Assessing the Valuation

Prompted by a question from my friend Mario, I've been rummaging around during the past several days on the Town of Bar Harbor's assessing database, looking up information about who owns what and how much the town thinks it is worth. In particular, I was looking for property assessment information on four major local landowners: Acadia National Park, The Jackson Laboratory, Ocean Properties (which operates in Bar Harbor through many llc's) and David J. Witham. Ocean Properties, owned by the family of Bangor native Thomas Walsh, and Witham are the two big rival hoteliers in town.
I found that together, these four entities own more than two-thirds of all the property wealth in Bar Harbor, which the state estimates to have a total value of $1.44 billion. Acadia's land in Bar Harbor (not counting parts of the park that lie outside the town) represents 45 percent of all the land value in Bar Harbor. Acadia and Jackson Lab are nonprofits, of course, which means they do not pay the town property taxes, the way Witham and Walsh do. Walsh is likely the largest taxpayer in Bar Harbor.
During my rummaging, I also came across the 2011 state valuation figures for every municipality and county in the state. Bar Harbor, incidentally, has the 25th-highest valuation of all the municipalities in Maine.
So, to make it all somewhat easier to digest, I slapped together a spreadsheet that lists:

• The highest municipal valuations in the state (>$1B).
• The valuation totals for each county.
• The municipal valuations for Hancock and Washington counties.
• The property assessment totals of the four Bar Harbor landowners mentioned above 

Admittedly, it's little more than a collection of stats. If you see any larger trends here, feel free to point them out.

Concordia Catastrophe

This is a nightmare situation anywhere. Although why it was so might still be debatable, there's no debating that the Costa Concordia was too close too shore before it ruptured its hull and then tilted over.
Based on news media reports, the captain claims he prematurely left the ship because he tripped and fell (wow) into a lifeboat being deployed off the ship. Surviving passengers have said they first were given inaccurate information and then, in some cases, were better prepared than nearby crew members to get themselves safely to shore. Not all did, however. According to the latest reports, 11 are dead and 21 still missing.
Cruise ships glide in and out of Frenchman Bay, off Mount Desert Island, by the dozens each summer, and local officials seem to be aware of the need to be ready in the event of an emergency. In the spring of 2011, state, federal and local officials held an emergency drill in Bar Harbor to rehearse what might happen if two tenders collided in the harbor while ferrying passengers between shore and one or more cruise ships anchored in the bay.  That is a much different scenario than what the photo above depicts, though two tenders could easily carry 30 or more people, which is roughly the same number of those believed to be dead and missing from the Costa Concordia.
But the chance of something similar to the scale of the Concordia incident happening in Frenchman Bay would seem relatively low. According to Bar Harbor Harbormaster Charlie Phippen, all cruise ships coming in and out Frenchman Bay have to have a certified pilot familiar with Frenchman Bay at the helm. When they come in, the ships stop at a buoy at the mouth of the bay and pick up the pilot to ease the ships around the Porcupine Islands to the anchorages.
Still, I wonder if a future training exercise might imagine a more disastrous scenario off MDI.