Councilors agreed they need tighter controls on lodging but rejected sending a controversial graduated scale to voters, citing concerns about fairness, loopholes, and unintended consequences.
Aug 19, 2026
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BAR HARBOR—In two big decisions made during its Tuesday night meeting, the Bar Harbor Town Council unanimously agreed to extend its lodging moratorium and declined to put a graduated lodging scale that would limit the amount of guest rooms in lodging in multiple areas in town before the voters.
The newest version of the lodging moratorium has a narrower scope than earlier iterations and focuses just on Lodging IV and Lodging V developments.
Lodging IV is lodging for overnight guests that might include accessory facilities and services. Lodging V is the same, but also includes services for the general public and conference centers.
The moratorium reads that its point is “to protect the public health, safety, and welfare while completion of the pending ordinance amendments occurs.”
Unless repealed by the Town Council, it will be in place for 180 days.
“We are entering almost two years into this moratorium, and at each renewal, the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce has urged the council to not extend this moratorium, and we’re back here tonight with the same request. The moratorium continues to create instability for business owners on what was meant to be a temporary freeze intended to study the issue at hand,” Chamber Director Everal Eaton said. “We believe, over the past two years, the Planning Board has worked hard to do just that. We believe that at this point the moratorium is being used as a moving goalpost that is encouraging rushed policy to coincide with each renewal phase.”
The newest regular moratorium extension on Tuesday follows two emergency moratoriums and two regular moratoriums, which means that any potential lodging development has been frozen since November 19, 2024. This current version isn’t as all-encompassing.
The moratorium would continue to halt Lodging IV and Lodging V builds or renovations in the Downtown Village I and Downtown Village II districts; Ireson Hill Corridor and Salisbury Cove Village districts; and Bar Harbor Gateway, Shoreland General Development I, and Shoreland General Development III districts.
“The moratorium in general is counterintuitive to everything I believe in. Philosophically, I do not think it’s an appropriate way to govern,” Councilor Steven Boucher. “But, in light of the proposed land use ordinances coming up, I think that this may provide some time for us to go back through those again.”
He’d like to include options for incentives for affordable housing and the moratorium, he said, might give them time to do that.
Chair Maya Caines also said that it wasn’t the most effective way of governing, but there’d been a lot of conversations throughout multiple sectors of the community in support of the extension.
PROPOSED GRADUATED LODGING AMENDMENT
For the Council Tuesday night, the moratorium and proposed lodging amendment decisions seemed linked. There were unanimous votes on both.
“My vote would be different had we not adopted the extension of the moratorium,” Vice Chair Earl Brechlin said of his vote against moving the lodging scale to voters in November, “which I think gives us time to have that conversation.”
The graduated lodging amendment that will no longer go before the voters had been created by the town’s Planning Board and would have limited lodging built in town in multiple ways.
Along with changing lodging definitions and where certain lodging types could be placed throughout Bar Harbor, that scale would have capped hotels in much of the downtown area to 12 guest units or less. An earlier proposal before the Planning Board had been a 30-unit cap.
However, other areas—such as in Salisbury Cove—were also recommended as having caps. Those worried both the new owners of the Coach Stop Inn and Bowdoin family that’s owned Edgewater Motel, Cottages, and Suites for decades. Both worried about how the proposed change would impact their properties ability to reconfigure guest rooms and create nonconformities in their historic properties.
The proposal had been supported by people who worry that any more hotels built—or expanded—in the downtown area would impact what they characterized as the small-town character of the town.
Those against both the moratorium and the graduated lodging scale have said that they felt 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.
Both owners of the Coach Stop Inn worried about being nonconforming if the lodging scale went to the voters and was passed. There were also concerns about grammatical errors.
“The Salisbury Cove Corridor is already pretty small to begin with,” Amanda Zompetti said of the district that the Coach Stop Inn is in.
If the proposal had gone before voters and passed, her property would no longer be in an area that allows lodging. Instead, it would .8 miles away.
However, there is a history of lodging right there on Zompetti’s property. Her building has been there since the 1800s. It’s been a bed and breakfast for 20 years as well as in the 1920s and 1930s.
“We bought our jobs to move here. We couldn’t afford just a house. We had to buy the business and put everything on the line,” to move to the island as a young family, Zompetti said. She and her husband Derrick Miller urged that the councilors not promote the proposed change to the November ballot.
Edgewater Motel owner, David Bowden, said his historic property in the town’s Shoreland Development IV zone out in Salisbury Cove, would also suffer if the proposal passed.
According to the Edgewater’s website, “David, Jayne, and Brody are the third and fourth generation to run the business that David’s grandmother opened in the late 1930s.”
The previous family members had actually settled the same land more than two centuries ago.
The proposed changes would keep lodging units in their district to 20 guest units or less in their zone.
That worried Bowden, a former town councilor.
“Bar Harbor zoning is like insurance,” he said at an earlier Planning Board meeting. “You don’t know what you’ve got until you go to court.”
He’s concerned since he and his father both have homes on the property where the cottage colony and motel is located.
“There’s not much I can do with that house. It needs a considerable amount of work,” Bowden said of one of the homes, a home which is close to 240 years old.
He doesn’t currently have plans for it, but he’s going to be paying a great deal of property tax on a house he can’t really use if the changes go through.
Cottage colonies, Bowden had said, quoting from a letter from Maine’s State Historian Earle Grey Shettleworth, Jr., are a part of Bar Harbor’s culture and its heritage.
