Bar Harbor’s Cruise Ship Fight Isn’t Over: Sidman Appeals Federal Ruling as Bar Harbor Appeals Board Rejects His Cruise Ship Ells Pier Disembarkation Challenge.
Jun 18, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Geddy’s.
BAR HARBOR—Charles Sidman has appealed the latest ruling that stated Bar Harbor’s 2022 cruise ship ordinance is unconstitutional for 10 months of the year.
The deadline to appeal was June 15, 2026.
On June 12, defendant intervenor, Sidman, filed a motion to amend findings and alter or amend that judgement.
Sidman’s motion asked the court to amend its findings and instead “declare the Town of Bar Harbor’s citizen-initiated cruise ship ordinance constitutional in its entirety, year-round.”
Sidman is a local business owner and lead petitioner of a citizen’s petition that significantly decreased cruise ship visits in Bar Harbor.
The town’s cruise ship passenger disembarkation limit of 1,000 was approved by voters in 2022 as part of that citizens’ petition and referendum. The ordinance had passed 1,780 to 1,273, a difference of 507 votes.
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. U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker’s latest decision came in a 32-page order released May 15. In it, Judge Walker declared that the Bar Harbor cruise ship ordinance is unconstitutional in all months other than July and August.
“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.”
In 2024, in the midst of lawsuits, the Town Council had put forth another plan.
That council-backed article had asked for a repeal of the 1,000-passenger daily disembarkation cap so that the Bar Harbor Town Council could put a different limitation plan in place using different mechanisms.
The ballot measure (Article 4) had originally failed by 63 votes or less than 2 percent. Of the 3,489 votes cast, 1,713 voted in favor of the repeal and 1,776 voted in favor of keeping the ordinance as is. The recount had been requested by Bar Harbor resident and restaurant owner Kevin DesVeaux.
The recounted vote was upheld 1,779 (no) to 1,714 (yes). There were 160 blank votes. The yes votes gained a vote. The no votes gained three.
DesVeaux owns the West Street Cafe and has said that his restaurant’s revenue has decreased by hundreds of thousands of dollars last season. He links that to the decreased amount of cruise ships that visited Bar Harbor since the new limits began.
In Sidman’s June 12 motion to amend, his attorneys, Robert Papazian and David Silk, argue that there is legal error in Judge Walker’s determination that an infraction can’t be clear if laws are sometimes constitutional and sometimes not, and that creating a monthly constitutional calendar exceeds Judge Walker’s authority.
That should be legislative, Papazian and Silk state.
They also argue that the Pike balance test is meant to defer to legislative policy decisions and also disputed that July and August is a “longstanding and self-evident” peak, but that congestion continues from May to December.
BAR HARBOR APPEALS BOARD DECISION
In another cruise-ship related suit, Sidman appeared before the Bar Harbor Appeals Board, June 17 with two appeals.
These specific appeals involved Sidman appealing the town’s decisions to allow small cruise ships to disembark passengers at 23 Ells Pier in both 2025 and 2026.
The appeals were about the issuance of cruise ship disembarkation facility permits.
After a four-hour meeting, the Appeals Board unanimously denied both. If they had not, the town would no longer been able to disembark cruise ships at its downtown pier.
Ells Pier is the town pier at the end of West Street. The cruise ships who can disembark passengers there are American Cruise Line (ACL) ships, which have American flags (meaning that they don’t require Customs officials) and are smaller cruise ships, typically holding approximately 90-130 passengers.
Because ACL’s ships are United States flagged vessels, the town doesn’t need a secure facility to disembark its passengers, according to Harbormaster Chris Wharff. The company’s tenders tend to carry 30 passengers at a time.
Sidman’s appeal was about the town’s issuing a disembarkation facility permit to itself on land zoned “Shoreland General Development 1.”
Sidman and Papazian have argued that this is not an allowed use in the zone. However, since the board decided Sidman lacked standing in 2025, they could not appeal until this week.
That’s because in March, Superior Court Judge Michael A Duddy had decided that Sidman does indeed count as an aggrieved party under the town’s ordinance when it comes to the administrative appeal of the town’s cruise ship disembarkation permit for the town pier.
