headlines last summer by shooting water guns at tourists. Now Boston environmental activists are growing increasingly worried about emissions from cruise ships and added vehicular traffic as Massport aggressively expands its Seaport-based cruise ship business.
Thomas Ready, a board member at the Fort Point Neighborhood Association in Boston, told GBH News that he’s concerned about health and traffic impacts to the increasingly dense residential community close to the agency’s cruise and container shipping ports.
Cruise ship tonnage — which measures the size and weight of ships — accounted for a quarter of the total oceangoing vessel traffic/tonnage entering Boston Harbor last year, according to U.S. Customs data. It’s part of a growing maritime shipping industry whose emissions are contributing to poorer health for tens of thousands of children and adults living near ports, according to data obtained by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.
“Once the ships are in, it is a pretty significant impact to the surrounding community,” he said. “Usually what we see [are] three large ships — and given the size that currently come and go out of Boston, usually 8,500 to 9,000 passengers — on a busy day. It’s the shoreside impact of these things, right? The trucks that come and go, the buses, the passengers.”
A contentious issue in Bar Harbor
Bar Harbor looks serene on the surface, surrounded by the sea with small islands and lobster boats dotting Frenchman Bay. But the bruising debate over cruise ships has driven a wedge through this idyllic village.
“It’s just a very contentious issue, and it’s splitting people apart,” said Matt DeLaney, the director of Bar Harbor’s Jesup Memorial Library.
Some residents are more accepting of the cruise industry that this year will have sent 110 ships chugging into this Midcoast Maine port on Mount Desert Island, dozens arriving via Boston’s Flynn Cruiseport, based in the Seaport district.
Gale Abbott, who owns a pet supply shop called Bark Harbor just a couple blocks from the waterfront, said business owners rely on cruise passengers to buy their goods.
“I’m glad it’s going back up for a vote,” she said. “A thousand [passenger limit] makes me very sad and worried that the shoulder season would be dead.”
Mike McCadden, sitting at the local library, said Bar Harbor needs to accept its fate as a magnet for tourism.
“It’s not a nice little sleepy community. It’s a tourist town surrounded by Acadia National Park,” he said. “Millions of people come here to see the park, go downtown, buy a T-shirt.”
Cruise ships have been coming into Bar Harbor for decades. Then the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the pause button on ships, an early hotbed for the virus, for two summers. Some residents were elated.
“Our harbor cleared. Our town cleared. And it was amazing,” said Levesque. “We remembered what our town was like before [cruise ships] happened.”
By 2022, the mammoth tourist vessels motored back to Bar Harbor — more than 150 ships, bringing hundreds of thousands of passengers into the town over a seven-month period. Citizens fed up with ships and day-trippers took their fight to the local ballot that fall, winning 58% of the vote to cap the number of cruise passengers coming to their town.
After that vote, supporters of the cruise industry took the issue to court. The town’s new proposal to set a higher limit on daily passengers is an attempt to find a compromise between both sides of the debate.
Charles Sidman, who led the citizens’ movement and runs a local art gallery with his wife, said the cruise industry has ruined the charm of his small town.
“More and more we’re hearing Bar Harbor is past its peak: too busy, too touristy. You’ve killed the goose that laid the golden egg,” Sidman said, while sitting on a park bench overlooking the harbor. “On a busy day, it’s like Times Square on our sidewalks. You can’t walk, bumping into people.”
Last year the town received nearly $1.3 million in port and passenger fees from the cruise ships.
Next month, voters will be asked to revoke their earlier decision and endorse the town council’s proposal to increase the daily passenger limit to 3,200. The initiative would also cap monthly passenger totals — no more than 55,000 passengers ashore in September and October — and ban cruise ships at port on weekends and holidays.
Val Peacock, chair of the Bar Harbor Town Council, told GBH News that if voters stick to the 1,000-passenger daily limit, there will be more “litigation craziness.”
“I would be happy if none ever came here again,” she said. “But you can’t just say 'no more cruise ships here.’”
Others hope more residents see all the pollution generated by the ships, not just the crowds and tour buses.
