Judge Lance Walker releases 32-page order.

Carrie Jones

May 15, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Edward Jones Financial Advisor: Elise N. Frank.

---

BAR HARBOR—In a 32-page order released today, U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker has declared that the Bar Harbor cruise ship ordinance is unconstitutional in all months other than July and August.

“On behalf of the board and all APPLL members we are thrilled to announce that we won our appeal in federal court. The citizens initiative limiting cruise ships to 1,000 passengers or less will only be enforced in July and August,” said APPLL president Kristi Bond. “We look forward to welcoming all cruise visitors to Bar Harbor once again.”

In December 2022 Association to Preserve and Protect Local Livelihoods (APPLL), the Penobscot Bay and River Pilots Association, and some other local businesses involved with cruise ship tendering had sued the town over its cruise ship disembarkation limits saying the limits were unconstitutional.

Since then, for four years, there have been appeals and orders and remands, oral arguments, and briefs. Judge Walker’s decision came Friday afternoon.

“I conclude that the ordinance’s 1,000-passenger cap is not clearly excessive in relation to its local benefits during the peak summer tourism season but is clearly excessive in relation to the shoulder seasons,” Judge Walker wrote. “Accordingly, I declare the ordinance unconstitutional and unenforceable in all months other than July and August.”

How this impacts the town is not currently known.

“The Town of Bar Harbor acknowledges today’s decision by the United States District Court and the Town Council will meet in executive session on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, with legal counsel to review the decision and receive legal advice regarding next steps,” Town Manger James Smith said on Friday afternoon.

The ordinance was the result of a citizens’ initiative and limited passenger disembarkations to 1,000 or less a day without fines. It had initially been passed by voters in November 2022, 1,780 to 1,273.

Since then, it has dramatically decreased cruise ship visits with more of an impact occurring each year since its enactment, as each year brings less and less ships that were booked and confirmed to visit prior to the cap.

According to the Town of Bar Harbor, the maximum total number of cruise ship passengers visiting Bar Harbor for the 2026 season sits just beneath 50,000.

Prior to the change, the town saw more than 100 ships in the season, which typically runs from early May to early November.

“The Penobscot Bay & River Pilots acknowledge Judge Walker’s ruling today that the contested ordinance is unconstitutional for ten months of the year, permissible only during the peak tourism months of July and August. While the ruling on remand vindicates our position, it brings little comfort to those who have borne the real-world consequences of enforcement in the interim,” the Association said in a statement, Friday night.

“The record demonstrated that less restrictive means were available to address the Town’s stated concerns, yet the Town’s prolonged effort to restrict maritime commerce has imposed significant costs on taxpayers and local businesses and come at considerable personal cost to those most directly affected. We are dismayed that years of litigation were necessary to establish what the Constitution plainly prohibits: a municipality’s invocation of local interests to indiscriminately restrict interstate commerce.

“We will review the full decision and pursue all available steps to ensure that maritime commerce and the livelihoods it supports are fully restored.”

The town has been delving deeply into tourism and its impact through a Sustainable Tourism Task Force. It’s also capped short-term vacation rentals in homes not a primary residence and has a lodging moratorium underway.

“It has been an abiding personal impression, rational in my view, that what may be fair and balanced for the peak season may not be fair and balanced for the shoulder season,” Judge Walker wrote.

According to Australian consultant, Edmund Morris, who is doing work as a sub-consultant for the town, Bar Harbor can host fifteen thousand people a day at the waterfront in July and fewer than 500 in winter.

Judge Walker had heard oral arguments in February in a partially remanded federal case challenging Bar Harbor’s cruise ship passenger cap, following a nuanced ruling from the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Lance Walker’s initial late February 2024 ruling mostly agreed with the Town of Bar Harbor and defendant intervenor, Charles Sidman, and upheld the ordinance and its disembarkation limits.