The March 2 ruling meant that the town’s Appeals Board’s earlier decision that Sidman lacked standing is vacated. This is why it went back to the board and was heard, June 17.
“Today’s court decision was a minor, but significant nonetheless, win in a long campaign to which we are totally committed,” Sidman had said in March. “It showed that the would-be despots who run our town (at our expense) cannot always avoid a court’s consideration of the legal merits and perhaps then correcting their misbehavior by a routine first tactic of slandering and trying to disenfranchise the messenger. Net:net, a small victory and recognition for citizens’ rights and the rule of law. On we go, with kudos to Attorney Papazian!”
Papazian (Gebhardt & Kiefer) represented Sidman at both the town’s Appeals Board meeting and Portland court proceedings.
When it came to the Appeals Board meeting on June 17, Papazian first wanted the board members to rule on if the board accepts Ocean Properties submission that occurred during a hearing last year.
Attorney Dan Pileggi, representing the Appeals Board, said that the board had never accepted those submissions, which had been disputed because of their timing related to deadlines. Those documents have not been resubmitted, he said. He said there wasn’t a compelling reason to consider the submission of a third party that hasn’t asked for it.
Moving on, Papazian told board members, “What you decide today means something.”
The town pier is in the General Shoreland District—a specific zone in the town. Each of the town’s zones allow certain activities and structures.
None of those activities in General Shoreland 1 allow for the disembarkation of cruise ship passengers, Papazian said.
That is an activity, he said, not a structure.
Eighteen other districts have piers. If the use of a permanent pier is all that’s needed to allow cruise ship disembarkations, then it would also be allowed in all those other districts.
“It’s either all 18 districts or none of them,” he said.
He then spoke to the purpose of multiple districts: residential, scientific, and more.
“None of these districts would ever be appropriate to disembark 1,000 cruise ship passengers in a day,” Papazian said.
There is a defined use in the town ordinance that allows cruise ship passenger disembarkations, he said. That is a ‘passenger terminal.’ That use, he said, is not in the district where Ells Pier is located. It is, he said, in the district where the CAT ferry terminal currently exists, further down Route 3.
He also questioned about the site plan approval needed for the activity. He also argued that even if the space had been used in the past for disembarkation of cruise ship passengers, it was not expressly in the LUO in the past, so it should not be allowed now.
Arguing for the town, attorney Stephen Wagner said that the Appeals Board really had to determine mostly a legal question where the burden is on the appellant and that Papazian hasn’t met its burden.
“They are essentially asking you to make a policy determination,” Wagner said.
The board, he said, has limited jurisdiction controlled by statute and the town’s LUO and can’t do that.
He said what the board members must determine is if the pier is an allowed use. The property as well as others in the district have a history of being used for cruise ship passenger disembarkations.
The use is what is authorized by the cruise ship disembarkation permit, not necessarily the facility itself.
The purpose of the district, he said, was for waterfront and tourist industry uses.
“The very point of this district is to preserve a certain type of history(ical) activity,” Wagner said.
Because the district allows waterfront and piers, it encompasses activity that allows movement between land and water or ships and boats. It is within the scope of the definition, he said.
All words not expressly defined in the land use ordinance (LUO) are meant to be looked at via context, he said. He pointed the board members to the dictionary definitions of pier, dock, and wharf.
The town pier is an existing permanent wharf, he said, that serves a functional waterfront use that includes the discharging and boarding of passengers.
“It makes common sense” for it to be a place for cruise ship tendering, he said and is a plain meaning based on context.
Sidman, he said, argues the district doesn’t allow passenger terminals.
The definition of passenger terminal includes things like ticket booths and other functions and if you took any of those singular activities listed in the overall definition as only being allowed where passenger terminals are allowed, it becomes absurd, he said. By that same logic, where passenger terminals are allowed would be the only place where there ticket booths were allowed or restroom facilities or waiting areas.
“You can’t read the ordinance in a way that creates an absurd result,” Wagner said.
The cruise ship ordinance exists, he said, because it is an allowed use in the area, which is also the area where the Harborside has disembarked cruise ship passengers. The site plan wasn’t triggered, he said, for reasons within the ordinance.
