Shaun Farrar

Aug 08, 2025

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Choco-Latté Café.

BAR HARBOR—Some residents and those who provide services to residents of Rodick Lorraine, a 48-unit public housing building at 15 Eagle Lake Road in Bar Harbor, are concerned with the recent disabling of the building’s electronic access system.

With that system disabled, the constantly locked building’s residents now must rely on keys so that service providers can enter the building.

“I know of at least two residents that Island Connections helps out that historically the volunteers go directly to the residents’ apartments and help them get outside to the van. That can no longer happen,” said one resident who wished to remain anonymous. “My greatest concern is for our resident who is in a wheelchair and has been hospitalized four times in the last month. She has deliveries for everything: food, rides to the doctors, prescriptions, and it is literally impossible for her to get to the door.”

Many times, residents will gather in the lobby to socialize, but in the summer time the lobby is too hot to sit comfortably, so no one is out there to open the door, the resident said.

The Mount Desert Island and Ellsworth Housing Authorities (MDIEHA) sees the situation in a slightly different light, also focusing on the security of its residents.

“As we have always worked closely with the services providers who serve our resident populations, we are continuing to do so and have already distributed keys to ensure access will continue,” said Weston Brehm, executive director of the MDIEHA. “While I was agreeable to this solution, I did have some reservations as doing so does conflict with the independent living model while also creating a point of compromise in security. All things considered, we intend to continue to work closely with service providers and will continue to assess for security related to our strategy for coordinating their access.”

The independent living model was explained via email by Brehm.

“While public housing is a form of supportive housing, it is based on an independent housing model, and it is therefore expected that tenants will be able to coordinate their various services without special accommodations. This includes providing access to their guests, as needed,” Brehm wrote. “This considered, Housing Authority staff are not responsible for coordinating the tenant services of third-party providers due to various legal and liability issues that can arise.”

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Disabling of the Electronic Entry System

The previous electronic entry system allowed residents to buzz people into the main entry doors at both the building’s front and rear entries. This same system could also allow anyone with an entry code to access the building.

Over the years, according to Brehm, residents have provided visitors with access codes for entry into the building. Residents have come and gone, but the codes they may have given out stayed in the system, some remaining as working codes. The visitors that have been provided access codes over the years include friends and family, private service providers, healthcare providers, and nonprofit service providers.

Brehm became the executive director of the MDIEHA in 2023 and since then said that he has had to respond to multiple instances of unauthorized people having gained access to the building.

“These breaches have included the discovery of non-tenants sleeping in the community room, with incidences of excessive alcohol consumption and defecation in the public spaces of the building being the result. These types of incidences prove challenging to Housing Authority staff, who are then tasked with cleaning up human waste and the varied scenes that remain thereafter,” Brehm wrote. “Additionally, tenants have expressed a good deal of concern regarding this. More recently, a group of teenagers entered the property and disrupted a number of tenants, with their access being confirmed as a result of their having a passcode to enter the property.”

Knowing that shared passcodes were resulting in unauthorized access to the building which created a less than secure facility for the residents, Brehm said that he approved the housing authority moving forward “with a review of the system to ensure that a solution was implemented, with the end goal being a secure building.”

The note above was, and still is, posted at Rodick Lorraine and led many to believe that the housing authority was simply disabling the electronic system as the means to make the building more secure. Brehm said that belief was not entirely accurate.

“All things considered here, we did not simply shut off the system with the intention of leaving it off. It was our intention to modify the settings to ensure a secure property, as we are required to do per federal regulations and the lease agreements executed with tenants,” Brehm said.

The intent was to shut the system off and purge it of all of the codes that had been given out over the years, but there were issues while attempting to do that.

“When moving forward with our intended strategy, a system error occurred during reprogramming,” Brehm said. “This is why the technician was brought in. Unfortunately, per the technician’s statement, the error is common with the solution employed and may not be repairable. Engagement with the support company continues.”

