CAMDEN — The eyes of the hooded figure in surveillance video glow bright white.

At 3:30 a.m., long after the tourists had left Bay View Street’s art galleries, antique stores and sweet shops, the masked person had all the privacy they could ask for as they turned the corner and strolled down the empty sidewalk. Timestamps from the footage, taken Sept. 8, suggest they already had been at their work for more than an hour.

The figure was gone by the time the sun rose over the fruits of their labor: 25 brand new parking kiosks had been tagged with pink hearts, the crevices of their card readers sabotaged with an expanding spray foam.

Though officials quickly determined that the vandal had caused little long-term damage and had not stymied the town’s controversial plan to start charging for prime parking spots, much of the mess remained days later. So did the uneasy feeling that America’s broader political dysfunction had arrived in the picturesque Midcoast community.

“Maybe I’m naive, but I did not think that this would happen,” said Holly Anderson, the town’s communications coordinator. “I thought that Camden was above that.”

Mainers, social media snarks and wider news outlets have had fun with the story, especially with the circulation of a fake Facebook post falsely claiming that officials believed a Portland resident known as “The Raven” was behind the crime.

The fact that police haven’t been able to identify the vandal has not slowed speculation about their motives. Several tongue-in-cheek Reddit posts compared the event to the Boston Tea Party and likened the Raven to vigilantes like Batman. One conservative news outlet theorized that the graffiti was the work of a “leftist” — how else to explain the pink hearts?

Town officials are less than amused. They’re unsure whether the perpetrator was attempting to make a political statement, looking to save a few dollars on parking or just trying to cause some trouble. But at a time when the venomous rhetoric that defines national politics is increasingly trickling down to the municipal level, several said they were disappointed that one individual would take their frustrations out on their own community.

“It’s parking! In the greater scheme of things, why is this causing this level of upset?” said Susan Dorr, chair of Camden’s Select Board. “I’m just shocked at people’s willingness to be completely uncivilized to one another.”

‘TREATED LIKE A TOURIST’

Camden has for years been inching toward a metered system like the ones already in place in many neighboring communities. Officials, citing a 2022 parking study, say the move is necessary to encourage turnover of downtown parking spaces. They also see an opportunity to generate revenue to help pay for town services that would otherwise pump up the community’s already high property tax rates.

“We’ve been giving away a valuable resource for free for a long time,” Dorr said.

Yet each time the town has taken a concrete step toward paid parking in the last few years — when the select board voted in April to spend about $260,000 on the new system, when public works painted the metered spots green, when the kiosks were installed last weekend — opponents’ complaints have bubbled up, Anderson said.

They’ve warned that the move will undermine Camden’s friendly and welcoming reputation and drive away visitors. They’ve bristled at the suggestion that downtown workers should make more space for the wealthy out-of-staters they serve. And they’ve argued they shouldn’t have to pay more money to park on streets that their tax dollars already fund.

“Completely ignoring those of us who pay the majority of expenses of this town is really short-sighted,” one resident said during select board meeting last October. “We didn’t move here last century to be treated like a tourist.”

The 30 new kiosks, which will charge $2 per hour between May 15 and Oct. 15, could net Camden hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, according to initial projections the town shared in April.

But despite the potential boon to the town’s coffers and the fact that residents will be able to register for two free hours of parking per day, some still struggle to see the plan as anything other than a hungry government reaching into their pockets.

DISTRUST OF THE SYSTEM

While most people have been careful not to endorse the defacement of town property, posters on the Camden Politics Facebook page and other social media sites have criticized town leaders for enacting the parking program without sending the issue to a town ballot.

State law grants municipal officers “the exclusive authority” to set parking rates.

Last Friday, Kendall Espinosa of the Camden Public Works Department remained hard at work scrubbing pink hearts off the vandalized kiosks, as she had been all week. She’s always liked cleaning, she said, so she doesn’t particularly mind the task, even though it requires her to bend and twist awkwardly for hours at a time.

But as a Camden resident and taxpayer, she said it was frustrating that the town now has to spend money and manpower fixing one person’s mess.

“There are other ways that you can oppose (paid parking) other than vandalizing town property,” she said. “It’s not going to stop the program.”

Camden’s system will finally launch on Oct. 1 before shutting down for the season two weeks later, Anderson said.

Officials are hoping that it won’t take long for the new setup to become second nature for Camden residents, just as it is for people in so many other places. Those who want to avoid the fee, they say, need only walk three to five minutes from the heart of downtown in any direction to find free spaces.

But they understand that as seemingly every decision made by any level of government is divisive, even in Camden, residents will have to see the benefits of the system to believe in them.

“It’s not fear of the unknown, because we’re telling them. It’s distrust,” Anderson said. “It’s going to just take one season, hopefully, to be able to show them the fruits of this change.”

In the meantime, officials continue to hunt for the person now known, at least on social media, as The Raven. The town has offered a $5,000 reward for information that leads to the vandal’s arrest.

Police say the tips have already been rolling in.