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Changing tides
 | As Ocean Properties continues snapping up local property, locals wonder what's in store for Bar Harbor

The tiny building on West Street, with a gabled roof and two wooden steps leading to a crooked porch, looks to have just enough room for a stove, a chair and a small bed.â&Copy;
“It’s a little old fisherman’s house,” Ivey Menzietti says, after stepping out from behind her store counter to walk out of the building, which sits across the street from Frenchman Bay. The shack, painted hunter green, is now the home of an artists’ co-operative called Bar Harbor Artisans, which Menzietti helps run with three other local artists. “You can imagine a lobsterman who took his boots off on the porch and went in,” Menzietti says.â&Copy;
Although the ramshackle building has lasted this far by being readapted for use in a tourist haven, it’s likely not long for this world. Its thin walls and spindly porch columns look like they would easily topple over in a fierce wind. But in fact, the building is more threatened by a looming, although as yet unspecified, development. Menzietti was recently told by the co-op’s owner, Barry McLaughlin, who also runs the Lobster Claw Take-Out restaurant next door, that the two-year-old co-op would have to vacate the shop by the middle of October. â&Copy;
McLaughlin, the Claw’s lively owner with bushy grey sideburns, interrupted his restaurant work next door to briefly say, “This spring, they had warned that this building was sold.” For the past six years McLaughlin rented from a Massachusetts company that recently sold its property at 54 West St. to the national hotel developer Ocean Properties Ltd., which has its main offices in Portsmouth, N.H. â&Copy;
“This fall he’s tearing everything down,” McLaughlin says, referring to Ocean Properties’ 80-year-old chairman and founder, Tom Walsh, a Bangor native. “It’s quite a project, a big hotel with a parking lot and fancy shops on the street.” â&Copy;
McLaughlin was repeating the rumor that has been running through town ever since business owners on West Street were told they could not renew their leases, and homeowners started selling their houses on nearby Rodick Street. Despite the widespread gossip, the hotel developer has remained mostly quiet on the subject — while snapping up a block of Bar Harbor properties and a Roddick Street mansion that collectively are worth more than $2 million. Several calls to Ocean Properties and Walsh were not returned. â&Copy;
But the mystery has nonetheless sparked a debate about development in town. Some business owners express concern about Ocean Properties’ growing footprint in Bar Harbor and its increasing control of local land use. The hotel developer’s work orients the downtown even more toward summertime visitors rather than residents, a focus that worries some year-rounders, based on interviews with business owners and town officials. (For an overview of Ocean Properties’ recent acquisitions in Bar Harbor, see “Ocean Properties’ growing Bar Harbor footprint,” below.) Still others argue, however, that if development has to come, it might as well be at the hands of Ocean Properties, which, backers say, builds tasteful hotels. Ocean Properties increased the property value from $2.3 million to $15.3 million — and subsequent taxes paid to the town — on the northern side of town when it built its upscale Harborside Hotel here five years ago.â&Copy;
Walsh sent a letter dated Aug. 4 to Bar Harbor Town Planner Anne Krieg explaining that he has been buying land in the West Street area over the last several months with the intention of “developing the area in a way that will greatly enhance these areas. I would classify the charm of the existing area as minimal.” He goes on to say that his company will make the new project “one the entire town will be proud of.”â&Copy;
Whether everyone will be proud or not is debatable, but this part of Bar Harbor appears poised for a makeover. McLaughlin points down West Street to the businesses that he knows are leaving — a small gift shop called Celtic Rainbow Gifts, his take-out place, the co-op. “It’s going to change the face of Bar Harbor,” he says about Ocean Properties’ unknown plans.â&Copy;
Ocean by the oceanâ&Copy;
Ocean Properties in 2003 opened its landmark Harborside Hotel, Spa and Marina on West Street’s waterfront. The privately-held hotel development and management company — founded in 1975 by Walsh, who now owns more than 100 hotels in the United States and Canada — tore down the previous hotel, the Golden Anchor Inn, and cleaned up what was a neglected lot disguising a prime piece of oceanfront property. Today, a 201-room hotel and club with a curvy swimming pool and tidy flowerbeds adorn the parcel. A few Bar Harbor business owners on West Street, and elsewhere in town, say they like what the development has done for the area. â&Copy;
“Instead of looking at barrels of I-don’t-know-what and a broken-down old motel, I’m looking at a beautiful building and nice stonework and the nicest landscaping in Bar Harbor,” says Sherry Rasmussen, who has owned Alone Moose gallery on West Street with her husband, Ivan, for 33 years. Rasmussen says she has not been asked to sell her building. â&Copy;