When there is ambiguity in an ordinance, the board has to construe it in favor of the property owner according to common law principle that a property owner can determine how to use their property, Wagner argued.
Pileggi asked if the board wants to ask the attorneys about if the district’s allowance of unloading and boarding sightseeing and other boats had any bearing. He asked if Sidman’s argument would impact those other kinds of passengers.
Those separate uses are not governed by the term “passenger terminal,” Papazian said, while cruise ships are a specific use mentioned in that term in the LUO.
Board Secretary Robert Webber said that for decades cruise ships tied up to or disembarked at the town pier.
Papazian said the town couldn’t claim a legal nonconforming right when it restarted disembarking passenger in 2025 since it had stopped several years before when the Harborside took over much of the operations on their site, including that of larger ships. It was a move that was meant to free up space at the pier as well as the surrounding area.
A representative from American Cruise Lines spoke during public comment saying, “We have come to Bar Harbor since the 1980s.”
The company has directly disembarked at the pier or used the tender, he said. He said if the board doesn’t deny the appeal it would be detrimental to the cruise line and the town. The Appeals Board said that financial loss to the cruise line or the town was not within their purview.
DELIBERATIONS
The board had previously said disembarkation was a legally permitted use at a meeting she was excused from, Board Chair Anna Durand said.
She spoke to wharf, pier, and dock as being specific, different terms and that the pier is not being used as a passenger terminal, but is more of a “place of transit.”
Vice Chair Claire Fox said that she’d assumed that when the language went into the LUO about the ferry terminal there was no change at the same time about cruise ship disembarkations.
Webber said he falls back on looking at the history of the area.
The board then talked about a previous case when they determined that the Golden Anchor’s (Harborside) use of disembarking cruise ship passengers as a finding of fact in another case about a notice of violation issued to the property. The Golden Anchor is in the same district.
Papazian said that this case is different because his client didn’t have the opportunity to contest the Golden Anchor’s notice of violation appeal.
The board, Pileggi explained, is being asked to make the distinction that cruise ship loading and unloading is materially different than the loading and unloading of other sorts of passengers in the district.
“You guys get to make that call,” Pileggi said. That, he said, is the essence of the appeal.
During the meeting, the board moved it was outside the appeals board’s jurisdiction to rule on Sidman’s appeal of the fee for appeals.
The board denied the 2025 appeal based on the findings and conclusion that it was an allowed usage. They did the same for the 2026 appeal.
OTHER DISCUSSIONS
At the end of the meeting, Durand asked that if one of the board’s decisions was remanded by a higher court or upheld, that the board be notified directly by the town rather than learning about it in a news source.
At the beginning of the meeting, associate member Michael Siklos brought up conflict of interest and what he believes is the applicant’s belief that Siklos is biased against him.
“I’m not that kind of person. I do not do that stuff. I take the Appeals Board very seriously,” Siklos said, but added that he wasn’t sure if Sidman or Papazian would take that assertion at face value and he worried that whatever way he voted it could be misconstrued as bias or retaliation.
That was a no-win, he said.
The way out of the dilemma, he suggested, was to put the ball in Sidman’s and Papazian’s court and asked if they thought he should recuse himself.
Wagner said that he had concerns about that plan, which he said would make Sidman and Papazian the gatekeepers of if an Appeals Board member participated or not.
Pileggi agreed, saying it was Siklos’ call and the board’s call whether he could listen to the facts of the case and make a decision based on the evidence and without bias.
“It is not appropriate for you to put that decision making capacity” before the appellants, Pileggi said.
“I do not believe that I am biased against Mr. Sidman, Mr. Papazian,” Siklos said and added that he never comes into a meeting knowing that he is going to vote in a set way.
There was no vote on whether to recuse him.
Siklos then told Sidman and others attending that he voted in Sidman’s favor during a close town vote where the town did not put a different ordinance in place instead of the citizens’ initiative.
Papazian said that they’d never accused Siklos of bias but had attacked the procedure of having an associate member place a motion.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Sidman Motion June 12 2026
261KB ∙ PDF file
All photos: Bar Harbor Story.
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.
You can help us keep bringing you daily, free, local news.
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Your contribution is appreciated.
Discover more from Bar Harbor Story
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.