Town, they suggest, faces three.

Carrie Jones

Mar 13, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by First National Wealth Management.

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BAR HARBOR—There are three key problems for Bar Harbor when it comes to sustainable tourism, a consultant from J.E. Austin Associates explained to a 13-member task force the town formed to help create a goal and actions relating to tourism.

“At some point we’re going to agree on what are the problems that these strategies are trying to address,” consultant Michele McKenzie told the Sustainable Tourism Task Force members, March 11. “So, we have distilled that the work that we’ve done in consultations to these key problems: managing growth, better quality of life, and governance and funding.”

She suggested looking at those problems as tensions for the town, which is positioned next to Acadia National Park, which recently has been hosting 3.9-4 million visits a year since 2021. The Maine Department Of Transportation controls the one road onto and off the island.

The 13-member town task force, appointed by the Town Council, 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.

McKenzie and Ben Nussbaumer, who are based outside the country, spoke to the task force members via Zoom.

A follow-up from an Australian consultant who presented in February has been pushed to an April meeting because he’s currently in the Amazon.

First, McKenzie said, the task force members have to agree on the three problems. Next, they and the residents have to find solutions.

Examples of potential solutions that she proposed were things such as creating a tourist code of conduct, allowing second homes to be taxed at a higher rate, and increased planning restrictions for new lodging accommodations.

When it comes to managing growth, McKenzie spoke to current systems in place in Bar Harbor such as cruise ship restriction, the short-term-rental cap for properties not the primary residence of their owners, Acadia National Park’s reservation system on Cadillac Mountain, Island Explorer, and the Acadia Gateway Center in Trenton.

Pain points include congestion during certain months and residential access to parking as well as resident exhaustion at the end of the season.

“Residents are happy to get their town back. That’s an expression we heard,” she told the task force.

The highest parking meter revenue days for Bar Harbor in 2025, according to Bar Harbor Finance Director Sarah Gilbert, were July 5 and October 11, which might help to indicate peak traffic in the season.

Bar Harbor, McKenzie and a prior consultant both said, has already done a great deal of things to manage tourism.

“There’s lots of opportunity to optimize these existing initiatives,” she said.

When it comes to quality of life, “this is the hardest pain point for the Sustainable Tourism Management Strategy to address,” McKenzie said.

Residents believe there is some value in tourism to the local economy, but worry that the town is becoming less livable, she said. “Livable” was not defined, but typical examples include vehicular and pedestrian congestion in the downtown area during the visitation season as well as congestion on the one road onto the island. That road is controlled by the state. A slide also suggested a potential goal as “preserving Bar Harbor’s small town essence.”

Many residents, McKenzie said, experience the town first as tourists.

“There’s a latent opportunity to diversify tourism,” she said, “but there’s no real entity to do that” such as an economic development agency.

She also said task force members could think of the problems as tensions.

“We know that this community is divided. We know that residents lack trust in the system the way it is working,” she said.

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PUBLIC COMMENT AND WORRIES ABOUT ELITISM

During public comment, Laureen Donnelly said she wanted to restrict all lodging, lower the short-term rental cap, which is currently at 9% of housing units. She also spoke about restaurants’ need for parking and housing. She worried about laundromats and churches.

“I think the churches have lost all kinds of people for a lot of reasons” including vacation rentals, she said.

During the second public comment period, Peter Miano said he was really impressed with the work that the consultants were doing and the thoughtfulness of the task force members’ questions. However, he doesn’t feel as if the conversation about short-term rentals is as well informed as it could be, saying that they aren’t the only cause for out-migration from communities. There are economic reasons, often, for people leaving.

“There are other forces at work that are even more influential than tourism and STRs,” Miano said.

Some people, he said, use those rentals to keep their home. In Bar Harbor, Miano said, three out of four short-term rental owners are local.

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SEDONA CASE STUDY

The consultants presented a case study where they compared Bar Harbor to Sedona, Arizona and suggested there would be other tourism community case studies presented in the future.

Another man in public comment said that incentives for Sedona are different from Bar Harbor’s, where there is no direct benefit to the residents via sales tax and the state does not allow local option taxes, which tax certain uses (such as lodging, restaurants) in a community and a portion (or all) of that money then goes back into the community. The state legislature has repeatedly denied that possibility for heavily visited towns with tourists, like Bar Harbor, for decades.

Since a significant chunk of the task force’s March meeting was based on a case study of Sedona, which created a sustainable tourism plan after a short-term rental boom, some task force members focused on the major differences, such as that the Town of Sedona relies on sales and bed tax and does not have property tax for its funding. Bar Harbor can only rely on property tax. That makes Sedona more dependent on funding via tourism. It’s the opposite, almost, in Bar Harbor, where it’s very dependent on property tax.

Task force member Jim Glavine said that the current strategy and framework seemed to lean toward building businesses.

Both he and task force member Pat Buccello openly worried about the concept behind focusing on enticing high value tourists who stay a long time and spend more rather than less wealthy tourists.

McKenzie said that they could change that wording.

But to Glavine, it wasn’t about the wording, it was about the perspective.

“Just changing the language isn’t what I’m after,” he said.

It’s possible to change the language to make it less offensive sounding, but his concern was the ethical consideration of making visiting the park and the town cost prohibitive.

Though he knows that the area has historically had multiple elitist aspect in its past visitors, he said, he was not in favor of “disadvantaging a whole segment of society” or squeezing “the most value out of the least amount of people.”

