Town officials and residents weigh the competing needs of tourism, housing, local businesses, parking, and town character.
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The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by ArtWaves.
BAR HARBOR—As Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park earned new accolades this fall for coziest fall destination (BetMGM Casino study) and most colorful fall hike (Travel and Leisure), the Town Council began a new process of dealing with its continuing lodging moratorium, which stops renovation or builds of lodging.
The meeting notice for the Bar Harbor Town Council workshop, October 5, said it would be focusing on the lodging moratorium, but as workshops often do, the conversation touched on multiple overarching issues, particularly housing availability and parking in the downtown area.
“Welcome to the jungle,” Vice Chair Earl Brechlin said to one of the newest members of the town’s planning staff, Penelope Whitman, sustainable economic development manager.
The goal was to craft the intentions for the planning staff and board as they work their way out of a lodging moratorium that’s gone on for two years in the town that is entwined with Acadia National Park, a tourist attraction that brings visitors—including many who need lodging—to the area.
Overnight visitors to the region stay in Bar Harbor, other Mount Desert Island towns, and Trenton, Ellsworth, and Lamoine.
For decades, there have been tensions about traffic congestion and pedestrian congestion. The town’s infrastructure—waste and water systems—are also aging out.
Property taxes are often cited as an issue for the town with residents saying that they are unfairly supporting a tourism industry. However, many of the largest property tax payers are hotels. In 2024, the ten largest taxpayers in Bar Harbor provided 11% of the town’s levy, or just over $3 million in property taxes. That decreased to 10.44% and just under $3 million as of April. Six of those largest taxpayers were lodging businesses. One was a campground.
According to Brechlin, citing a town housing report, approximately a third of the town’s housing is not used year round. Some might not be winterized. Some might be used only for short-term rentals. Some might be summer homes. Some might be housing for seasonal employees.
Another place of friction is whether or not preventing lodging being built in the town has the potential to increase traffic on the state-owned road on and off the island.
WORRIES ABOUT IMPACTS TO SMALL OWNERS
Some members of the public spoke to how a moratorium on all lodging and other restrictive changes doesn’t just impact larger hotel owners, but can hurt local, smaller lodging owners.
David Bowden, whose family has owned Edgewater Motel and Cottages in Salsbury Cove for decades and multiple generations said, “You know, every time one of the larger developers develop and have their lawyers…we always close the barn door and we always hurt the small mom and pop business. It’s the mom and pop businesses—that I think is what we want. (It) is the people that hire the local contractors, electricians, plumbers, and so on and so forth. The kids go to school here and they’re part of our year round community.”
He said he thought keeping those mom and pop businesses that have been here for their lifetime as well as new families building a life together was part of the town’s goals.
“The other ultimate goal is to make sure our town isn’t torn down and built into hotels. But we need to find a way not to eliminate the ma and pa (businesses),” Bowden said. “We need to find a way that they can exist and over the years expand moderately and such, whether it’s 10% or 20%, and that all will all go to whether they have lot coverage and parking requirements and septic requirements and all that.”
He mentioned the family that owns the Coach Stop Inn that has a fifth grader in the Bar Harbor school and his own family business as types the town would want to keep and not isolate nor make it impossible to grow moderately when needed.
He then listed multiple, generational lodgings owned by local families. Many others are also owned and run by year-round locals.
In a small town, he said, minor changes to land use ordinances can have outsized impacts on smaller businesses. He’s seen that, he said, often in the last forty years.
Brechlin agreed, saying that often the town believes ”it’s a simple solution if we just do this, but the fact is all those solutions reverberate through the zoning ordinance through the community through the economy and through the business community. So the law of unintended consequences comes into play there. So I think that we have to be careful not to just look at things overly in simplistic terms and look at the bigger picture and how they affect all of that to just avoid those pitfalls.”
For Bowden, the emphasis was on small businesses like his own and how the land use decisions by the town don’t often think about those impacts.
“It’s always been, let’s kill the ma and pa, shut them down ‘cause it’s easy, ‘cause I can’t afford a $100,000 lawyer for one more cottage, you know, but if you’re going to build 180-unit motel and you spend $100,000, so be it. It’s only so much a unit,” Bowdoin said. “It’s a tough position you’re in.”
For family businesses like his own, he said, it’s an investment.
“We put all our money back into our business and not our retirement because that is our retirement and and we extend it down our generations. And so I’m just asking you in your thoughts and whatnot, if you please can consider instead of taking the easy duckling and cutting the legs off and trying to figure out how to get to the big guy, help the little guy, okay?” Bowden said.
