Tourism boom? Hardly

Reading the editorial “Tourism Is Booming” in the July 11 BDN brought an obvious question to mind. Where? Turnpike traffic, attendance at a soccer tournament and vacation rentals in Northeast Harbor scarcely add up to a tourism boom. Turnpike traffic has to do with people passing through Maine. Tourism has to do with visitors who stay for a time.

To find out about them, talk to the people who deal with tourists on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, they are not dealing with many tourists this year.

Talk with the longtime owner of a popular oceanfront campground in midcoast Maine. He’ll tell you that his revenues are down more than 30 percent from their numbers last year at this time. Talk with innkeepers, shopkeepers and restaurateurs on coastal Route 1 that runs along Penobscot Bay from Port Clyde to Mount Desert Island.

Their sales, too, are weak. The summer traffic jams of tourists snaking their way through Rockland and Camden are nonexistent this year. You won’t find “No Vacancy” signs at the inns that dot the route. They have been replaced with “For Sale” signs.

Tourism boom? Hardly.

The most telling statistic in the BDN editorial: Maine ranks 38th among the 50 states in dollar support for tourism. Thirty-seven other states – among them Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania – competing for the same tourism dollars, all spend more than penny-pinching Maine legislators will permit.

Unless the state launches imaginative programs backed by significant funding increases to promote the industry, tourism will go just as other Maine industries have gone, and with it the billions of dollars tourists bring to the state. When that happens, as it surely will without aggressive state involvement, what will we do?

Perhaps we can deed the entire state to the Nature Conservancy. If we can’t help people, at least we can make the animals happy.

Frank Kulla

Watchtide Inn

Searsport