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Potential Issues

Responding to an email inquiry from the Bar Harbor Story, Island Connections Executive Director Carissa Tinker spoke of some of the issues that the nonprofit anticipates encountering with a key only entry system.

According to its website, “Island Connections provides free transportation services to older adults and people with disabilities on MDI and the surrounding islands.”

Volunteers bring others to doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, cancer treatments, dialysis, and other medical needs. They bring people grocery shopping or to pick up their grocery orders. Island Connection volunteers will bring residents food from Meals on Wheels and the Food Access Project as well as providing trips to the pharmacy.

“Our volunteers often have to enter that building to assist folks with limited mobility, so we are concerned about our ability to continue assisting these neighbors. Sometimes they enter the building to bring them groceries, sometimes to push their wheelchair or give them a steady arm on the way to the vehicle, or even drop off prescriptions to folks who are sick and should stay in their units,” Tinker said.

Tinker is concerned that not having an electronic entry system will create some “real barriers” for some of the residents, specifically the less mobile, to receiving services from Island Connections.

Tinker said, “Our mission is to provide free transportation to seniors and people with disabilities that live independently, and being able to connect with our volunteers is essential to that independence and our work. We will continue to work closely with the Housing Authority to ensure everybody has access to care in the meantime, but without a viable access solution we are not sure if we will be able to continue serving people in that building in the same way.”

Additionally, the same anonymous resident said that on Friday and Saturday of last week, the mail delivery person, UPS, and FedEx all had to be let in the building. According to this resident, the residents are very concerned with packages, prescriptions, and cold, fresh, or frozen food deliveries being left outside of the front door in the heat and being stolen or spoiling before anyone know they are there.

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The Way Forward

According to Brehm, all MDIEHA public housing properties use keys for access with Rodick Lorraine being the only property that has that electronic entry system.

At Union River Estates in Ellsworth the housing authority is preparing to install its first key fob entry system. If that works as a viable entry method Brehm says that they may want to expand it to all of the MDIEHA properties following reviews of the system and the properties. The issue with that is financing.

“Do consider that one of the foundations of public housing is modest purchasing, as the funding source for the program is provided through public funding on the federal level,” Brehm said.

Union River Estates received a $250,000 grant for the installation of the key fob system being tested there.

While the electronic entry system is being repaired, if that is a possibility, residents and visitors will have to depend on keys for entry. There is the possibility that in the interim that could become the accepted norm that everyone adjusts to.

Tinker feels that volunteer-dependent service organizations will taking on a large task to maintain a key access system.

“We deeply value our partnership with the Housing Authority, however we are unable to take on the management of physical keys across a rotating group of volunteers or the coordination of having someone there to let them in,” Tinker said. “This is fundamentally an accessibility issue between the Housing Authority and their tenants, and we don’t have the capacity to absorb the labor of coordinating with another party in order for our volunteers to gain access to the person they are there to help.”

Additionally, there is a cost associated with the key entry system for tenants, if they have providers or others who need a key but are not a part of an agency that has been provided keys by the housing authority.

“Upon establishing residency, all tenants are provided two keys. The Bar Harbor Housing Authority currently charges $40 for extra keys. The $40 fee is the rate charged at all five housing authorities managed by MDIEHA. This charge covers the cost of the key and the costs associated with staff time for processing a request, to include delivery and the required tenant profile updates in our housing software,” Brehm said.

According to Brehm, the key entry system does not hamper emergency first responder time.

“First responders have always had keys and will continue to use this means for access. Additionally, there is a Knox Box on premise, and it should be noted that first responders have not historically used the electronic entry system,” Brehm said.

But some of the residents of Rodick Lorraine worry that there are many people who will have access issues that they depend on: a visit from their grandson after school, a meal to eat, or the delivery of lifesaving diabetes medication, to them easy access is a priority that they can no longer count on.

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The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.

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