While she hasn’t seen a bump in sales from the Harborside Hotel, Rasmussen says she is not adverse to more Ocean Properties development on the street. “My feeling is if we’re going to have to change, let’s have quality change,” she says. “And things change. Nothing ever stays exactly the same.”â&Copy;
Ocean Properties, however, might have more of a say in how things change than some residents are comfortable with. Starting in the mid-1990s and picking up pace in the past eight or so years, Ocean Properties has bought 24 properties in Bar Harbor, and now owns five hotels. In total, the company owns more than 29 acres assessed at more than $69 million. Ocean Properties is paying more than $612,000 in annual property taxes to the town. (The size of Ocean Properties is a matter of debate. According to the business research firm Hoovers Inc., Ocean Properties, which is family-owned, has annual sales of $168 million. The Portland Press Herald, however, has reported the company’s annual revenue at more than $1 billion.)â&Copy;
Money does not impede Ocean Properties’ vision. Rather, local sentiment might be more of an obstacle. “I don’t want to see the whole town turn into a one-person town,” says Debra Ceranic, owner of the gift store Eden Rising on Cottage Street. â&Copy;
Nina Zeldin, president of the All Fired Up art studio and gallery on Cottage Street, feels similarly. “I don’t see how beneficial it is for any community to have one or two people control the land.” She adds, though, that another hotel would likely bring more visitors to her shop and other stores.â&Copy;
Up the street from the Harborside Hotel and the area of speculated development, Matt and Kristi Losquadro run the Saltair Inn, a stately B&B with a lawn sloping to the sea. They point out that, as inn owners, they don’t compete with hotels. What’s more, they see a positive side effect of Ocean’s local ambitions. “[Walsh’s] advertising is bringing more people to Bar Harbor,” Matt Losquadro says. “Maybe they’ll see his ads and stay here.” â&Copy;
Still, the Losquadros are ambivalent. “It’s a shame to pull down all those little houses for parking for a hotel we don’t need anyways,” says Kirsti Losquadro. â&Copy;
The futureâ&Copy;
Since the end of May, Ocean Properties has bought two homes on Rodick Street and two properties on West Street, according to town records. Ocean Properties also has set up four other limited liability companies with names of Rodick Street addresses. The homes, ranging in value from $108,300 to $303,600, line a one-way street. While the LLCs do not prove the houses have been sold, they indicate the possibility of a sale, explains Bar Harbor Town Assessor Steven Weed, and there is a lag in the public record for property transactions.â&Copy;
Although Bar Harbor Public Works Director Chip Reeves was not available to comment before deadline, he reportedly told the Mount Desert Islander that he had a preliminary conversation in May with Walsh about sewage capacity in the West Street/Rodick Street area for a 120- room hotel. According to the town’s zoning code, a hotel in that downtown district requires one parking space for every room.â&Copy;
Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Director Chris Fogg says Eben Salvatore, manager for Ocean Properties’ Harborside Hotel, sits on the chamber’s board of directors. “They’re at a point where they’re not sure what they’re doing,” he says. “It’s way too early to speculate.”â&Copy;
At the same time, Bar Harbor’s planning director, Anne Krieg, says Walsh has accepted an invitation to come in for an informal conversation about future plans for that area with a local economic development task force. “West Street and Main Street [which is perpendicular to West Street] is an anchor for the town. It’s where we welcome ships, and visitors congregate down there,” she says. “It is an important block to the town.”â&Copy;
Krieg says the task force, formed six months and made up of local business owners, wants to see whether Walsh’s plans for that block could not just buoy Bar Harbor’s lifeline of summer tourists, but also enhance the year-round economy. One member has expressed concern that the development will raze homes but not replace it with other long-term housing, Krieg says.â&Copy;
“We’re trying to promote a more symbiotic relationship of goods and services for visitors and residents, so [residents] have that better connection to the downtown, so it stays lively and alive longer and doesn’t just shut down in October after the last cruise ship leaves,” Krieg says.â&Copy;
The town’s focus on serving both visitors and locals is echoed by Camille Hoffman, who has lived in Bar Harbor since 1999 and bought Morning Glory Bakery on Rodick Street last winter, near where the rumored development will take place. “I worry that there will be less and less of the year-round businesses and more businesses geared toward summer tourists,” she says. â&Copy;
Hoffman also helped with a satirical float created by the bakery this summer as part of the town’s July Fourth celebration. On it, a fighter representing Rodick Street duked it out with a Walsh stand-in dubbed “Tommy the Man.” â&Copy;
“It was just our way to sort-of bring it to attention and shed a little humor on the situation,” Hoffman says. “Of course, [Walsh] won every round.”â&Copy;
Rebecca Goldfine, Mainebiz staff writer, can be reached at rgoldfine@mainebiz.biz.â&Copy;
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