Public Works Presentation Currently Set for October. Citizen Worries About Process.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by The 1932 Criterion Theatre.
BAR HARBOR—Exactly how detailed should minutes for town boards be?
That question surfaced at a September 3 Bar Harbor Planning Board meeting when Chair Millard Dority wondered about how his criticism of the town’s slow pace on a lodging moratorium was left out of the official record.
After Dority’s question was raised, the board learned that the final two pieces of the data and information that they’ve tried to learn about the town’s relationship with lodging, information relevant to the town’s lodging moratorium, should come by October 8.
THE MINUTES
At many meetings, municipal and school boards approve past minutes that are either compiled by the board’s elected secretary or a member of town staff.
When the planning board approved the minutes of an August meeting, Dority saw that his displeasure with the pace of the moratorium process in that earlier meeting was not included in the meeting’s minutes and he asked, “What is the purpose of the minutes?”
Staff Planner Hailey Bondy said minutes were meant to be a high-level review of the meeting.
Dority suggested making it clear to those who read them that the minutes are not an in-depth description of what occurred at the meeting.
Bondy said that the lack of inclusion of the remarks was not intentional and asked Dority if he wanted them included.
According to Meeting Minutes, “Accurate and timely meeting minutes play a vital role in local government, where decisions impact entire communities. These records serve as more than a summary of discussions—they are essential to ensuring transparency, accountability, and effective governance.”
Minutes not only promote transparency and accountability for town and school boards and committees, they make government boards more transparent and more accountable, which increases the public’s trust in the government. They help people who read the minutes understand why boards make the decisions that they do.
They also provide context for future decisions so that policy choices can be informed.
They also are part of the historical record for a town, for the events in a town, and for decisions made in the town. But even without that historical aspect, good and accurate minutes allow departments and boards to be aware of what other departments and boards are doing, which allows for more efficient coordination.
“Clear and accurate minutes ensure that everyone involved in governance has a shared understanding of previous decisions and ongoing discussions. This prevents misunderstandings, reduces the need for repeated discussions, and streamlines the decision-making process,” Meeting Minutes writes.
The minutes Dority questioned involved the board’s August discussion of the town’s lodging moratorium where he had worried over the length of time to get a report from the town’s public works department about infrastructure, which he said was an essential piece of understanding the impact of lodging on the town’s resources.
In August, Bondy said she was hopeful that they will have the public works moratorium workshop that month. It is now scheduled for October 8.
“I know it’s been a long time coming,” Bondy told planning board members at their September 3 meeting.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” Dority said.
There will be a presentation and then a question and answer session at that October meeting, Bondy said.
“Perfect,” Dority said.
THE MORATORIUM WORK
The town council has tasked the planning board with reporting to the council about how lodging may be straining the current town systems and if the approval process within the town’s land use ordinance is “inadequate to prevent serious public harm.”
The moratorium began November 2024 and has been continued multiple times. The last continuance occurred on July 1 when the moratorium was modified.
There will be no construction or authorization and review of the lodging uses specified in the moratorium’s language.
The July 1 extension followed two emergency moratoriums and the last regular moratorium, which means that any potential lodging development has been frozen since November 19, 2024. The moratorium’s latest run began July 31, thirty days after its approval.
During the moratorium, the town’s planning staff and planning board have collected data and had meetings to look at, according to the moratorium itself, the “development and operation of certain transient accommodations, including impacts on health and safety, environmental quality, quality of life, adjacent property values, size, and the approval process, especially for accommodations approved without planning board review.”
Data collected includes the number of guest rooms and maximum guest capacity, conversions from residential use to lodging, mapping of lodging by district and neighborhood, mapping locations of short-term and long-term rentals, and mapping areas serviced by public sewer and water.
“We’ll have a presentation about all of our findings,” Bondy said of the September 8 workshop via Zoom and Town Hall Streams.
A packet of materials will likely not be dispersed ahead of the meeting, Bondy said, but will be afterward.
Bondy further explained that the September 8 workshop will have findings about the data collection focused on convergence of commercial and residential property, current and historical lodging room data, as well as data about connection to water and sewer structure, density of lodging uses around town and a question and answer about what the data looks like.
“This will be the last two pieces that we have asked for,” Dority said. “On October 8 we will have completed the gathering information of every area that we said we would gather it from. We need to make our decisions on facts.”
During public comment, former planning board chair and business owner Tom St.Germain expressed concerns about the moratorium process and how the town council went about it.
“Instead of having data and then having the moratorium based on the data, which is what the state law requires, they declared an emergency and then have sought data to support the idea that there needs to be a moratorium. It’s been more than an year since the idea of a moratorium has been brought up,” St.Germain said.
He said the first step should been talking to the public works director, not the last step.
“Here we are ten months out and the promise is that the public works director is going to present to this board,” St.Germain said, referencing the October workshop.
He said he was also concerned about the consultant working with the sustainable tourism task force, which expects a 16-month project time for its recommendations and report to the town council.
Bondy said the town staff is looking at the sustainable tourism task force and moratorium as separate things.
“It puts a sector, the hospitality sector, of this town in a situation where it basically isn’t able to move in the interim. It seems really targeted toward one industry. The lack of progress is notable,” St.Germain said. “This process is taking much longer than it was originally thought to be taken.”
Dority said that the delay isn’t because of the planning board. The board has been willing to meet at multiple workshops.
“I hope that you weren’t insinuating that we are trying to find a reason to support the moratorium. That’s not what this group is doing,” Dority added. The board members are also waiting for the data. “We’ve got other things we’d like to be doing such as (dealing with) a lack of housing.”
Dority said that the delays were also not the planning department’s fault.
St.Germain said he was not insinuating that the planning board was dragging its feet on purpose. He said, typically, the planning board takes a minimum of six months to go over information to make suggested changes to the land use ordinance’s potential imperfections, which worries him.
“The collection of data has been very slow,” St.Germain said. “It’s already been a long process and as structured right now it’s going to continue into the future.” He added, “My guess is that it’s going to take another two years.”
Board member Teresa Wagner said there are things like the guest room definition in the town’s land use ordinance, parking, and lodging in residential zones, which could be looked at while the data is still being gathered.
“If there’s any of this we could start talking about now, because it does take so long to get anything changed, I think it might be something to consider,” Wagner said and suggested items be put on an upcoming agenda.
Guy Dunphey, board member, asked for an additional workshop after October 8 to digest the information the board has learned. Board member John Seavitt agreed.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Bar Harbor Planning Board Chair Worries Delay in Moratorium Presentation Takes Time Away from Board’s Housing Work
To watch the future meeting on Town Hall Streams.
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