Castine Gives Fire Department $1k Thank You for Help in August Fire, Group Talks MOUs.
Nov 18, 2025
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by The Witham Family Hotels Charitable Fund.
MOUNT DESERT—The Mount Desert Selectboard met in executive session, Monday, to discuss the potential full consolidation of the town’s police department with Bar Harbor’s, a proposal that would merge both agencies under the Bar Harbor budget, but leave some questions about staffing, support, costs, and local oversight. No action was taken following the 25-minute closed-door discussion.
An executive session is a closed discussion that is not open to the public because it contains potentially sensitive material. That material can be about litigation, personnel issues, and contract negotiations. The Maine state statutes stipulates what is allowed to be discussed in executive session.
It is meant to give a body (like a select board or nonprofit board) the ability to meet outside of an open forum so that the discussion won’t have a detrimental impact on issues that are specified in Maine statute.
Talks of a full police merger have been known to the public since a joint workshop of the Mount Desert Selectboard and Bar Harbor Town Council in July, where the two towns began exploring whether combining departments could create cost or coverage advantages.
A proposal written by Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Chief David Kerns in June details a plan to fully integrate all police and dispatch personnel under Bar Harbor’s administration while maintaining existing service levels in both communities.
”This proposal outlines the full integration of all police and dispatch personnel under the Town of Bar Harbor’s administration while maintaining existing service levels for both communities. The objective is to streamline administrative functions, eliminate duplication, and create a unified personnel and management structure without altering service delivery,” the document begins.
The departments have been sharing some services for more than a decade. Now, they might be going further.
“We wish to continue the evolution of the police sharing agreement. As you know, it began with the chief, expanded to patrol zones. Same marked police vehicles, common uniforms and badges,” former Town Manager Durlin Lunt had said earlier this summer. “Last year all command officers were placed in one department. This made sense operationally as well as ensuring that they were paid the same wages and benefits which could be a bone of contention otherwise. We would like to discuss if this should now apply to the patrol officers as well.”
Since 2013, the towns have shared services and some positions. The towns first shared a police chief, and since then have integrated services while also maintaining positions that were officially within one town or the other. Since then, the towns have shared its records system, computerized dispatch services, and other aspects of call response and record keeping. It operates on one radio frequency and submits reports to the Maine court system as one department.
At the joint July 28, 2025 meeting the Town of Mount Desert Selectboard and Bar Harbor Town Council seemed generally supportive of full consolidation of the two towns’ police forces underneath the Town of Bar Harbor.
How exactly those costs would be shared was not yet expressly laid out.
“We really have become a virtual agency as far as the court is concerned and as far as the state’s concerned,” Mount Desert and Bar Harbor Police Chief David Kerns said.
However, the financials for the employees and liabilities haven’t been perfectly combined, he’d said.
A full integration is unlikely to create cost savings, according to the June Kerns memo, but would potentially decrease Mount Desert’s expenses for overhead. The reverse could potentially be true for Bar Harbor unless the cost-sharing agreement was tweaked between the two towns.
The Mount Desert officers currently earn 61 cents less per hour than their Bar Harbor counterparts.
In regular session of the November 17 selectboard meeting, the board released funds from the police department’s capital improvement line, which has a balance of $289,671 for the purchase of a 2026 Ford Hybrid Police Interceptor SUV from Darling’s Bangor Ford in the amount of $50,508 with a trade-in allowance of $4,120 and a net purchase price of $46,388.
Selectboard member Rodney King thought the trade-in amount of $4,000 seemed low.
Town Manager Alex Kimball said it had a lot of miles and that the town had thought of using it as a fleet vehicle.
There is just over 100,000 miles on the cruiser.
“But it’s a different kind of miles,” Kimball said. “(There’s) a lot of sitting there.”
King thought it might be nice to sell it to an employee.
Outside the executive session, the selectboard moved through a routine agenda that included a new appointment to the town’s warrant committee, approval of dock inspection work, and acceptance of a $1,000 gift from the Town of Castine to reimburse Mount Desert Fire for its mutual aid during a major wildland fire in August.
CASTINE GIFT
An unconditional $1,000 gift from the Town of Castine to the Mount Desert Fire Department was part of a broader effort to thank and reimburse the 14 Hancock County towns that sent help during a severe wildland fire in Castine from August 6–8.
According to Mount Desert Fire Chief Mike Bender, fire departments in the region generally do not expect repayment for mutual aid, as cooperative response is governed by a countywide agreement. However, the prolonged nature of last August’s fire prompted Castine officials—advised by the state—to provide funds covering costs incurred from the second day onward.