He also talked to the potential impact of building more lodging off island in towns where there are no moratoriums and where the zoning rules—and land to build—might be easier to deal with and find.
“You got 50 cottages being built in Trenton. You got a 100-unit hotel being in built in Ellsworth. They’re all headed to the island and and they’re competing against us and we’re old time establishments,” he said.
THE CHARACTER OF THE TOWN AND INITIAL DISCUSSIONS
During the workshop, attending councilors spoke to their concerns while Bar Harbor Housing and Community Planner Cali Martinez tracked and sometimes reframed them into shorter phrases on a large sheets of paper.
Councilor Randell Sprague worried about a “canyon effect” with increasing height requirements close to the sidewalk in town.
Councilor David Kief also spoke about the ‘canyon effect’ and how as a property owner across Main Street from the Bar Harbor Grand Hotel he’d been worried about its construction and the viewshed when it had been built over a decade ago.
Councilor Joe MInutolo said it was important to keep the character of the town and the green space. If everyone built to the curb and a 40 foot maximum, it would diminish the feel of the town. Scale, character, and green space were all part of future development concerns.
The councilors also spoke to the look of buildings. Lodging design that resembles old homes turned into inns wasn’t something most developers would do, Kief believed.
Those tend to be added costs.
Minutolo suggested roofs with pitches rather than boxy buildings.
Brechlin’s concern was what would happen if a corner gets bought up and a structure goes there across multiple lots that were once individual lots.
“It’s a Home Depot without the orange sign because it fills the whole lot,” he said. “And so I just think when we look at scale, it isn’t necessarily just how much is on the street and how tall it is, but I also think it’s, you know, how much does it just suck? Is it a black hole for just a huge building that takes up a whole corner or a whole block?”
Minutolo worried about mature tree growth to development. Old growth in downtown is important.
Councilor Deb Vickers said that often times landscaping is approved by a town board, but doesn’t happen.
“Is there accountability?” she asked.
Martinez reframed that as making sure there are enforceable standards and enforcement for those standards.
“It seems right now that all the development going on is lodging,” Kief said. “That’s where the money is and that’s where you know that if they can they’re doing very well. They’re able to purchase properties and expand. So that’s, that’s the thing we’re up against right now is the lodging. Unfortunately, it’s really hard for small businesses to move in here because well, they’ve all been ushered out because of real estate prices.”
“So, you’re saying that lodging is probably the biggest—maybe not the only—but it’s the biggest concern here,” Martinez said.
Minutolo brought the workshop back to the theme that many things are connected. A need for hotel workers can create a need for housing. Others mentioned that restaurants do the same. Some hotels and businesses and nonprofits have created housing. Some have purchased existing housing, as have some nonprofits. Some house some employees year round on their inn or hotel properties.
Discussion also occurred around how to have hotels and lodging have commercial space on the first floor, which already occurs on West Street and the Pathmaker Hotel.
LOCAL OWNERSHIP
The workshop also touched on encouraging local ownership of businesses.
Though not discussed, many of the start-up aspects that help create those locally owned, up-and-coming brick and mortar businesses—business incubators, food trucks, etc.—aren’t allowed or don’t currently exist in the town due to current rules and codes.
That isn’t the only roadblock to encouraging local ownership.
“If a storefront opens up,” Kief said, “it seems like it gets gobbled up by someone who already has a pre-existing business.”
Sprague also suggested getting Town Hill back into the mix of the discussion and encouraging an increase and diversity of local services such as electricians and shoe stores and how zoning requirements in that area might stifle that.
Brechlin suggested protections for current lodging, like Bowden’s.
“I think it’s difficult when you start talking about local ownership and small business because you really can’t legislate against forms of business ownership,” Brechlin said.
Minutolo said you have to incentivize what you want and disincentivize what you don’t through tax incentives and tools, but then the question becomes: How do we figure out exactly what those businesses would be to qualify for that.
“No more t-shirt shops,” Kief said to chuckles.
Brechlin reiterated that he didn’t want to allow the creation of mega-lots.
Vickers said there is room for some small lodging growth and that she understands the worry about large growth in areas where it isn’t as suitable. She owns a six-room inn and has no desire or room to expand it.
Sprague wondered how full Bar Harbor is now, saying approximately 45 years ago the town was full with no room at the inn. He wondered about the town’s level of occupancy.
