Ellen Dohmen. Cara Ryan. Charles Sidman.

Carrie Jones

Jul 12, 2026

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Shenna for Senate

I have been involved in Bar Harbor Town Government for 25 years – chair of both Planning Board and Appeals Board (for 15 years).

I have known Shenna Bellows since about December 2013 when she was an unknown running against Susan Collins. My husband and I went to a “meet the candidate” gathering – we had never heard of her but knew we weren’t supportive of Collins – and were so totally impressed that we signed up to have a house party for Shenna. We have known her since then and our fondness and admiration have grown weekly since that time.

When we are thinking of who should replace Platner, we cannot start with an unknown. Someone like Mattie Daughtry is not known to anyone outside Augusta, while Shenna and Troy Jackson are names well known now. Shah, also well known, is completely unqualified and has all kinds of “baggage” from his mismanagement of Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak in Illinois to his own lack of real government experience.

Shenna comes from CD2 and is a most homegrown candidate. She is so squeaky clean – we’re now dear friends but she refused even to let me buy her a birthday gift in case it looked like a campaign contribution, something so behind the scenes that no one would even know of it – that no vetting would need to be done. She could hit the ground running and would only need cash – and LOTS of it!!

Shenna’s record as Secretary of State – whether it’s her standing up for the Constitution in refusing to put Trump on the ballot (and her subsequent gracious acceptance of the court’s ultimate decision), her protection of our privacy, her refusal to accommodate ICE, her modernizing of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles or registering to vote there, her updating of Maine’s archives – or her forward-thinking and progressive positions on universal health care, education, and help for working families, all are excellent.

Since she is willing to assume the candidacy and if given enough support really to run a campaign that could match that of Collins and her millions of corporate and dark money, I think it would be a winning ticket.

And I, personally, would do anything and everything to make this happen.

Ellen L. Dohmen

Bar Harbor

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Barcelona v. Bar Harbor

The people of Barcelona want their city back. They’ve had enough of the 16 million annual visitors who overrun what used to be their downtown and they’re doing something about it. On top of the lodging moratorium they’ve had in place since 2017, the city’s 10,000 vacation rental licenses will now expire in 2028. They’re also increasing tourist taxes and parking fees for tour coaches, and planning to effectively ban day-trip cruise ships by raising the tax to the maximum. They not only want these fees to subsidize tourist services, they plan to invest this revenue in efforts to restore Barcelona’s true identity, supporting businesses that serve residents. They also have strict usage laws that limit the number of tourist establishments. When asked about critics crying that these measures “threaten prosperity,” Barcelona’s new commissioner for sustainable tourism replies, “We have to have a hierarchy of priorities. And at the top of our order is the citizen’s right to live in the city.” Bar Harbor has a little over 5,200 residents and sees 1.5 to 2 million seasonal visitors every year. Barcelona, with a population of 1.75 million, is overwhelmed at 16 million, 9 times their population. That’s a lot of tourists, but scale matters too. We’re a tiny town, losing more essential services for our citizens every year. We’re also on a heavily wooded island with a single, narrow road off.

Bar Harbor shouldn’t be debating new downtown hotels anymore. Like Barcelona, we need to say, “Enough.” We can learn something from their marketing shift too: instead of begging tourists to “Visit Barcelona,” they now say “This is Barcelona,” asserting civic pride as well as hinting that the city you’ll visit is their own, not yours, and you visit on their terms.

In the comments to this NYT piece, someone identified as “Nic, writing from Italy” adds, “This is not a class issue. A backpacker on a budget can stand in silence in front of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and feel something real. A wealthy tourist can walk past it staring at their phone. The problem is not who can afford to come. It’s whether people come to experience a place or simply to consume it. Sustainable tourism is not about selecting people by income. It’s about creating the conditions for everyone, residents and visitors alike, to actually enjoy what makes a place worth visiting in the first place. That requires courage. And a long-term vision most administrations still don’t have.”

Barcelona is on a mission to create those conditions for visitors while simultaneously recovering its integrity for residents. Bar Harbor? Well, we have a new Big Cup next door to the municipal building.

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Sidman decries stickers

With some reluctance but feeling it important to do so, I write to inform our community how low some reprobates in Bar Harbor have sunk with the recent public posting around town of the sticker above, falsely claiming that I personally do not want tourism in Bar Harbor, in an effort to divert business away from my and my wife’s gallery by name. These stickers demean and dishonor the entire community, being a public escalation of previous attacks against me personally as a stand-in for community sentiment. In addition to being utterly untrue, it defies any logic that my wife’s life-work business, that has for 31 years celebrated and enhanced Bar Harbor nationally and globally by sending over ten thousand fine paintings into thousands of homes, across all fifty US states and fifteen other countries, would not want tourists to visit.

Bar Harbor’s voters are trying to better manage uniquely high levels of tourism, and no one has ever suggested that visitors are unwelcome here. Our gallery and Town indeed welcome them, but in a fashion that does not overwhelm the community itself. These stickers show everyone that some in our midst cannot abide democratic processes and votes not in their favor, and resort instead to manufactured personal vilification as their last spoiled recourse.

In response, I call upon the Chamber of Commerce (of whom our desperate adversaries are no doubt members) to publicly repudiate this conduct, lest visible internecine attacks damage everyone in the community. Our town government should be equally forceful, denouncing and prosecuting this behavior when possible and severing ties with any organization defending it. Anyone with information about the printing and posting of these stickers should contact the Bar Harbor Police Department. Finally, individuals can write letters to the editor, patronize (or not) establishments promoting or engaging in public disparagement, and/or further demonstrate their support for our efforts to defend the public interest via check to me at PO Box 200, Bar Harbor, ME 04609, or GoFundMe campaign https://www.gofundme.com/f/8aeb5n-protect-acadia-from-cruise-ships. Will we allow our community to be defined by a hateful, anonymous, cowardly, and non-democratic extremist fringe among us?

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