The 13 liens filed against a Mount Desert Island hotel over a recent $28 million renovation of the property are not the first time the hotel’s owner has been accused of stiffing contractors on their bills.
Tim Harrington, who bought the 124-year old Asticou Hotel in 2023, also had previous contractor liens filed against other projects he has pursued in nearby towns. These other documents were filed with the Hancock County Registry of Deeds in recent years, before 11 contractors from around the state filed liens totaling $14 million against the MDI hotel over the past two months.
One earlier lien was filed with the Hancock County Registry of Deeds in 2021 for work done at The Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, which Harrington bought in the fall of 2020. Another lien was filed on a residential waterfront property on Little Cranberry Island that Harrington purchased around the same time he acquired The Claremont.
Harrington hired R.L. White & Son of Bar Harbor to work on a major renovation of The Claremont, but the $925,000 in bills that the company later submitted to Harrington went unpaid for months. After the contractor filed the lien with the county, it took more than a year for Harrington to compensate the firm for their work and for the lien to be discharged, according to registry records.
Richard Bradford, a builder from Southwest Harbor, was hired by Harrington to build a new house on a 2-acre residential property on Little Cranberry Island, and later submitted bills totaling nearly $324,000 for his work. In July 2023, more than three months after Bradford filed a lien with the county over those unpaid bills, Harrington sent him the money and the lien was discharged.
Bradford and R.L. White & Son did not respond Friday to messages seeking comment on their experiences in working on Harrington’s properties.
Harrington did not respond to requests for comment sent to his representatives on Thursday and Friday.
The registry of deeds has no records of any liens having been filed against Salt Cottages, another upscale lodging property that Harrington owns in Bar Harbor.
Harrington also is founding partner of an ownership group of 10 other high-end tourist lodging properties in Kennebunkport and Kennebunk. The properties he owns on and around MDI are not part of that group, which is called Kennebunkport Resort Collection.
According to records in the York County Registry of Deeds online database, there have not been any contractor liens filed recently or in past years against the collection’s properties in those southern Maine towns.
But Harrington’s management of at least one property in Kennebunkport did come under public scrutiny a few years ago. In 2017, Harrington abruptly closed a popular restaurant at The Boathouse Hotel, surprising the staff with little to no warning, a local newspaper reported at the time.