Carrie Jones

Jan 05, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Window Panes Home and Garden.

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BAR HARBOR—Long-serving Bar Harbor Planning Board Chair Millard Dority resigned this Saturday in an email sent to the town’s manager and council.

In his resignation, Dority expressed frustration about the focus of the planning board in the recent past as it waited for the town’s 2035 Comprehensive Plan’s completion, cruise ship changes that went into the town’s land use ordinance, and then the focus on the moratorium.

“Please find this note as my intent to resign my position on the Bar Harbor Planning Board effective immediately,” Dority wrote. “After a long period of frustration with the way the planning board has been, and is, operating: twiddling our thumbs for two years while awaiting the completion of the comp plan, then months on the cruise ship debacles, to most recently, months and months of chasing shadows on the council’s lodging moratorium, all this while the planning board does virtually nothing to address the real issue of a lack of housing on a large scale. I feel like my efforts, and my mental health will be better served by going in a different direction.”

A split planning board had voted against recommending extending the lodging moratorium. A split town council then voted last week to continue it. Other work he mentioned in his resignation included the cruise ship changes that were part of a citizen’s initiative and also involved the town’s land use ordinance, and a cap on short-term rentals as well as defining vacation rentals in the ordinance, lodging changes, potential lodging changes, and the information gathering and presentations for the town’s lodging moratorium.

Also on Saturday, Bar Harbor Planning Director Michele Gagnon informed her planning board members the same afternoon, writing, “Good afternoon, I am writing to let you know that Manager Smith has just informed me that Millard has submitted his resignation from the planning board. Looking forward to seeing you at January 7 meeting.”

“I’ve really enjoyed it, the interaction with the people,” Dority said Monday, but added that he would have liked to be more proactive with housing needs.

Dority was raised on Mount Desert Island and has been a vocal advocate for the need for the town to do more work to help increase housing options, particularly focusing on younger potential year-round residents.

That hasn’t changed.

“I’m really really serious about doing something about housing for young professionals,” Dority said Monday.

His father, he said, died 100 days before Millard was born. That left his mother with three children and no education. She worked hard to survive, to help her children survive.

His mother, Dority said, played an important role in the town of Bar Harbor, doing much of the same work as visa workers do now. They would move to save $20 a month, and move often. But, he said, they had places that they could move to, a situation and possibility, he said, that doesn’t exist now as renters scramble for places to call home.

“Where would my mother live today?” Dority had asked at a February 2024 town council meeting. “We know what we’re losing and we know that we’ve done very little up until now.”

“We’re all going home to our nice warm houses so we don’t have to worry,” Dority said to those attending that meeting, but a lot of people don’t have that opportunity, he said. Those are people who work here, who may have grown up here, but can’t afford to stay here.

Dority had previously served on the town’s planning board for about 12 years, ending in the early 2000s. He had resigned then because he worried about potential perceived conflict of interest issues because of his position at College of the Atlantic, which was having a lot of projects at the time.

“We really did a lot of work. It was really fun,” he said of the planning board then.

There would occasionally be pizza brought in for late meetings. Sometimes, the power would go out and the planning board members would continue working at the third floor council chambers in the town’s municipal building. Former Code Enforcement Officer Angela Chamberlain would journey downstairs to get flashlights as an occasional planning board member would make ghost noises until she returned. The lights would be set on the desk as the board continued to work. One meeting lasted until past 2 a.m.

“Still, it was fun,” Dority said.

It felt productive, he said, and Dority is a productive person.

He worked at the College of the Atlantic (COA) for more than 51 years before retiring. He started his tenure there as a long-haired teenage guitarist who needed a job. He eventually became the building and grounds director, fluent in lot coverage, town zoning, and the land use ordinance. He’d mentor students and be mentored by them, too, reading course work, text books, constantly learning and connecting.

In 2021, he told the Mount Desert Islander’s Rob Levin about his time at COA, “When I’m on my deathbed, I’m going to be able to say that I’ve been involved in something really important.”

That same can be said of Dority’s volunteer service to the town’s planning board and time coaching football for island seventh and eighth graders, among other things such as the renovation of the Jesup Memorial Library. Now, he’s going to be on the Bar Harbor Food Pantry Board.

For Dority, stepping away from the planning board is not a retreat from civic life but a recalibration. His focus now includes the food pantry board, a place where, he said, he feels he can make an immediate and tangible difference.

“I realized how excited I was about that position,” he said. “This is something where I can really feel like I’m helping people.”

It is a continuation, rather than an ending, of a long pattern of service. It’s one rooted in the belief that communities are sustained not just by plans and ordinances, but by people showing up, paying attention, and doing the work in front of them as they build the future of a community.

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All photos: Bar Harbor Story/Carrie Jones/Shaun Farrar