Tourism, Trust, and Tension: Inside Bar Harbor’s Community Debate When Some Feel Even Talking About Things Feels Risky

Carrie Jones

Feb 07, 2026

BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Town Council seems to collectively have no issues with consultants for the town’s sustainable tourism task force speaking to individuals throughout the community—and keeping those individuals’ identities anonymous—to gather deeper insight into tourism and the community.

The discussion came during the town council meeting on Tuesday, February 3, during an update about the task force.

Bar Harbor is positioned next to Acadia National Park, which recently has been hosting 3.9-4 million visits a year since 2021. The Maine DOT controls the one road onto the island.

The 13-member task force is meant to create a vision of what sustainable tourism means for Bar Harbor in the hopes of helping the town to get that vision while also working with other town tools such as its comprehensive plan.

On Tuesday, consultants from J.E. Austin Associates (Michele McKenzie and Ben Nussbaumer) gave what Bar Harbor Planning Director Michele Gagnon called a high-level update of the task force’s work so far.

The consultants spoke about the draft sustainable tourism definition, its works, but also about how they weren’t able to approach the work in the typical way because the task force had balked at the interviews, which has been part of the consultants’ standard practice in multiple communities.

In August 2025, town staff members had picked approximately 30 community members to potentially answer the consultants’ general questions about the town.

However, some task force members worried about not knowing who those community members were or how they were specifically chosen.

Since those community members were not listed by name, task force member John Kelly, who is involved in multiple town committees and works for Acadia National Park, said he was worried that local media would call it a “secret list” and then it would become a distraction to the task force’s job.

His concerns echoed some others on the task force, while some members spoke in support of keeping the names private, saying that it’s understandable that some people are hesitant about speaking on the record about the town in the political climate of 2025.

The morning after that meeting, the consultants sent emails cancelling the meetings and stopped scheduling them.

The consultants had begun doing similar interviews with the task force members themselves.

Most of the consultants’ heavy work in the past month was in looking at the capacity analysis.

A goal was to get a broad cross-section of engagement and that no one set of individuals or groups was overlooked or too loud.

All the task force meetings are open to the public and also people can email comments or have three minutes to speak at the meeting if they chose to do so.

There have been social media posts as well as a resident survey, which had 374 respondents, according to the consultants. Of those surveyed who answered about their demographics, 63% were over 55, and 75% were year-round residents.

Themes that emerged were traffic congestion and parking; overall visitor levels; housing and short-term rentals; year-round economic vitality; tax burdens; and community polarization.

“We have missed out on this more targeted approach to individual representatives within the community,” Nussbaumer said.

Though general topics have emerged, he said, there hasn’t necessarily been consistency of thought about those topics.

“There are many different voices in the business community, in fact there are even factions in the business community, so working with the business community is challenging,” McKenzie said.

While ‘faction’ is typically considered a negative word, diversity of thought is common in communities, families, geographic areas, and organizations.

“They did not want their names shared. When we mentioned that to the task force, the task force was not interested in us speaking to different people unless they knew specifically who we were speaking to,” McKenzie said, which took out a big part of their consultations.

“There’s a way forward,” McKenzie said, and that would be by working with a robust process nonetheless. “We also recognize that the relationships in the business community and residents is strained and also the business community and the town of Bar Harbor can be strained.”

In the past, it has been mentioned during public comment that many businesses in Bar Harbor are owned or run by Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, or Hancock County residents.

Vice Chair Maya Caines began the conversation between the councilors and consultants about not allowing anonymous feedback of a broad cross section of the community. However, she said, surveys are often anonymous, such as the task force’s previous survey.

“They were fearful,” McKenzie said focusing again on the business community members not wanting other business community members knowing what they were saying. She added, “We also saw that in residents as well. This is an unusual thing to happen in our methodology.”

She still saw benefit in those interviews, but didn’t want to undertake that without some discussion or agreement from the council to do so.

There were also some potential individuals to be interviewed who had no issue with their names being shared.

“There’s a fear that the way the process is unfolding is that maybe the process is just going to be listening to the loudest voices and the ones who are prepared to be identified,” she said.

The consultants also plan to do a business survey, which she said can’t be anonymous because they need to know that one business isn’t responding to multiple surveys. However, that can occur in any survey, Councilor Earl Brechlin said, including the previous one focused on residents, but it can not occur in personal, live interviews.

“Thank you for your work and welcome to Bar Harbor,” Chair Val Peacock told the consultants, saying that they’ve gotten right to the heart of challenges of doing work in the community. “We have to figure out a way through this and we have be able to talk to people and be able to talk to everyone here and the fact that people are afraid to speak says a lot about where we are in our community and that we are not creating a safe or open space for dialogue.”

She worried that people worry or get nervous that they aren’t heard. She also said she thinks those anonymous interviews can occur.

“I think the committee can help you to ground truth back,” Peacock said.

“I want to hear every voice because I don’t know who has the best ideas. None of us know who has the best ideas,” Brechlin said, saying that ideas will sink or swim, but they still need to be heard and not cut out.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

To watch the meeting

To read the task force’s agenda and packet for February 11

December 10 presentation.

Sustainable Tourism Management Task Force bylaws

The task force’s page on the town’s website.

Tourism Task Force Reviews Survey Results, Hears Call for Year-Round Economy

Carrie Jones

December 18, 2025

Read full story

Disclosure: I was one of the people asked to be a part of those one-on-one interviews. As shown in the story, that interview did not happen.

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The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Acadia Brochures of Maine.

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