Carrie Jones

Oct 24, 2025

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BAR HARBOR—Some changes are coming to how three agencies work with the town when it comes to annual budget support they receive.

On Tuesday the Bar Harbor Town Council approved a new plan for how the YMCA, Jesup Memorial Library, and Island Explorer (a free and seasonal bus system which provides transportation on and near Mount Desert Island) request money from the town.

“We have what we call cooperating agencies,” Council Chair Valerie Peacock explained. “Folks from the community who come to the council and request money from the town through the budget process to support their activities in the town that we as a town see as being a part of our services.”

That might be helping out with food insecurity, hospice or home health care, services for kids. An example would be Island Connections or the Bar Harbor Food Pantry, which historically also receive a much smaller amount of funding from the town.

“This was a request from the council to differentiate between different types of cooperating agencies,” Peacock said.

The simplest way to think about it, Town Manager James Smith said, is that those three agencies deliver services that are often delivered by towns or cities.

Bar Harbor residents can use the YMCA, library, and Island Explorer are private entities. The library is free. Island Explorer is free. The YMCA has a sliding scale for its use and some free programming.

“We think the more streamlined approach would be to enter into MOUs with those entities, set the expectations that the council and the community has for those services that substantiate and justify their level of funding,” Smith said.

The other requests, he said, are traditional nonprofits that mostly exist outside of municipal government and it is more appropriate to continue in the traditional funding requests, which come through via applications during the year.

The requests and memorandums the town receives from these organizations are now considered community service partnerships. They’d previously been considered cooperating agencies and the policy that governed that has been repealed.

Now, those three organizations, the order reads, will be “structured as public-private service agreements governed by memoranda of understanding in order to clearly define service expectations and accountability consistent with public funding.”

In the last budget cycle, the YMCA had requested $200,000, up from $150,000, a 33% increase; the Jesup Memorial Library requested $312,756, a 3% increase from what it had received the year before; and the Island Explorer requested the same amount it had the year previously—$310,544.

The town manager will negotiate memorandums of understanding for each agency, this will be authorized by the council, and the town manager will recommend an amount to budget for each. The town voters at town meeting will approve (or not) that funding.

Peacock said that the level of funding has previously made the process difficult and not allowed the town to have more strategic conversation about the budget, budget process, capacity, goals over time, and that it will hopefully take care of some of the angst that occurs during the process. She believes it will be a more formal and holistic approach.

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The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Peekytoe Provisions.

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