Lodging prompted the loss of 17 dwelling units since 2007
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BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Planning Board, charged with reviewing data and making recommendations in regards to the town’s moratorium on multiple lodging uses, heard a draft report on the data analysis presented by the town’s planning department in a workshop, Monday.
“This is one of two remaining workshops that we wanted to hold to gather information,” Planning Board Chair Millard Dority said to those assembled.
The board did not receive the information in advance of the meeting where Bar Harbor Housing and Community Planner Cali Martinez and Staff Planner Hailey Bondy presented the information they’d gathered and their analysis of it.
“This is a chance and opportunity for us to hear from the planning staff about all the data they’ve been collecting,” in the past few months, Dority said.
Some of the information presented included that in the past 14 years, there was a net increase of four lodging facilities and 334 rooms. Most of those lodgings are in zoning districts that are primarily commercial. There are currently 2,999 guest rooms in the town, according to the planning department’s data.
The data was collected and collated by the town staff because of a lodging moratorium enacted by the town council.
On July 1, the Bar Harbor Town Council officially extended a modified moratorium on lodging. The extension means that there will be no construction and authorization and review of the lodging uses specified in the moratorium’s language. The extension follows two emergency moratoriums and the last regular moratorium, which means that any potential lodging development has been frozen since November 19, 2024. During that time, the language of the moratorium and its whereas clauses have been tweaked.
Also during that time, 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.”
The data effort is separate from the sustainable tourism management effort, Martinez stressed Monday.
“We believe we have more than enough data to make a decision on the moratorium,” she said.
Questions they looked at included: Has there been a pattern of conversion from residential uses to other uses and how do the conversions relate to the categories of areas in town (residential or commercial)?; Are lodging uses being developed close to natural resources?; and, has the growth of lodging increased recently or is it significantly different from the past?
LOSS OF HOUSING UNITS:
According to Martinez, staff used Google Street View and then building permit files, which aren’t digitized, to determine what was happening at different spaces in the town. The department went back to 2007 to look at the changes.
Martinez focused on explaining the conversion or residential dwellings to other uses.
The districts with most conversions are Downtown Village 1 and Downtown Village 2, which, as the names indicate, are in the heart of downtown.
However, Martinez included commercial uses in her data as a separate section. Those commercial uses include things such as the hospital, banks, the college, the library, private schools, and others demolishing or converting homes for other uses. There have been 17 dwelling units lost to commercial uses in that same time period.
Since 2007, there have been 17 residential units lost distinctly to lodging uses.
Martinez did not discuss how many homes have been built in that time frame.
Of those 37 units that were changed to lodging, commercial, or mixed uses or lost to become a parking lot, 66 percent were single-family homes and 29 percent were apartments.
At the same time of the conversions, there has been a slow growth of dwelling units, Martinez said, relying on census and town assessor data. The population downtown has gone down according to census while the overall town population has increased.
“The seasonal housing demand does significantly restrict the overall housing stock,” Martinez said.
Short-term rentals, campgrounds, and employee housing are not counted in the numbers, according to Bondy, and are not included in the moratorium language. Short-term rentals are, however, currently capped when not the primary residence of the home owner. Those still count as dwelling units, they said.
The draft data analysis also included assertions, such as that the town needs “to continue to manage the growth of seasonal housing as much as possible.”
LODGING GROWTH
For this section, the department looked at periods of analysis from 2011 to 2025. According to the town, 334 more guest rooms were created during that time, 265 of those were from new or closed lodging, and there was an overall increase of four lodging facilities in the past 14 years.
The most growth in the number of guest rooms was between the nine-year period of 2011 to 2018. The greatest increase of lodging facilities was in the two-year span between 2023 and 2025. There are currently 87 lodging facilities in the town. They are of various sizes.
Twelve lodging facilities expanded, creating 103 guest rooms.
During this time, most of the changes occurred in areas that allow primarily commercial uses such as in Downtown Village 1 and 2, Bar Harbor Gateway, and Shoreland Development.
“We thought it was important to touch specifically on this,” Bondy said.
There are 657 dwelling units in Downtown Residential and 13 lodging facilities: three expanded since 2011 and one was constructed, while two lodging facilities closed.
Lodging 1 (a cap of three guest rooms) and Lodging VII (which has historical buildings that are made into lodging uses) are allowed in that Downtown Residential district. Lodging VII is only allowed between Cottage and Mount Desert, and then closer to the water from the Field south to Hancock Street.
Bar Harbor’s entire downtown area holds 58 of the 87 lodging facilities.
The larger lodging uses are in the primarily commercial use areas, while smaller bed and breakfasts are mostly in the primarily residential use areas, Bondy explained.
The largest lodging facilities are in the Bar Harbor Gateway, Shoreland General Districts, and Ireson HIll Corridor. Two-thirds of the town’s lodgings are downtown.
The five lodging facilities that hold over 100 guest rooms have a combined total 882 rooms in the town. All except one (the Hampton Inn) were built prior to 2002. The Hampton Inn was built in 2014.
Almost 60 percent of the town’s lodgings hold 25 guest rooms are less.
“What does that mean? It means that the larger lodging facilities are located in districts that primarily allow commercial activities,” Bondy said.
There is currently no lodging facilities registration process in the town unlike the process for short term rentals.
The average group of travelers is 2.7. according to the Maine State Office of Tourism, so the town multiplied that by 2,999 guest rooms for a maximum of 8,097 people at one time at full occupancy of all lodgings.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
The presentation on potential environmental impacts focused mostly on data about how many lodging facilities are connected to town water and sewer (73%). Only 1 percent of guest rooms are not on town water or sewer.
