Cara Ryan. Shaun Farrar. Carrie Jones.

Jun 07, 2026

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR POLICY

We always welcome letter submissions to The Bar Harbor Story.

For details on our policy, please visit our about page and scroll down or just visit here.

As with all newspapers, the beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints expressed by the writers of letters to the editor and included here do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints or official policies of The Bar Harbor Story.

Similarly, we do not fact check those beliefs, opinions, or viewpoints that are espoused in letters to the editor.

We do not have an exclusive submission policy. That just means if your letter is published here, it is fine by us if it’s also published in other places and vice versa. We will print letters related to local elections that involve candidate discussion only up to one week prior to that election.

All the past letters to the editor can be found on the Substack site here.

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Vote YES on 6

To the Editor:

Bar Harbor’s Lodging moratorium is likely to end this summer, but not before residents can vote in some important improvements to our Land Use Ordinance that will limit the scale of new lodging projects and protect crucial areas of town from overdevelopment. We need to vote Yes on Article 6, a LUO Amendment to Lodging rules that will tighten up many vulnerabilities regarding size and location of new hotels.

Among the improvements of this complicated amendment are 1. Putting a limit on the number of guests per guest “unit” (currently there’s no limit, leaving developers to determine how many rooms, beds, and guests can fit in a “unit,” even where limits were clearly intended by zoning restrictions). With this amendment, no more than 4 guests will be allowed per unit with further requirements for square footage per guest. This is a reasonable if generous definition. 2. Lodging will no longer be allowed in several critical areas including Town Hill Business, where limited water and sewer currently raise real concerns; and Village Residential, a large area to the west and south of Downtown Residential, roughly from West St. Extension all the way to Schooner Head Rd. Protecting these neighborhoods from lodging development is in line with our new Comprehensive Plan. 3. Finally, by eliminating the smallest Lodging category (fewer than three guest units), the amendment closes the loophole for conversion of homes into mini hotels.

These changes were carefully thought through, responsive to both internal LUO consistency and the stated policy goals of the Comp Plan and moratorium. I’m grateful to the planning board and department for their painstaking work in drafting this amendment. And I’m grateful to the councilors who voted to extend the moratorium long enough to see this amendment through to voters first. More can and should be done, but right now, we need to secure these improvements by voting YES on Article 6.

For a helpful guide to this amendment, please see https://www.barharbormaine.gov/DocumentCenter/View/8877/FAQ_Lodging—032726

Cara Ryan

Bar Harbor

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Here’s Why We Don’t Cover Candidate Events for Federal and Gubernatorial Primaries.

Hi, everyone. We’re putting this into the “Letters from Readers” just because we don’t want to bombard your email with a second piece.

Here at the Bar Harbor Story, we’ve received a lot of questions about:

1. Why we don’t endorse candidates.
2. Why we don’t cover it when candidates visit specifically for campaign events especially when it gets a ton of national play.

There are reasons we don’t do either of those things.

The first is that we don’t want to influence people to support one candidate or one question over another. Our goal is to get information out in local races and elections about local issues.

We trust you to make up your own mind on things and quite frankly, we’re okay with it if not everyone supports exactly the same issues or candidate that we do when it comes time to vote.

It’s a bit counterintuitive if you think of news in terms of influence, but that’s not how we think of news.

We think of news as a way to support our neighbors.

We don’t think of news as a way to tell our neighbors how to vote or how to think.

It’s for this same reason that we rarely write editorials, columns, or first-person narratives on here.

We don’t want the Bar Harbor Story to be about us. We want it to be about you.

When it comes to why we don’t do things like cover Graham Platner, Troy Jackson, and Matt Dunlap at the Criterion, or the many house parties that have happened on the island, or people speaking at the YMCA or YWCA, it’s because we can’t cover every Democratic, Independent, and Republican candidate for the primary races.

We’ve made that choice because we don’t feel it’s right for us to cover a Graham Platner event without equal coverage of David Costello’s or Susan Collins’ campaigns. That goes for governors’ races and Federal House of Representatives races as well.

We also know that’s not a common choice for news outlets.

We’re still making it.

As you all know, we’re just two people and we know without a doubt that we can’t do that sort of coverage fairly (even though we might want to), especially when the fields are large and wide ranging. A source for most of the candidates and websites is here.

Shaun and Carrie

And for those of you who couldn’t attend, the MDI High School graduation was streamed here.