Bar Harbor Town Council Workshop on Lodging Moratorium

Nov 04, 2025

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BAR HARBOR—The town released an online version of an agenda for its Thursday workshop, Monday evening. All three discussion items deal with the town’s lodging moratorium, which is a pause on all building or extensive renovations of multiple types of lodging in the town.

Meeting notice for the Bar Harbor Town Council Workshop on November 6, 2025, detailing agenda items including review of Planning Board findings and proposed policy solutions.

The workshop agenda lists that the council will review the planning board findings, review potential LUO policy solutions that would go before voters in June 2026, and also discuss other potential policy solutions.

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.

If the town council enacts it again, a new iteration of the moratorium would continue for 180 days unless the town council extends, repeals, or modifies it. That would begin again in January.

On February 5, 2025, the town council voted to enact a 180-day moratorium on most lodgings. It was renewed in July.

Since then, the town’s planning board and staff have been working to collect data relevant to the “whereas” clauses in that moratorium.

Back in September 2023, the town’s attorney Stephen W. Wagner (of Rudman Winchell) explained that a moratorium is “essentially a pause on development.”

To do that, the councilors have to make certain findings: that the moratorium is necessary to stop a burden on public facilities and other aspects; that the existing comprehensive plan is inadequate to do so. In June, the town voted to update its comprehensive plan. The whereas clauses serve as those findings.

The October 2024 discussion was spurred on by a Bar Harbor dentist’s appeal before the councilors to think again about a moratorium on lodgings (transient accommodations) in town.

The topic came up after she was approached by a bed and breakfast owner about purchasing her property on lower Main Street, she said. That owner was not identified.

Some other residents were unsettled by a potential hotel near the Conners Emerson School.

Since then, the planning staff presented data it collected to the planning board and also brought in other department heads and others to discuss the whereas clauses in the moratorium.

The workshop will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Council Chambers in the Bar Harbor Municipal Building. It will also be viewable live at Town Hall Streams.