Carrie Jones

Oct 20, 2025

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by First National Wealth Management.

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BAR HARBOR—Former Bar Harbor Planning Board Chair Tom St.Germain has sent a 21-page packet of data and explanations that he’s collated in response to the town’s moratorium on lodging to the town council and planning board. He also wants everyone who wants to be able to see the document to be able to do so. That way he can get feedback and information can be shared.

Last week, a split planning board did not recommend that the Bar Harbor Town Council extend the lodging moratorium, October 14.

The decision came after the board substantiated one of the moratorium’s eight whereas clauses. The vote not to recommend was 4-3 and came after almost four hours of discussion and deliberation during the afternoon workshop, which followed presentations and workshops that have gone on throughout the spring and summer.

“I want a truthful analysis, and there were issues I saw from the outset with the town’s data gathering process,” St.Germain explained about the reasons he collected the data and created the document. “I asked the town manager for the numbers and data that were supposed to exist back in July, but I was rebuffed. If the document exists, which a town employee claimed it did, it is a public document. The unwillingness to share numbers made me think that I should take a crack at it.”

St.Germain is referencing the residential conversions to lodging uses that was mentioned by staff during a planning board workshop.

St.Germain writes in his report that he hasn’t found that 17 residential properties were converted to lodging uses between 2011 and 2025, which is what the town’s initial report to the planning board had said.

The planning department hasn’t released those properties in a way that is viewable to the public and during a planning board workshop said that the reason was because they did not want to cause undue duress.

He also questioned the time frames the town used.

“When the town presented its numbers, there were different time frames presented: one attempted to analyze changes to the lodging inventory and covered the years 2008-2025; the other included data from 2011-2025; the public safety workshop covered the years 2018-2025; the public works workshop covered from 2022-2025,” he said.

That bothered him.

“I don’t believe that this could result in a fair analysis of any data. I also have a fair amount of what might be referred to as ‘institutional knowledge’ with my background, etc. The project didn’t take very long, maybe 10 hours. Creating the graphs was more challenging,” he said.

The results of St.Germain’s data isn’t quite the same as the town’s. The owner of Jack Russell’s Steakhouse, writer, and co-owner of The Pathmaker Hotel said he went into his data dive without any preconceptions.

“I was looking for real numbers. The pattern emerged quickly as I went geographically from Compass Harbor Motel to the north that there has been a trend from smaller lodging establishments returning to residential uses. This is a small town and I’ve had lots of interactions with owners of these properties, or I’ve looked at them when they were for sale,” he said.

Unlike the town’s lodging moratorium data collection, St.Germain included campgrounds in some of his report.

“I did separate graphs and spreadsheets; the first set did not include campgrounds, the second one did. I included them because when the former councilor who was a driving force of the moratorium was making his arguments, he included campgrounds, noting that he was sick of the new campgrounds, equating them with lodging in general,” St.Germain said.

“The inclusion of campgrounds does not impact the numbers very much,” he continued. “Terramor was a reduction of 62 units; the other campground creations almost equaled that in additions, adding about 40 new units, mostly yurts and cabins. Twenty-two units out of 3,000 is 7/10ths of one percent.”

Trends started to appear. Rooms were lost. Rooms were gained. Inns were being turned into homes, he said. Development of larger hotels seemed to happen in clusters. The overall number of lodging rooms that he found increased by 18 in 25 years. He picked a quarter of a century as the starting point for his report because it made sense to him.

St.Germain is the first to admit he’s no data scientist, but he found it helpful breaking room gain and room loss into five-year increments to help him understand the data.

“I just saw that a twenty-five-year span allowed that analysis easily. I think it shows that each five-year period seems to replicate itself generally in terms of growth, etc. Each five-year block had gains and losses,” he said. “On the other hand, there has been a fairly sharp increase in lodging growth in surrounding towns in the last five years.”

