The major renovation of the Asticou Hotel on Mount Desert Island is not the first project on which the owner has dragged his feet on paying contractors.
Tim Harrington did the same thing when he renovated The Wanderer tourist rental cottage property in Kennebunk in 2022, according to documents filed with the York County Registry of Deeds. After Harrington bought and renovated the property and then reopened it in 2022, six contractors filed liens against it totaling more than $1.6 million over unpaid bills.
The records suggest a pattern by Harrington, who owns or co-owns more than a dozen lodging properties in Maine, of delaying payments to contractors for months and, in some cases, for years.
His latest project, a major renovation of the Asticou Hotel in the MDI village of Northeast Harbor, has racked up nearly $14 million in liens from contractors who say they have not been paid for their work.
In Kennebunk, Harrington bought the former Kennebunker Cottages property in 2021, and then the following spring and summer had contractors make extensive renovations to a house and 17 rental cottages at the site.
But in the ensuing months, after not getting paid, six contractors filed liens against the property. The smallest of those liens was filed by Hancock Lumber of Casco for nearly $139,000, while the largest was for $372,000 worth of unpaid work by Barrett Made of Portland, registry documents indicate.
Most of the liens were discharged in a matter of two or three months, after the contractors were paid, but the lien filed by Barrett Made was not discharged until late June 2024, nearly 23 months after it had been filed in August 2022, according to registry records.
The $372,000 payment was not the only money Barrett Made had to wait on from Harrington. Around the same time, in August 2022, the company filed a lien against a Kennebunkport property co-owned by Harrington where it had made nearly $161,000 in improvements. That lien sat unresolved for more than 30 months, and was not discharged until April of this year, registry records indicate.
Harrington has not responded to multiple messages seeking comment about his renovation projects on MDI or on the contractor liens filed against the Asticou Hotel and some of his other properties.
The Asticou Hotel and The Wanderer are part of a group of seven hotels owned and operated by Harrington under his Atlantic Hospitality company. This group includes the Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor, where Bar Harbor contractor R.L. White & Son made $925,000 in improvements in 2021 and then had to wait more than a year to be compensated by Harrington and for the lien to be discharged, according to records filed in the Hancock County Registry of Deeds.
Harrington also is the founding partner of a separate group of 10 Kennebunkport resort lodging properties called Kennebunkport Resort Collection, but a search of documents in the York County Registry of Deeds did not turn up records of current or former liens filed against any of the Kennebunkport collection’s hotels.
A contractor’s lien was filed against a stand-alone restaurant owned by the Kennebunkport group that has since closed. That lien, for more than $12,000, was filed on Sept. 22, 2022, by CCB Inc. of Westbrook for work done at Via Sophia by the Sea, but then was discharged six days later, according to York County Registry of Deeds documents. The restaurant closed down permanently last December, according to the Portland Press Herald.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story listed an inaccurate name for a lumber company that filed a lien against The Wanderer property.