During Council comments, August 18, it was determined that the changes (had they gone forward and been approved by voters) would not strip people from a legal nonconforming status. They can continue operation under their current operation status.
“They can maintain their building, they just cannot expand,” Planning Director Michele Gagnon said.
Dennis Bracale was in favor of most of the ordinance amendment proposed but worried about its language and said that the Planning Board did an incredible job.
“To say that it is beyond the average resident’s comprehension of the specifics,” he said, “it should be apparent.”
But the public could be educated going forward and that would allow people to have time to come up with a coherent plan to move Bar Harbor forward and that it would take more time than the moratorium.
Mary Galperin, Sharon Knopp, and Carol Chappell all said they hoped the Town Council would support the amendment while Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Director Everal Eaton said the proposal would make 69% of the existing lodging in the districts no longer conform to the rules of the district.
Eileen Doreika spoke of living on Kennebec Street.
“Kennebec Street is a wonderful, quiet, neighborhood street,” she said. “I am absolutely opposed to any more building—commercial, hotels, whatever, employee housing—in our area.”
She said she didn’t want to see their street which she categorized as close-knit and full of retirees become a street where they couldn’t comfortably age in place.
“I’m not in favor of putting this on the ballot. And certainly I think the trigger for me was the change from 30 to 12,” Brechlin said. “I think we need to continue to have a conversation within the community about what that appropriate number is. I think in too many instances a change like 12 becomes a zero because it makes it economically unfeasible to do anything.”
He compared it to the disembarkation limits on cruise ships to 1,000 a day.
“All of a sudden nobody comes,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s ready for a ballot. I think it needs some more work” Councilor Joe Minutolo said.
He’d like to see housing and sewer connection fees laced into the proposed change.
“Putting this out right now feels like putting a bandaid on something that needs more work,” Minutolo said. “I think there’s a lot of loopholes and some inadequacies.”
Finding a balance between limitations and fairness to property owners was his goal, Minutolo explained.
“Let’s do the work. Let’s come up with a better product is what I’m hoping,” Minutolo said.
Councilor Randell Sprague said he didn’t support a vote for it at this time, agreeing with other points made by Brechlin and Minutolo, while saying he wasn’t opposed to the 12-unit cap. The cap, he said, might need to be lower.
“I do think we need to take the time to look at it,” Sprague said.
Councilor Steven Boucher said he agreed with a lot of what’s been said. “I don’t support 12 I think that in the spirit of what we’ve been doing lately—especially our STC we’ve been trying to create pathways to sustainable tourism.”
He didn’t think that the limitation of 12 in certain zones was fair to future residents who may someday want to carve their own pathway.
He said, like Minutolo, that he believes there’s an opportunity for building in housing requirements into any potential lodging development.
“I really feel like this does needs some amending,” Councilor David Kief said. “The nonconforming part of it. I’m in favor of the 12-limit downtown.”
He, like most of the councilors, said he honored the Planning Board’s work.
“I know they put a lot of time into this,” he said.
Chair Maya Caines said it’s easy to say no to something, but the town has concrete goals mapped out in the comprehensive plan and she’d like to find ways to incentivize those things and make them happen, building them into the policy that’s created. She also acknowledged the Planning Board’s work.
“I think there are some challenges in this,” Caines said.
Having less lodging in the form of hotels might not be the solution. There are vacation rentals and second homes out there.
“We do have a lot of units that are not being used to their full potential and I would also like to still explore that,” Caines said.
Another proposed amendment about the alignment and integration of definitions moved forward to the voters.
THE MORATORIUM
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 has previously advised the councilors.
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 had previously 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 stressed and in a split vote in October 2025 recommended not to extend the moratorium. The Town Council did extend it.
Worries, at the time, were about congestion, stress on the town’s emergency services, water, and sewer supplies.
But the moratorium discussion has consistently also been very much about housing and how new hotels could potentially displace homes.
Brechlin said that he wants to prevent those commercial uses from spilling into neighborhoods, buying up houses, and making streets dark at night. The moratorium’s continuation, gives the town a chance to continue to try to prevent that.
The new moratorium extension’s goal is to continue the work of the Planning Board, which has been tackling the potential lodging-related amendments to the town’s land use ordinance with the town’s planning department.
It speaks to guest unit caps, building scale, community character, environment, and traffic. It also calls for decreased conversion of housing uses to lodging uses.
The “whereas” clauses on the proposed potential moratorium continue for approximately three pages, though the moratorium is smaller in scope than its previous iterations.
According to the moratorium’s language, “The purpose of this moratorium is to temporarily suspend Lodging IV and Lodging V development applications in seven districts while the Town completes ordinance amendments addressing regulatory deficiencies affecting those uses, thereby protecting the public health, safety and welfare and preventing development approvals that would substantially impair implementation of those amendments.”
It continues, stating that the moratorium gives the town government more time to:
- “Identify appropriate guest unit caps for the seven districts where Lodging IV and Lodging V are allowed based on building scale, infrastructure, community character, traffic, and environmental compatibility.
- “Develop requirements that protect year-round housing and reduce the conversion of housing to lodging uses.
- “Develop design requirements that ensure new lodging is compatible with the scale, character, and historic identity of Bar Harbor.
- “Consider regulations that encourage mixed-use development and enhance neighborhood livability.
- “Continue to receive public input and work with residents, businesses, the Planning Board, and other interested parties before adopting final regulations.”
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Read the packet with the moratorium and proposed amendments here.
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