On Friday, in a joint statement, Sidman and his attorney Robert Papazian referenced that earlier decision and said, “Judge Walker’s remand decision is an unexpected development, given that he disagreed with his own previous decision to give deference to Bar Harbor voters over inherently local matters. Bar Harbor citizens have voted twice now that we don’t just want more limited cruise disembarkations two months of the year; we want it year-round. We want our downtown back, even during the shoulder seasons. And as we have always maintained, big business does not get to dictate and impose its self-serving wishes onto an unwilling citizenry. If we have to make it clear again with a third vote, so be it. In any event, Judge Walker’s decision will not stand. It is not practical or possible for a federal judge to micromanage cruise tourism in Bar Harbor. We will appeal and hope that the town government does too.”

Much of Acadia National Park sits in Bar Harbor. The park gathers almost 4 million visits each year, which is not the same number as visitors. Many of those visiting, also visit Bar Harbor.

The park is one of the state’s major tourist attractions, including for those who visit via cruise ships. Congestion in the downtown Bar Harbor area near Ells Pier and adjacent streets was a key element of the case and greatly discussed in the August 11, 2025, First Circuit opinion. The citizens’ initiative was meant to help limit pedestrian congestion via capping cruise ship disembarkations.

Those passenger caps (with financial penalty if exceeded) had been approved by voters in November 2022 and were enforced in summer 2024. An attempt to repeal that decision by bringing it back to voters in November 2024 lost by 65 votes and inspired a recount. The repeal would have been the first step to put in other measures limiting cruise ship visits.

It has since spawned multiple law suits, but this was the main one, which headed all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, on August 11, 2025, had partially upheld and partially sent back to a lower court Bar Harbor’s legal dispute. That meant that Judge Walker reviewed a portion of his original ruling again.

“This case returns following a remand from the First Circuit that directs me to resolve a ‘mismatch’ in my findings, make additional findings in previously unaddressed areas, ‘acknowledge’ a certain burden on interstate commerce, and delve more deeply into the Pike discussion contained in my March 1, 2024, Amended Decision and Order,” Judge Walker’s May 15 order begins. “With the benefit of the First Circuit’s opinion, supplemental briefing by the parties, oral argument, and a guided reexamination of the trial record, this order clarifies and enhances the findings made in my prior ruling and modifies my prior ruling on the merits.”

Judge Walker focused on the Pike portion of the Dormant Commerce Clause. The Pike Test was established in 1970 by the Supreme Court.

Law Shun explains that it is “a legal standard used to determine the constitutionality of state laws that affect interstate commerce.”

It is often used in relation to the Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution. That clause allows Congress to regulate the commerce that happens between different states.

Tim Woodcock, an attorney for the businesses involved in the case has consistently stressed that since the cruise ship visitors make up approximately 5-7% of the town’s estimated total visitors, the ordinance itself doesn’t reduce the congestion downtown in a meaningful way.

Papazian, representing Charles Sidman of Bar Harbor, who led the citizen’s petition to create the ordinance changes and attorneys for the town, has argued that other less burdensome means had already been tried and that another strategy had been rejected by voters in November 2024 when it lost by 65 votes.

That town-led strategy had been a daily passenger cap of 3,200 and a monthly and seasonal limits as well as days that were designated as ship-free.

In February, Papazian qualified tenders disembarking as “sheer chaos” downtown.

“Bar Harbor isn’t built for that,” he’d said in his argument in favor of a differential treatment for cruise ship passengers.

Other putative benefits of safety and conservation of public safety services also matter, he said.

Judge Walker’s ruling makes a distinction between the higher visitation months of July and August and the shoulder season months of May, June, September, and October. This distinction lead to his refined ruling.

“The ordinance is in my view measured and reasonable for the peak summer season, not clearly excessive in relation to the local benefits, because peak season congestion has all but exhausted the voting public’s patience and tolerance, and that exhaustion is the product of much more than mere marginal impacts. Plaintiff and the Pilots Association’s less burdensome, ‘voluntary’ alternative fails to account for the fact that there is no predictive model to plan for a low-intensity tourism day and, given this fact, I find it appropriately balanced for the defendant to impose the 1,000-passenger cap across the entire peak summer season,” Judge Walker wrote.