St.Germain’s document also mentions places that are in the town’s report (such as the Stratford Inn and Canterbury Cottage) as added or continued lodging uses as incorrect. The inn had been an inn, then unoccupied for years, and then reopened as an inn, he said, and therefore shouldn’t be counted as new rooms. Similarly, Canterbury Cottage was an inn and is now a residence, which is not how it’s listed in the planning department report, he said. The Highbrook Inn, he said, was approved for 16 rooms, but that was never developed. He suggested in his report that the rooms should be taken from the town’s total of lodging.

His numbers show a net reduction in lodging capacity. He writes in his report that he welcomes scrutiny of his data for “the better good of the town.”

Neither St.Germain nor the town include short-term rentals in their reports. Bar Harbor has capped vacation rentals that are not occupied by their owner as a primary residence. The town council is looking at potential revisions to the town’s policy on short-term rentals at its next meeting, this Tuesday.

“I do think it’s necessary to correct one other aspect of the town’s presentation. It claimed that prior to 1900 there were either zero or one hotel with more than 100 or 150 rooms (I don’t clearly remember the numbers, but I think I have the proper ranges). In fact, there were multiple hotels with hundreds of rooms prior to 1900. I think Bar Harbor had a 600-room hotel prior to 1900, along with many other extremely large hotels. That jumped out at me,” he said.

“I agree with several of the planning board members; enacting a moratorium on a single industry is not fair. There are multiple large projects going ahead right now. I’ve watched many institutions and organizations in this town make and enact plans for the future, building new research facilities, schools, libraries, housing, student centers, maintenance facilities, all of which contribute to the town’s infrastructure and usage of public services,” he said. “And it is far from the case that only lodging entities are buying up residential housing. Look at what COA (College of the Atlantic), the hospital, the lab, etc. have purchased in this time frame. Housing is a completely separate issue. If we supposedly need 600 housing units in this town, wouldn’t the market for them cause their creation? What would people say if a 600-unit housing development were proposed? Who would develop this and take the risk? I think these are fair questions. My decade on the planning board gave me a front row seat to observing this process both from a policy perspective, and from the review side. Change is always going to happen. As a small developer, the effects of this moratorium doesn’t only impact me; we spent $5 million on local contractors and suppliers when we built The Pathmaker; we employ over 130 people in the hotel system, and another 35 in the restaurants; most of these jobs are year round, so the effects and impacts are more far reaching than just one or two small projects being delayed. It stymies the job markets for hospitality workers present and future; it prevents carpenters, plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, restaurant equippers, etc., all local, from getting business.”

The Pathmaker is 45 rooms, three stories, and at 77 Cottage Street by the town’s municipal building. Its approval caused concern amongst some residents about the town’s lodging definitions and processes because it conformed to the town’s definition of bed and breakfast at the time, which facilitated a different review process than other types of lodging.

In his report, he added that the lodging ecosystem has shifted with less owner-run inns that are small and an increased reliance on bigger hotels. Those inns, he said, have a trend of being converted into single-family homes. This, he said, is the strongest trend he’s found.

“This explains why the character of the market has changed,” he wrote, “even though the inventory is flat—the mix is very different.”

He added, “Eventually, I plan to redevelop some of the properties I own. When Nina and I bought the Water Company building in 2013, it was always with the idea that it represented an opportunity, and I’ve offered the building to the YMCA for free if it is moved to their property, so that it could be used as employee housing. My plans for that property are flexible; I might build housing, I might do something else, I might sell it. Nothing is set in stone….Regarding any other plans I have, I’m busy running Jack Russell’s and The Ovens at Pathmaker. I am at the age where I’m thinking about how much more I want to do during my work life, and my kids are in college or about to be in college, so I don’t know what the future brings, other than hopefully supporting them into adulthood.”

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

St.Germain’s report in full is attached below.

Lodging Report

419KB ∙ PDF file

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Split Planning Board Recommends Not to Extend Bar Harbor’s Lodging Moratorium

Carrie Jones

Oct 15

Read full story

To read the moratorium.

• 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)
• Workshop #4 slides

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