That continues to be the Bar Harbor Town Council’s Question.

Carrie Jones

Jul 09, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Thrive Juice Bar & Kitchen.

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BAR HARBOR—Bar Harbor’s moratorium on the development of hotels and inns ends July 27.

However, at the Bar Harbor Town Council workshop, July 7, discussion circled about possibly extending that halt on building or renovating transient accommodations again.

In Maine, moratoriums can only last 180 days.

Councils (or in other towns, select boards) can choose to renew moratoriums as Bar Harbor has multiple times. However, there is a need for a moratorium to be justified, Town Manager James Smith advised the councilors.

That justification has to be able to withstand lawsuits and contestations, he said.

“It has to stand up in court if it is challenged by someone who feels aggrieved by it,” Smith said.

The town has to be able to explain why the moratorium, which is reaching its second year, needs to continue.

“No pressure,” Smith said to chuckles.

The work that the moratorium is meant to give the town the space to do will still continue no matter if the moratorium is extended or not, Smith explained.

Some of that work has already taken place. The Planning Board and staff collected and collated a lot of information when looking at infrastructure needs in 2025.

That work was originally about ensuring that lodging development didn’t stress the town’s infrastructure. The town’s Planning Board originally found that it mostly wasn’t and in split vote in October 2025 recommended not to extend the moratorium.

It was extended.

Worries, at the time, were about congestion, stress on the town’s emergency services, water, and sewer supplies.

But the moratorium discussion was also very much about housing and how new hotels could potentially displace homes.

Data collected included the number of guest rooms and maximum guest capacity, conversions from residential use to lodging, mapping of lodging by district and neighborhood, mapping locations of short-term and long-term rentals, mapping areas serviced by public sewer and water.

Another regular moratorium extension would follow two emergency moratoriums and two regular moratoriums, which means that any potential lodging development has been frozen since November 19, 2024.

During that time, the town’s planning staff and planning board have collected data and had meetings to look at, according to the 2025 moratorium, the “development and operation of certain transient accommodations, including impacts on health and safety, environmental quality, quality of life, adjacent property values, size, and the approval process, especially for accommodations approved without Planning Board review.”

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THE WORK CONTINUES

After presenting the Town Council with its findings last fall, the Planning Board has continued to work on changes to the town’s land use ordinance. Everything that has gone before the voters has passed since then.

The newest potential change—which may go to voters in November if the Council moves it forward—would be a graduated lodging scale. Along with changing lodging definitions and where certain lodging types could be placed throughout Bar Harbor, that scale would cap hotels in much of the downtown area to 12 guest units or less.

The proposal is supported by people who worry about displacement of homes and congestion in downtown proper.

Those against the proposal feel it’s government overreach and that it will simply displace hotel development to Trenton or Ellsworth, increasing traffic congestion onto the island as visitors come back and forth to Acadia National Park, driving more each day to visit.

Town Council Chair Maya Caines worried during the workshop that there will always be a new reason to continue the moratorium.

“We said the last time this came up that we’ll extend to wait and see how the new legislation proposed in June works out,” Caines said. “And that went through.”

Now, the sentiment of some councilors at the workshop and planning board members is to wait again so that the Planning Board can work more on the graduated lodging scale.

“The Planning Board began working on April 22 to complete the development of a graduated scale for lodging uses, particularly addressing the L4 and L5 categories. After ten workshops in six and a half weeks we made considerable progress. However, we realized that this would be a much better plan if we had additional focused community input,” Planning Board Chair Ruth Eveland said, Wednesday. “If we had more time to meet with community members in structured discussions – not open-ended, beginning-at-the-vision discussions (Bolds are Eveland’s)- we would be able to offer a plan that would integrate better with our simultaneous desperately necessary work to make possible more year-round housing opportunities of varying kinds. We would focus on specific questions that would allow us all to make decisions about trade-offs we can support.”

Eveland spoke similarly at the Town Council workshop where there were issues with the microphone, recording system, and where the meeting’s recording ended abruptly after her remarks.

Town Clerk Liz Graves said via email on Wednesday that the town is working on the issue.

“The previous moratorium allowed us to gather a lot of information about the burdens and benefits that the amount of lodging our community has and might have,” Eveland said. “We hoped to garner the support of the lodging industry for a short additional delay, possibly including only a limited number of our downtown zones. The Planning Board did finally receive support letters from three local lodging providers supporting the idea of a focused moratorium that would include the kind of discussions I was urging.”

The Bar Harbor Story has reached out to the town to verify which hoteliers sent letters to the town, but has not received a response as of press time. David Witham has shared previously a letter about proposed lodging changes and is in favor of a possible moratorium extension.



“I am concerned also that not only do we need not only more input from the community and the lodging industry, but also from the Council. In developing these ordinances we are perilously close to making policy, which is your job, not ours. We work, as do you, from the Comprehensive Plan, and there is additional information being gathered and analyzed by the Sustainable Tourism Task Force. All of these elements need to be included in creating the Land Use Ordinance that will work for the most of us,” Eveland said.

During the workshop, Caines said that the town could potentially regulate the lodging and housing relationship in ways that do not include land use amendments, which is a lengthy process. The Council did something similar for the regulation of short-term rentals.

Smith will speak with staff and bring back options to the councilors, most likely later this month.

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