He wrote that in the peak summer season, Bar Harbor’s downtown and its residents have negative burdens that are mostly related to congestion and “always in relation to the quality of municipal life.”

The ordinance, he wrote, creates breathing room in the high season.

“If one is up to one’s eyeballs in water, lowering the water beneath one’s nostrils is a substantial benefit, indeed, an emergent need, even if the volume of water is not thereby dramatically reduced,” he wrote.

Using PlacerAI technology, Morris showed data maps of where cell phone pings indicate the highest amounts of congestion are in Bar Harbor and when. The AI company tracked four areas: Eden Street in Hulls Cove, the downtown waterfront, Hancock Street area, and Cadillac Mountain summit.

Ten minutes in the area and the AI has someone pinged as a visitor in the location. Most often people who are spending ten minutes or more are doing it at the waterfront, which Morris said is “bearing the brunt of all of the pressure.”

Those pings do not include residents of Bar Harbor, but could include commuters.

The waterfront peaks at about 15,000 people a day during the July 4 week, holds somewhat in August, lessens, and then picks back up in October.

”Then it plummets,” he said.

In summer there is a twenty-times increase, Morris added.

The PlacerAI data also shows a great decrease in activity and visits between places such as the waterfront and Hancock Street. The summer average at the waterfront, according to Morris’ data, is 11,464 visits. At Hancock Street, that drops to 2,868.

Bar Harbor’s waterfront marks the beginning of the Shore Path, Ells Pier, whale watch and nature excursions and iconic buildings such as the Bar Harbor Inn and the Bar Harbor Club.

Judge Walker wrote, “As for the shoulder season, I find that plaintiffs and intervenor-plaintiff’s protests are much more sensible and that defendant and intervenor-defendant’s opposition lacks persuasive force. That is not to say that I believe that the residents of Bar Harbor should be required to endure a level of cruise traffic during the shoulder season that ensures they have no respite from the press of the peak summer tourism season; only to say that the 1,000-passenger limitation, applied to every day of every week in the shoulder season is really quite parsimonious from an objective standpoint. This hard limitation is difficult to defend on a principled basis. The distinction between peak and shoulder seasons is longstanding and self-evident. The initiative authors’ failure to recognize and account for the significant intensity fluctuation between the shoulder seasons and the summer season appears more an act of indifference than a fair-minded effort to balance competing interests. It is to be expected that the authors of this kind of initiative would have performed their own Pike balancing long before I ever needed to. Yet I cannot see or infer that they ever did. Instead, they presented the voters with one disembarkation limitation born out of peak frustration.”

“Needless to say, problems of this kind are best addressed in a legislative venue. But popular initiatives are the last resort of majorities who find no safe harbor by their representatives and litigation is the last resort of losers in the democratic arena, leading inexorably to this act of judicial rearrangement,” Judge Walker wrote.

---

TO LEARN MORE

Judge Walker May 15 2026

280KB ∙ PDF file

Download

We had a tight turn-around for this story and we’ve reached out to representatives of the Golden Anchor, LC as well as the Pilot’s Association and will update when/if we receive statements from them. We’ll let you know at the end of a future article when/if that happens so that you can read it.

All photos not indicated otherwise are Bar Harbor Story file photos.

This article was updated at 8:15 p.m., May 15, to include a statement from the Pilot’s Association.

---

HELP SUPPORT THE BAR HARBOR STORY

When we started The Bar Harbor Story, we didn’t know if anyone would read it. But you showed up. You shared. You sent tips. Now—over 400,000 views every month later—it’s clear: people here care about their community and each other.

We’ve kept everything free because news should never be out of reach, but every one of our stories takes time to write, and your support keeps The Bar Harbor Story going.

If you value our work, please consider a paid subscription, a founding membership, or a sponsorship.

It truly helps us cover one more meeting, tell one more story, shine one more light.

Even $5 a month makes a difference. Click here to become a one-time supporter now.

Thank you so much for being here.

Founding member information can be found here.

Have questions about sponsorships? Just send Shaun an email at sfarrar86@gmail.com, he’d love to hear from you.