Bar Harbor and Mount Desert are considering combining payroll, benefits, and personnel administration after more than a decade of shared police services.
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BAR HARBOR—Two Mount Desert Island police departments that have been sharing services for more than a decade now might be going further, joining underneath the auspices of the Town of Bar Harbor.
At a Thursday workshop that involved the town council of one Mount Desert Island town with some selectboard members of another, Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Police Chief David Kerns explained what he’d like to be the next step in the police departments for both towns, which currently share some personnel costs and direction from one chief.
“I don’t know if it’s a cost savings, but it’s a time savings. So, time is equal to money in our eyes,” Chief Kerns told members of the Bar Harbor Town Council and Mount Desert Selectboard, Thursday.
The proposal is meant to outline “the full integration of all police and dispatch personnel under the Town of Bar Harbor’s administration,” a hand-out created by Chief Kerns, and dispersed to the officials of both town, reads.
At the meeting, Chief Kerns said that he and Captain Christopher Wharff, who also serves as Bar Harbor’s harbormaster had worked on the proposal.
“We really started looking at the redundancies that we were doing for both towns as far as budgetary purposes, payroll and personnel, inequity and wages not so much, just we kept seesawing back and forth because we could never get it right. So we came to both town managers at the time and we’re like: we would like to consider moving towards, you know, a unified employer for all of the employees,” Chief Kerns explained at the meeting.
The cost will shift on the Bar Harbor side with offsetting revenue coming in from Mount Desert. Currently the towns share a few employees at a 60-40 cost share, Chief Kerns said.
Since 2013, the towns have shared services and some positions. The towns first shared a police chief, and since then have integrated services while also maintaining positions that were officially within one town or the other. Since then, the towns have shared its records management system, computerized dispatch services, and other aspects of call response and record keeping. It operates on one radio frequency and submits reports to the Maine court system as one department.
“We really have become (one) virtual agency as far as the court is concerned and as far as the state’s concerned,” Chief Kerns said at a July 28 meeting of both the board and council.
However, the financials for the employees and liabilities haven’t been perfectly combined.
Currently, Bar Harbor staffs Chief Kerns, Captain Wharff, three sergeants, 10 patrol officers, four dispatchers, one mental health liaison, one administrative assistant, an assistant harbormaster, and a parking manager who also serves as an animal control officer, which accounts for 23 employees.
According to the handout, Mount Desert staffs eleven employees including three dispatchers, six patrol officers, a lieutenant, and a sergeant. Some of those might not currently be filled.
“I think the big, big message for everybody here, as well as the communities, they’re never going to see a change in how we’re operating. It’s very much going to be the same,” Chief Kerns said. “This is really more on the back end.”
The goal is to fully integrate Mount Desert’s eleven employees into Bar Harbor’s payroll and benefit systems. Those employees, Chief Kerns has said, would maintain their current roles. There is no call for a reduction of personnel or service disruption, he said.
Administrative costs as well as the cost for the police chief, captain, and mental health liaison would be shared (50% each) by both town’s budgets, which are supported by property taxes. Similarly, each town would pay half of the annual police liability insurance costs, but there would be one policy through Bar Harbor covering both departments.
Bar Harbor would support two-thirds of the cost of other staff. Mount Desert would pay one-third.
All human resource issues, payroll, and employee records would be within Bar Harbor’s systems.
Chief Kerns said he hoped the plan would begin July 1, 2027, which would make it the start of Bar Harbor’s budgetary fiscal year 2028. For that to happen both towns must approve it by April 2027.
“What we’re hoping to see tonight is a lot of heads shaking ‘yes’ and that it looks like we’re still heading in the right direction and that we’re comfortable with what we’re proposing, because we need to start developing those budgets,” Bar Harbor Town Manager James Smith said. “Our numbers are suggesting to us that any changes in costs are going to be very negligible. And so, neither town should see any type of a shock to their cost of service because we’re really not changing the levels of service. We do expect to be under the insurance, probably some savings there, and there’s some realignment for the personnel, but I think everybody’s already factored that in and understands those mitigating circumstances.”
Each board would take a separate action to enter into the MOU as the towns develop budgets.
Vehicles in both towns are separate from this agreement.
“Rather than just taking assets and calculating (the) value of everything and trying to cost shift across and pay out, it’s just as things slowly depreciate and get replaced that that cost or that asset would be then purchased by the town of Bar Harbor and that money then would just be part of the agreement as far as funding,” Chief Kerns said.
Officers for both towns already can patrol both towns as part of their normal duties. Because of the island’s mutual aid agreements, all the island towns can respond to emergencies when necessary.
Bar Harbor’s councilors asked about other agencies potentially merging.
“Do you think this could lead to more of a unification of Northeast Harbor Fire Department and Bar Harbor’s Fire Department?” Bar Harbor Councilor Randell Sprague asked.
“It’s the ageless question,” Bar Harbor Council Chair Maya Caines said.
“Over time, I think, you’ll naturally see that, and I think the fire chiefs of our two towns have already started to develop a strong—We have a brand new one coming on November 3, and they’ve already started doing that,” Mount Desert Town Manager Alex Kimball said of his town’s new chief who is replacing the retiring Chief Mike Bender. “And in fact, when we interviewed for our incoming fire chief, yours was part of the interview panel and really helpful. So, I think it’s just little steps like that as we go along that will help us keep moving in that direction,” Mount Desert Town Manager Alex Kimball said.
Kimball added that if merging the towns’ fire departments does move forward, it will be a long process. Both towns have full-time fire and emergency staff who respond to both fire and ambulance calls as well as on-call firefighters.
Bar Harbor Councilors David Kief and Earl Brechlin did not attend. Chair Caines, Steve Boucher, Joe Minutolo, and Deb Vickers attended. Mount Desert Selectboard Chair John Macauley, David MacDonald, and Martha Dudman attended. Wendy Littlefield and Rodney King did not attend.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Consider Full Police Merger
July 23, 2025
Disclosure: I used to part-time dispatcher for the Mount Desert Police and Fire Departments. I was also an on-call firefighter for a brief time.
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