Three petitions seek to establish a recall provision for elected officials and give voters another route to consider a contested lodging proposal.
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BAR HARBOR—Resident Charles Sidman has sent the Bar Harbor Town Clerk three petitions that he hopes will gather enough signatures to be placed on the town’s June 2027 ballot. One would create a recall provision for elected town officers and officials.
That provision would be for Town Councilors, Warrant Committee members, and School Committee members in the town.
The grounds for recall would be “for any reason.” The petition could be drawn for signatures by five residents, but would require 10 percent of the voters who cast votes at the last gubernatorial election to proceed. A recall election would then have to be called within 60 days. A successful recall would mean that official could not serve in that position for three years.
Sidman has previously been the lead petitioner in the town’s cruise ship disembarkation ordinance which limited disembarkations to 1,000 or less daily without fines and changed the mechanism for how disembarkations occur, changing it from a license to a permit. This ordinance has most recently been declared unconstitutional for all but two months of the year by Judge Lance Walker.
Another recent citizens’ petition about how the town interacts with federal ICE operations was approved by the Town Council earlier this year.
Sidman was not a part of that petition though he is also the lead in a 10-person complaint to the Maine Public Utilities Commission about Bar Harbor’s new water rate structure, which had been approved earlier this year by both the state and Town Council. The PUC has opened an investigation based on this petition.
The three documents released Friday lead into each other.
“With full recognition of different points of view, I and others feel that the citizens of Bar Harbor can no longer depend on the 1. functionality, 2. competence, 3. fidelity, or 4. relevance of our elected and appointed town officials,” Sidman said in an email late Friday afternoon. “In other words, if government officials think by virtue of their positions that citizens work for and are to be ruled by them (rather than vice versa), in various matters including cruise ships, water rates, land use regulations, etc., voters may choose the admittedly more laborious path of governing directly themselves. Endless discussions and inaction are not acceptable. The Planning Board proposed a thoughtful article for the November Warrant concerning hotel restrictions, and the Town Council refused to allow the voters to decide the issue for themselves. While honest differences of opinion exist, Maine law allows citizens, not officials, to call the shots. The voices of our town’s voters cannot be ignored or denied by our officials.”
On each of the three documents there is a petitioning committee which includes Charles Sidman, wife Amy Sidman, Jim O’Connell, David Rapkevian, and Nathan Young. O’Connell is married to Warrant Committee member Carol Chappell.
The first petition in the batch of three is about graduated lodging scale that was not forwarded to this November election by the Town Council this summer.
The second petition calls for a change to the town’s charter and allows for that recall provision for elected officials.
The third focuses on allowing a notary-called town meeting if the petition to move the graduate lodging scale isn’t moved to the June meeting by the Town Council.
“This is a state-allowed procedure to have a notary-called Town Meeting, in case the LUO proposal above achieves the necessary 10% of past gubernatorial signatures, but the Council still refuses, for any reason, to put in on the subsequent regular or special town warrant. This petition, by Maine Law, can then be put for a vote at a special town meeting called by a notary public, but does eventually require certification of the signatures,” Sidman wrote.
In August, the Town Council unanimously voted that the graduated lodging amendment would not go before voters this November. It 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’ abilities to reconfigure guest rooms and create nonconformities in their historic properties, such as adding a deck.
The proposal had been supported by people who are concerned that any more hotels built—or expanded—in town would impact what they characterized as the small-town character of the town.
Those against both the current lodging 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.
Since the August meeting, the Town Council has begun work with planning staff to create a framework for the Planning Board and planning staff to work to address lodging concerns and end the moratorium, which has begun its second year.
THE EMAIL
The petitions are attached to the article below.
Sidman has requested space in the Town Council Chamber at the November 3 election to collect signatures for each.
In a letter to Town Clerk Liz Graves and members of the local media, Sidman explained, “Two are ‘standard’ citizen initiatives (one the recently Council-declined Graduated Lodging Scale LUO proposal, that we feel citizens must have the opportunity to vote on, and the second a proposed Charter change to establish in Bar Harbor a recall provision for elected officials comparable to what many other Maine towns and other jurisdictions have.) I understand the substantially differing signatory requirements for these two petitions, so that their return to you for further action may take place on different timetables.”
Charter changes have different requirements than land use ordinance changes.
A town’s charter is a document that establishes “a body politic or other organization, or that grants rights, liberties, or powers to its citizens or members,” according to NY Courts. It’s also “an instrument by which a municipality is incorporated, specifying its organizational structure and its highest laws; specifically, a written document making the persons residing within a fixed boundary, along with their successors, a corporation and body politic for and within that boundary, and prescribing the powers, privileges, and duties of the corporation.”
A town’s land use ordinance is basically a town or city’s rules that direct how land is used and developed in that town or city. It creates things like zoning districts, determines lot coverage and setbacks, and uses.
The third petition, Sidman wrote, is not standard because of the notary-called town meeting.
Questions to the Bar Harbor Town Manager and Town Clerk were not answered by press time.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Recall Provision in the Town Charter
2026
209KB ∙ PDF file
Notary Called Town Meeting Petition
2026
167KB ∙ PDF file
Graduated Lodging Amendment to LUO
Luo 2026 06 Graduated Lodging Scale Final
462KB ∙ PDF file
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