From the audience, hotelier and former councilor, Stephen Coston said it is at 98% occupancy from May to October.
“There is demand,” Brechlin said. “So then the question is what’s the best way to satisfy that demand and at what point do you say that demand is excessive right? When does that tip the scale because adding lodging growth isn’t going to help us with parking congestion, street safety, or diverse year-round economy.”
Bar Harbor’s population is roughly 5,100. The town has said there are 3,000 hotel rooms in 94 hotels and roughly 3,000 dwelling units, Minutolo said.
“You’ve got as many or more hotel rooms as you do residences, that’s a statement. You know that’s really pretty shocking to say the least,” Minutolo said.
The amount of bedrooms in those dwelling units was not mentioned.
The group also quickly spoke to consequences of decisions, harkening back to Bowden’s comments, but in slightly different ways.
More lodging out of town could mean more vehicles in town and parking spaces needed and possibly negatively impact the environment where there isn’t town sewer or water supporting it. More lodging in town could mean more displacement of homes or other businesses for parking. There seemed to be a consensus that on-site parking or committing money to parking projects (or other town infrastructure) should be required.
“You have the fairness question,” Brechlin said of the potential change in requirements and how to create them. “You’ve got a 600-seat theater with no parking. You’ve got 4,000 whale watch seats a day going out of here with no parking requirements for that. So, I think, you know, to to make someone who’s selling a few t-shirts or selling a few lobster rolls have to have mandatory parking…”
Vickers said that new lodging growth could be potentially good if it was linked to also creating more housing, within reason.
“This is the very beginning of a policy practice or a a process that’s going to identify things,” Brechlin said.
OTHER PUBLIC COMMENT
Ruth Eveland, a former councilor and current Planning Board chair, said that she was happy the council workshops had begun.
“I’m very very very happy that we’re engaging in this process. Now, I think this is going to be a much sounder basis for ongoing decision-making for the community at large. We have the guidance of the comp plan that had an extraordinary participation rate and,” Eveland said, “we need to make sure that what we were doing is actually implementing the work that actually happened there. We never intended that this iteration of the comp plan was going to be an on-the-shelf document. The whole point of it was to be an active guide in what we are what we’re doing in our community.”
The comp plan is the 2035 Bar Harbor Comprehensive Plan, which was created by staff and an appointed task force and approved by the voters. It is meant to prioritize the town’s future
She moved to Bar Harbor 33 years ago, she said.
“I want to live in an active living town, not a toy village,” she said.
She’s in favor of historic preservation. She used the Jesup Library’s new addition to its historic building as being a guide to future expansion of existing businesses to meet new needs while also preserving the old.
Residential neighborhoods in town, she said she believes, are often also business districts because they hold apartments. Those linkages should be remembered.
Former Planning Board Chair Tom St.Germain, a business owner and part of the group that built the Pathmaker on Cottage Street, lodging next to the town’s municipal building and in front of Vickers’ Black Friar Inn, also spoke to concerns that the mega-lot councilors were referring to was the Cherrystones lot on Main Street, properties that have been purchased by Coston.
He called out the specificity of some councilors’ concerns. He also compared the size of that lot, which he said was 31,000 square feet to the Jesup’s 49,000 square feet and the hospital’s expansion, which he said he believes is approximately 250,000 square feet.
“I would hope that you consider the scale with respect to many other properties In town, not just the specificity of the particular corner that’s been discussed repeatedly tonight,” St.Germain said.
Current Planning Board member Teresa Wagner spoke after St.Germain.
“I do think the size and scale of buildings, especially downtown, is important and personally, I think, it’s hard for me to compare a lodging business with a library that serves the entire community all year round and a hospital that certainly serves the entire community all year round,” she said.
“I think we’re missing a significant root tension, which is the financial one. So I think that the tension between where the money from tourists go and the money that the taxpayers have to put up to pay for all the things that the tourists need is not addressed in this town. I know a lot of that’s very difficult to accomplish, but I think until we get a handle on that, it’s hard to support significant growth in the lodging industry in particular because I I don’t believe at least and maybe, you know, maybe we have ways to prove whether this is the case or not, but I don’t believe that the tourist business is paying for the experience of the tourists in terms of infrastructure, in terms of services, you might work with the fire department, the police department,” Wagner said.