Two years ago, students at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor measured the environmental impact of the cruise ships they see from their campus. Their study found that the 158 cruise ships emitted nearly 361,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide on their voyages that year — far less than the 3.6 million cars also bringing tourists to Bar Harbor. But per capita, the cruise passenger’s carbon footprint dwarfed the car driver’s by a magnitude of seven times, they reported.
“A lot of places and people are negatively impacted by the cruises,” said Lucy Dabbs, a co-author of the study and now a college senior. “Voting on limiting cruise ships, it sends a message. There is a power to affect a really big issue from a small town.”
Boston’s expanding cruise market
While Bar Harbor awaits a vote that could push back against the cruise industry, Massport is expanding Boston’s cruise market with an eye on retooling its port to bring in even bigger ships.
Massport has steadily booked more ships, and bigger ones, over the last decade. By the end of this year, 172 cruise ships will have come to Boston Harbor, up from 141 the year before the start of the pandemic. The annual tonnage of these ships has also increased more than 38% in the last decade, from 5.5 million tons in 2014 to 7.6 million last year, according to U.S. Customs data obtained by GBH News.
And Massport officials say they are studying a renovation of the cruise port to bring in bigger ships capable of carrying more than passengers than currently visit Boston.
More tonnage means increased emissions of highly polluting, high-sulfur content fuel known as heavy fuel oil or bunker fuel.
Cruise ships consume massive quantities. The Norwegian Gem — a 965-foot-long vessel that docks at Flynn Cruiseport dozens of times a year — burns nearly 53,000 gallons of fuel oil a day, according to a fact sheet distributed to cruise passengers last summer. And cruise ships routinely keep engines running while at port.
As environmentalist Kyle Murray watched tugboats muscle the 3,660-passenger ship Enchanted Princess to the wharf at Flynn Cruiseport recently, he questioned the push for such massive ships here.
“Because [the cruiseport] is pushed off to the side, not as visible, people aren’t as aware of how big [the ships] are and how much how much pollution it contributes,” said Murray, who directs state policy at the Acadia Center, an environmental and clean energy advocacy nonprofit based in Boston. “It’s just not sustainable to keep going bigger and bigger.”
Massport’s bid to grow the cruise industry — along with the recent expansion of its Conley Container ship terminal — comes as the agency has developed more than 2,000 nearby housing units on land it owns.
Ready, of the Fort Point Neighborhood Association, worries about how this will affect local residents.
“Apartments within a half mile of here … and a quarter of a mile in that direction,” Ready said, nodding toward a construction zone just a couple blocks away building 200 units of affordable housing. “[These are] pretty dense residential areas, so clearly a balance has to be struck … with the people that happen to live here.”
Ready joins other environmentalists who want to see more electrification of the ports.
Boston ranked as the nation’s 16th worst port area for fine particulate matter pollution — worse air quality than much bigger ports of Baltimore and Houston — according to a survey of U.S. ports released last month by the International Council on Clean Transportation.
That pollution isn’t coming from cruise ships alone, but from the combined marine shipping traffic in the harbor. And the health impacts on port communities are grim and well-studied. Exposure to diesel emissions near marine ports leads to respiratory illnesses, heart disease and cancer, according to researchers at Yale University, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization.
Massport — whose key operation Logan International Airport has faced longtime criticism for polluting nearby residential communities — controls more than three-fourths of maritime shipping in the harbor, and is grappling with the environmental and public health impacts from its water-based operations.
If the transportation agency wins a $280 million grant from the EPA, it said it would focus squarely on cruise ship emissions by building an electric shore power system that would allow cruise ships to turn off their engines and plug in to electric power.
Massport said it also wants to conduct a first-ever emissions inventory of its cruise and container ship operations, but has not specified a timeline. Other aspirational plans in purchasing more hybrid and electrical vehicles to serve the cruise ships.
Ready, from the Fort Point residents’ group, said he wants to make sure Massport pays more attention to the environmental impacts as it boosts the number and size of ships it brings in.
“Their focus on the port community isn’t anywhere near the focus they have as it relates to the airport’s [neighboring communities],” he said. “And that’s our expectation with Massport ... to try to move away from some of these impacts these ships have.”
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
