by Chad Gilley- Online Editor
July 20, 1999

As you inch your car through downtown on a hot July day, it comes over you. That complete and utter disgust with the fact that your beloved community has become overrun with annoying visitors who are on their own schedule, quite oblivious to your deadline, your life, your problems. People who regard folks such as yourself as quaint and maybe just a little backward, all the while asking you those questions: At what point do deer become moose? Or why is that lobster green? Or how much snow do you get here? As if by some miracle except for the week they managed to arrive, you have to hack through the ice to fill up the buckets to get water for your house.

Or they’re asking you directions. How many times have you been truly tempted to tell them the wrong thing. But of course you don’t. That would be mean. It’s just a fanciful little thought that tickles the back of your brain when you tell them that yes, indeed you can get there from here, you just have to go past where the Grange Hall used to be. Sometimes they just want to hear you talk. They find your accent "charming." You have a different word for theirs.

Dann Lewis  Maine Department of Tourism

Well neighbor, truth be told, the state thinks the onslaught of visitors is a good thing, because most of them come with a wallet full of disposable cash which they’re going to spend on ice cream, boat rides, t shirts, and rocks with "Bar Harbor" painted on them. There’s just no way we can get these folks to just mail their cash to us because we’re special. They’re going to have to physically come and see how special we are. And the state Department of Tourism has this guy, Executive Director Dann Lewis, who’s whole job is to get those people from their homes in Pennsylvania and New York, to your main street in their RV.

Lewis, appearing on Time Warner Cable’s "Maine Matters" show says, "There’s not a family in Maine in truth that doesn’t benefit. If you consider that over 101 thousand jobs are generated or supported by tourism in the state. There’s approximately 7.7 billion dollars of economic impact per year. It generates over 312 million dollars for the general fund. If that money weren’t coming in from visitors, everybody’s taxes would go up a great deal."

Barbara Whitten  Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau

Barbara Whitten of the Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau says even those who aren’t working directly with tourists benefit. "You hear people who may be in the painting business or the hardware business and they’re not really understanding all the tourism industry might mean. When they realize that all these front porches and the rocking chairs and the trim at all the inns along the coast need painting. They understand. …We need to do a little bit more education about how many people are employed by the tourism industry and how it affects all of us."

Lewis says that yes, there are a lot of tourists. "In 1997, which is the most recent year we have complete data for there were about 8.3 million visitors to the state overnight. And there were another nearly 40 million people who came on day trips primarily to Southern Maine."

Tourists in Maine all seem to come to the same places at the same time. Lewis says "The seasonality is quite a problem, Maine is much more seasonal than the US as a whole. And something like 55% of the visitors come in just three month July August and September"

Barbara Hagar  Portland Downtown District

Barbara Hagar of the Portland Downtown District says a big part of their job is to let folks know that Maine is a nice place to be outside of those three months. "We’re always working to try and lengthen that summer to starting in April to ending in November."

Dann Lewis would like to get them to visit some other places where tourists don’t typically go. He points out that a thriving tourist industry can be a great boon to an area where perhaps a mill has closed down. He points to Millinocket, where white water rafting in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter are creating new opportunities. "There’s a lot of opportunity throughout the state for this new and different type of activity"

One growing source of tourism in Portland is the cruise ships, but that’s taken a concentrated effort by city tourism officials. According to Barbara Hagar "There is tremendous competition for the visits from some of the cruise ships. They set their schedules maybe two or three years in advance." Barbara Whitten says, "We’re looking into expanding and renovating our Maine State Pier where we’ll be able to have cruise ships up to a thousand feet." That should help lure more and larger cruise ships to Portland.

The current labor shortage is a big problem for the tourism industry. Dann Lewis says "It’s really reached the acute stage. It’s necessary to bring people in from the outside to staff many of the hotels, restaurants and sightseeing businesses." So, businesses are importing students and young people to serve the tourists.

All this, of course has it’s downside, as anyone who has been in the forty-second car in a slow moving line up Route One behind a geriatric RV driver can tell you, and a lot of the problems relate to traffic congestion. Tracy Perez of the Office of Personal Transportation is working on plans to get some of our visitors to leave their cars at home. That means having a system in place that allows tourists to use busses, trains, ferries, and other alternatives. The state is making this effort in part because of summer air quality problems along the coast. "We don’t know exactly where it’s coming from but we know it’s partially due to the cars in the summer time." Perez says. "It also impacts the business along the coast because the people who live there will avoid them in the summer because of the Route One congestion."

But as long as Maine is beautiful, those of us who live here are going to have to put up with some inconvenience in the summer time. But maybe if the tourism officials are successful, we’ll just have to put up fewer of them all at once and all in once place.