Currently, parking fees help pay for town costs. Previously, cruise ship fees paid for things like wages for harbormaster office employees, some of the police captain’s salary as well as benefits, ferry terminal studies, some legal fees, environmental monitoring, supplies for that area (trash cans, cones, etc.), patrol boat supplies and fuel, internet access and wi-fi in that area, trainings, insurance, the ferry terminal study, and Life Flight and Island Explorer contributions.
Since the cruise ship ordinance was enacted those revenues have diminished from roughly $1.28 million in fiscal year 2023 to roughly $367,000 in fiscal year 2026.
Sales tax collected by businesses go into the state coffers, not local ones.
“It’s not the responsibility of either the business or certainly the town to accommodate every person that wants to be here in a given time,” Wagner said.
That’s a conversation the town should have explicitly, she said.
“Or do we have some sort of obligation to house everyone in Bar Harbor that wants to be here at any particular time? I don’t happen to think we do. I’m okay with people staying elsewhere,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a terrible thing. Especially when the taxpayers are basically subsidizing a lot of these visitors.”
Charles Sidman, who owns an art gallery with his wife downtown asked the council if the discussion about housing needs and commercial patterns and any potential new regulations applied only when a new structure is built or when a new business is formed or begins operating.
“Just to give you an example, my wife and I operate a mom and pop business. Well, somebody could be in that space with a different business model. They could have employees,” Sidman said. “Would you think then that they have to be regulated differently from what my wife and I how my wife and I are regulated now in that same space?”
He also mentioned that in the discussions of seasonal employee and year-round employees there are variances and they aren’t a homogenous group with all the same needs.
“I’m certainly a year-round resident. My children, when they were growing up, were seasonal employees. They didn’t need extra housing because we lived here,” he said.
He cautioned against oversimplifying the situation.
Throughout the workshop, participants spoke of Portland and New York City and their methods of dealing with housing and/or lodging. Sidman advised the councilors to remember that those tourism seasons don’t swing as greatly as Bar Harbor’s.
“We have two economies here, but one physical home,” Sidman said.
Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Everal Eaton suggested that the council talks about trade-offs and unintended long-term consequences, which has been part of the town’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force’s work.
“That’s maybe something that might do this conversation very well of talking about,” he said about when town officials discuss development outside the downtown, what that means for car congestion.
“I think that could aid the council pretty well in thinking about some of those maybe unintended long-term consequences and just wanted to encourage that suggestion. Thank you,” Eaton said.
Coston spoke to both parking regulations and information about the Pathmaker.
“I think one space per room is a good standard and I think the proximity rules that exist are fine. Totally understand if you guys want to regulate that parking doesn’t displace any dwelling units. That makes total sense,” he said. “Overall I think parking is fine and I know people are upset about Pathmaker. I would say two things. Firstly, the parking lot that we have across the street, that was never a dwelling. It’s always been a parking lot. Secondly, we have enough space to park all the cars. We just have to valet them. We chose to have a parking lot across the street instead.”
He said that when Pathmaker was built the regulations were different and the parking standards were different and Pathmaker was “in no way illegal or non-conforming when it was constructed under the use that it was constructed as.”
He also stressed that the Pathmaker’s floor plan never changed “from the day that it was drawn until the day it was built.”
It’s exactly the way it was drafted, he said.
“There never was any additional public space that didn’t get built. I’m not sure where that rumor might have came from, but the the public space on the first floor was the restaurant and it is the restaurant and that’s the way it was drawn,” Coston said.
He also supported lodging helping to create more housing.
“I would just encourage to let lodging contribute to affordable housing. Set a soft limit. Set a hard limit. In between, require everything you want. That’s my suggestion,” he said.
Guy Dunphey, another Planning Board member suggested lodging free corridors to help maintain the character of the town.
“If you go downtown, you really don’t see lodging really anywhere on Main Street from West Street to Mount Desert Street and pretty far out to Cottage Street. So, as you go through this exercise, is it worth considering allowing lodging in downtown but have a lodging-free corridor to maintain—to help maintain—the integrity of the town or the character of the town and promote other sources of business there, maybe apartments above the stores or use that for employee housing above the stores. I’m sure a lot of them do that now,” Dunphey asked councilors.
Dunphey brought up and Gagnon briefly discussed the nonconformity aspects of the Graduated Lodging Scale amendment to the land use ordinance that had been worked on by the planning board and not advanced by the council to the voters this November. Instead, the councilors chose to look at housing and lodging through this process.
Chair Maya Caines and Councilor Steven Boucher were not at the workshop and were both out of town.
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