He suggested a tax on short-term-rentals.

“I want to see this be a family destiny,” Buccello said.

Sedona, she said, is a high-wealth destination, not a family destination. Even the presentations of the consultants, she said, were focused visually on Acadia National Park rather than Bar Harbor, saying that 80% of the photos used are of Acadia National Park.

“We’re not going to change Acadia National Park,” she said.

“I don’t want to be Nantucket either,” Glavine said, echoing a comment Boland had entered into the Zoom chat.

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NEXT STEPS AND OTHER TASK FORCE COMMENTS

By May and June the group will be working on the action plan, McKenzie said. For now, they are working on strategy. This, she said, is the exciting stage as they begin working at the core of the strategy and then the actions.

In February, Australian data consultant Edmund Morris described Bar Harbor’s core challenge: not attracting more visitors, but managing dramatic seasonal swings while protecting services for year-round residents.

Morris presented a 60-page report to the town’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force, earlier this month, arguing that while the waterfront strains under peak-season pressure, the town and Acadia National Park remain largely unknown outside the United States and Canada.

Morris, founder of Equator-AI, a market intelligence platform based in Australia, had zoomed into the meeting as a sub consultant and he is according to The Conscious Traveler, “a former speechwriter turned data storyteller.”

The narrative he told about Bar Harbor is this: he believes that the town is undiscovered by most of the world, as is Acadia National Park. Most of its daily visits in the summer are at the downtown waterfront area. And he believes it lacks essential services compared to some other Maine towns.

Morris talked about Bar Harbor being a hidden gem.

“I think that some of the threat that Edmund shared in terms of Bar Harbor ultimately being discovered and increasing,” McKenzie said on March 11 she didn’t feel was quite so worrisome.

McKenzie said that she felt that things are more manageable in Bar Harbor than many other places. There’s opportunity for Bar Harbor because the visitors who come to Acadia National Park have similar values to the people who live here, she said.

Task force member Michael Boland said he was unimpressed with Morris’ report.

McKenzie said that Morris focused on the data, but the whole picture will be created with other research and consultation.

To that end, there are two upcoming community engagements. A community organizations workshop on March 25 and an open house on March 26. Details are forthcoming.

“We’re ahead of the curve on a lot of things,” Boland said. He worried that his initial comment about being unimpressed at Morris’ report as being negative. However, he said he hoped the task force doesn’t rely too much on the initial report. “I hope we dig a little deeper.”

Chair Vicki Hall said that a comment that was made multiple times was that people had an end of season fatigue and a sense of relief and yet a proposed strategy was driving up off-season demand. She doesn’t believe that expanding the offseason will reduce the peak.

Task force member John Kelly said that the curves of visitation aren’t the results of marketing strategies. They have to do with climate.

Changing that, he said, “it’s an uphill battle when you’re dealing with climate.”

A vast majority of visitors already stay overnight, approximately 75%, Kelly said. The length of stay is already long at 5-7 days.

“In a lot of ways we’ve maxed out,” he said.

Christopher Cannon worried that the consultants and group were look at everything through the business-as-usual lens.

He spoke of potential movement toward tram and trolley services that occurred prior to bus and auto culture and could occur again.

“Why are we emphasizing more parking when we could potentially think bigger?” he asked and stressed that more parking or extra road lanes tended not to relieve congestion, but instead allowed more visitation. “Where’s the big thinking rather than the micro, business-as-usual thinking?”

Vice Chair Enoch Albert thanked McKenzie for the presentation and said he’d learned a lot from it. He said that when he talks to community members, they stress property tax reduction and the importance of quality of life.

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POLL

Substack’s platform does not allow fill-in-the-blank answers on polls. So, we’re a bit limited. That said, we’d love to know what you think about something we keep hearing in meetings, and if you have additional comments about it, please feel free to use the comment section. No pressure though!

POLL

Do you feel Bar Harbor is divided?

Yes

No

Yes, but not as much as it seems

0 VOTES · 2 DAYS REMAINING · SHOW RESULTS

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Tourism Management Task Force

• October 2025 Sustainable Tourism Management Update
• STM Resident Survey Flyer
• STM Resident Survey – Polco
  • Bar Harbor is developing a Sustainable Tourism Management Plan, and your voice matters. We asked residents to complete a brief survey that will help shape the future of tourism in our community.
  • The survey closed on Thursday, December 4, 2025.
• November 12, 2025 Presentation – The material in this presentation is a draft and subject to change. It was presented as a work in progress during the Sustainable Tourism Management Task Force Meeting on November 12, 2025. The analyses, data sets, models, and visualizations presented have not yet undergone full validation or quality assurance. Data collection and analysis are ongoing, and individual models may be refined further. Charts, statements, and other outputs are preliminary and may differ in the final version
• December 10, 2025 Presentation – Strategy Development Process Updates
• February 3, 2026 Presentation – Town Council Update
• February 11, 2026 Presentation – Situational Analysis presentation by Edmund Morris of Equator AI, with Sustainable Tourism Management consultant J.E. Austin Associates. This meeting recording, and all previous meetings, can be viewed on Town Hall Streams: https://townhallstreams.com/stream.php?location_id=37&id=71268

Taskforce Contact

Please use this email to contact the task force: STMTaskForce@barharbormaine.gov.

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