The average year lodging outside of town was established was 1968. New lodging facilities are generally not being constructed in the town’s rural areas, Bondy said.
COMMERCIAL INTRUSION AND LAND USE CONFLICT
The final part of the staff’s analysis focused on where lodging was currently allowed in town.
Staff imagined a 300-foot buffer around lodging sites to signify the areas most potentially impacted by the lodging.
Using data from the police department, the town staff looked at noise complaints between 2018-2025. Most noise complaints occurred in the downtown area.
Main, Cottage, Mount Desert, Rodick streets, and Roberts Avenue, along with Route 3 (near campgrounds) had the highest number of those complaints.
The correlation between noise complaints and lodging was not explained.
Planning Board Secretary Clark Stivers asked about the nature of the noise complaints.
“We don’t know always the exact source. It could be commercial uses. It could be a loud area,” Martinez said and that they wanted to attach those complaints to an area.
However, the source of the noise complaint could not necessarily be attached to lodging uses.
Former Planning Board Chair, restauranteur, and co-owner of the Pathmaker Hotel, Tom St.Germain asked about the origins of noise complaints being related to hotels and if that was the only criteria considered to be a conflict with the land use.
DISCUSSION AND NEXT STEPS
“That’s terrific,” said Dority at the end of the presentations. Vice Chair Ruth Eveland agreed and both praised the department’s work.
Eben Salvatore, who is Ocean Properties’ director of local operations, asked if the staff factored back in commercial or lodging uses that may have converted back into a residential use.
A place like the Ledgelawn Inn, which now houses seasonal employees, would still be classified as lodging if there was no change of use filed.
Some of the bed and breakfasts are now residential while others may be vacation rentals.
Those changes would likely lower the town’s number of guest rooms.
Ellen Grover said the work was impressive. She wondered if they looked at residential usage and business usage in residential areas.
“Seasonal worker housing does negatively impact the year-round residential stock,” Martinez said.
Grover said seasonal housing for employees has impacted year-round neighborhoods.
As have people who live in their homes seasonally, Bondy said.
St.Germain asked about 17 lodging uses that were taken from the residential inventory. He asked if those would be publicly noted so that people could verify that they were indeed residential currently.
Martinez said she wanted to avoid showing that data to keep people from becoming a scape goat situation, but that they could release it if the planning board wanted her to.
The planning board isn’t in charge of what data gets released or not, Town Planner Michele Gagnon later said.
St.Germain asked about the different dates covered in the presentations, saying that he believed it would make a more fair comparison if all the research and data went back to 2008.
“That’s not going to happen,” Gagnon said.
Bondy said there were enough situations where information wasn’t available in the town’s building files to create ethical comparisons, which is why she did not go back to an earlier date.
The planning board members each received a paper copy of the presentation and Gagnon praised the work of Martinez and Bondy.
“The amount of work was absolutely spectacular,” Gagnon said of her staff.
“This is a draft presentation,” she said. “It definitely is a good set of data and analysis for the planning board to digest.”
On October 8, the planning board will hear a public works presentation about town infrastructure.
“That’s the last big piece of information that’s missing for the data collection,” Gagnon said.
There will be a report, which will likely be bullet-point focused rather than narrative, she said.
There will be a workshop discussing policy objectives and then looking toward regulatory policies, which are higher end strategies to address issues that have been identified. That will occur in the next four months.
“The council needs to also bless those objectives and regulatory policies,” Gagnon said.
She said they are hopeful that in November they would have an idea of the regulatory policies, which could be new ordinances or land use amendment changes.
Dority suggested another workshop between September 8 and October 1 to review the language of the moratorium and the September 8 meeting’s presentation. That will likely occur on September 22. There will be a town council update on September 16.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Lodging Moratorium Extended as Bar Harbor Continues to Collect Data
Certain Transient Lodging Accommodation Moratorium Ordinance (Lodging Moratorium)
Strategy 1: Address the Immediate Needs of the Moratorium: Manage Lodging Uses
The Planning Department, as stated in the 2025 Workplan, is tasked with collecting data to address the concerns in Lodging Moratorium.
- Moratorium Ordinance Language (uploaded 03.28.2025)
- Updated Moratorium Language (effective July 31, 2025)
- Data collection overview and roadmap (uploaded 02.18.2025)
- Updated Moratorium Timeline (uploaded 05.01.2025)
- Workshop #2 (March 27, 2025) Meeting recording (uploaded 04.09.2025)
- MDI Historical Society presentation starts at: 04:50
- Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce presentation starts at: 31:17
- Workshop #2: Staff Discussion Guidance Slides (uploaded 03.27.2025)
- Workshop #2: MDI Historical Society Presentation (uploaded 03.28.2025)
- Workshop #2: Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Presentation (Trends in Tourism Economy) (uploaded 03.27.2025)
- Maine Office of Tourism 2023 Economic Impact & Visitor Tracking Report (uploaded 03.28.2025)
- Maine Office of Tourism Downeast & Acadia 2023 Economic Impact & Visitor Tracking Report (uploaded 03.28.2025)
- Workshop #3: Staff Discussion Slides (uploaded 05.01.2025)
- Public Safety: Calls for Service Graph from 2018-2024 (uploaded 05.01.2025)
- Re-recording of the Public Safety Panel with the Fire and Police chiefs
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