BAR HARBOR – When the cruise ship season opens this summer, passengers from an estimated 30 arrivals will pour into town, leaving $9.7 million behind.

But the people who have to manage the harbor and maintain the piers, floats and restrooms want a little left for them as well.

So, for the first time, the town will assess cruise ship fees that are expected to bring in $26,000 in 2001.

Town councilors approved the precedent-setting anchorage fees earlier this month.

Town Manager Dana Reed said about $80,000 each year is required to keep the harbor master’s office shipshape. Half is covered by mooring revenue.

But the remaining $40,000 comes directly from Bar Harbor taxpayers.

“The town has a large investment in the harbor and an ongoing expense in operating it,” Reed said Monday.

The fees are expected to bring in as much as $60,000 as the number of ships in town increases in coming summers.

Large ships must ordinarily anchor in deep water, sending launches to the town pier for unloading. Bar Harbor currently charges $700 daily for this use of the public pier or its network of floats. Beginning in 2002, this daily fee will increase to $750.

However, Bar Harbor will also begin charging a first-of-its-kind $750 per day anchorage fee to any vessel dropping anchor within the harbor’s boundary, as defined by the Porcupine Islands. In 2002, the anchorage fee will increase to $1,000 daily.

The Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce has spent the past few years trying to increase MDI’s share of the cruise business. Whether the anchorage fees will hinder its efforts remains to be seen.

“We really don’t know what the effect will be. We don’t know if the additional fees will discourage the cruise ships from coming,” said Clare Wood, executive director of the Bar Harbor Chamber.

The council approved the cruise ship fees based on the recommendations of a Department of Transportation study completed last year. T.F. Valleau & Associates, a Portland-based consulting firm, studied Bar Harbor’s cruise ship industry throughout 1999.

The Valleau study forecast that Bar Harbor’s cruise traffic could double in the next decade. It considered how other towns that have become popular cruise destinations -primarily those in Alaska – managed their harbors, and recommended the anchorage fee and pier fees.

Lawyers from the Portland firm Berstein, Shur, Sawyer and Nelson studied Maine law and determined that Bar Harbor not only has jurisdiction to charge docking and anchorage fees, but that the town may restrict the number of ships that anchor in the harbor and even require cruise ships to use municipal facilities instead of private mooring facilities.

The town has no plans to force use of its pier and float, Reed said.

The right to charge a fee for anchoring in the harbor is tied to the state act that charges harbor masters with regulating the navigable waters of a community, the lawyers said. In fact, an anchorage fee has legally existed in southern Maine for almost 10 years.

Long Island, an offshore community of just under 200 year-round residents in Casco Bay, is the only other Maine municipality to charge an anchorage fee.

That town has charged the fee since shortly after it seceded from Portland in 1993, and it has not seen a resultant decline in the number of vessels in its harbor.

However, Long Island’s fees are a mere fraction of those proposed for Bar Harbor. Any vessel to drop anchor within town limits is charged a one-time fee of $100. For each subsequent day, the ship must pay just $10 to remain in Long Island’s waters, according to Long Island Harbor Master Francis Murphy.

The fee is symbolic: charged more as a means of keeping track of the vessels in town than to gain revenue, he explained.

“It wasn’t done to make money,” Murphy said.

Despite their relative absence in Maine, substantial anchorage fees are quite common worldwide, said a spokeswoman for Miami-based Royal Caribbean International. Bar Harbor’s fee is not likely to affect the company’s interest in Mount Desert Island as a destination, she said.

For the past five years, Royal Caribbean has brought about 1,800 passengers to Bar Harbor every 10 days during September and October, a total of more than 9,000 fall tourists, Graham McRorie, a shore excursion manager for Royal Caribbean said, while his ship was docked in Bar Harbor last fall.

And demand for the foliage cruises through New England and Atlantic Canada grows each year, McRorie said.

Bar Harbor’s proximity to Acadia Natural Park grants the town a cachet that will probably weather any hit from the increased fees, Wood said.

“We’re not Portland, and we’re not Miami,” she said.

“If we stay true to who we are the cruise ships passengers will always want to come. The passengers want that unique, authentic Bar Harbor experience.”