Town Manager Alex Kimball noted the gesture was particularly meaningful.
“It was a really nice gesture on their part,” he said.
The funds are intended to help cover the specific expenses Mount Desert incurred while dispatching a tanker to assist in Castine’s time of need.
APPOINTMENTS
The board appointed Rustin Taylor to the Warrant Committee. He was unanimously appointed.
OTHER BUSINESS
The board authorized the inspection of Northeast Harbor Commercial and Public dock’s top and bottom chains by Alvah B. Barge Service Inc. for $2,185.75. It was unanimously approved.
The board approved payment of overage to Kelley and Sons Small Excavation in the amount of $3,825 for portable restroom installation work. This was for a concrete surface to support the portable restrooms at the Seal Harbor Pier.
“The installation also included plumbing and electrical connections embedded in the concrete surface and adjacent asphalt surface. The quoted price of $11,480 was based upon the understanding of the design by the contractor and assumed conditions from review of the site,” Public Works Director Brian Henkel said in a November 13 memo. “Once on-site work began, modifications to the design and changes in material quantities were necessary to complete the project. All in-field changes were authorized by a representative to the Public Works Department. The in-field changes caused an overage in the total cost of the project from the quoted $11,480 to $15,305 a difference of $3,825.”
Memorandums of Understanding Discussion
Kimball said a number of different local agencies had asked him about the process for receiving town funds and/or becoming an organization that applied for funds via a MOU (memorandums of understanding) rather than an agency request.
As a new town manager, he felt he was 90% cognizant about the town’s philosophy.
He hoped the board members would catch him up to what they thought the best path forward would be. Some agencies using MOUs are the town’s various libraries, pieces of the Neighborhood House’s operations, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Great Harbor Museum.
“The way I understand it is that the agencies that we offered the MOU to are agencies that provided a service that the town would otherwise have to provide,” selectboard member Martha Dudman said.
She said that she liked the current process where agencies asking for money request it not via a MOU, but through the town budget and town meeting process.
“All the agencies that come to us are doing something good, and they’re run well, and they tell us how many people they serve. They find that that annual meeting, though, it’s lengthy . . . but, it gives us all an opportunity in the public to, the opportunity to hear about the organizations in our community that help the people in our community, and, and I always come away from that evening feeling good about what the town is able to do, and better informed about who’s doing it. So I think it’s a good exercise for us,” Dudman said.
“The easy line of demarcation is between services that the town otherwise would not take on,” Board Chair John Macauley said, “and those they would.”
Board Secretary Geoff Wood talked about the efficiency of the current process where some organizations are MOUs and some are line items as well as the history of the change to include some MOUs.
“There were certain organizations that we knew we were going to fund, and we knew we were going to do it on a regular basis, we would take them out of the mix of having to come in and plea for the money every year, and that it was easier for the budget because we knew ahead of time these line items were already in the budget, whereas the people that come in to ask for money for their particular organization, that’s not a line item,” Wood said. “I mean, as we talked about before, I mean, we may approve a total that gets voted on at the town meeting, but there’s no guarantee that the $10,000 we added because of the request of one organization is going to go to that organization exactly.”
The totals can be changed on the town meeting floor.
“So, for me, it was just a matter of not having this redundant plea from organizations that we knew we were going to support on a pretty steady basis, and to get them out of that meeting, to try to cut it back to one meeting instead of two where we listened to their requests,” Wood said. “I hear what Martha’s saying about it’s nice. It is nice to get a little bit of a grassroots testimonial about the kinds of things that are going on and our ability to support them is great, but I just think it was. It’s just a matter of ‘here’s a bunch of stuff we know we’re going to, we know we’re going to pay anyway, let’s get it out of the way so that we know it’s in our budget, we don’t have to mess around with wondering what our budget’s going to look like and, and be more efficient.’”
Kimball asked, “Do you think there would be any gain to formally drafting up what we exactly are defining as things the town would have to do otherwise?”
The board agreed that it would be helpful.
“I think there’s some value in having to do something to receive a donation. And it forces you to clarify your mission and articulate it,” Dudman said. “And it’s not just automatic: ‘You’re going to get your money. Don’t worry about it.’ It’s here’s what we do. And you’re telling us, but you’re also telling the public and you’re telling yourself what you’re what you’re about. And I think that’s valuable.”
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
To read this current packet and see the agenda
The packet and agenda from July with the Kerns memo
To watch the meetings on YouTube.
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