Warrant Committee Chair Said He’ll Bring Issue to His Committee Members

Carrie Jones

just now

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Paradis Ace Hardware.

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MOUNT DESERT—After a Selectboard meeting, Monday, Mount Desert Warrant Committee Chair Philip Lichtenstein will ask his committee members about potentially taping and airing its meetings. If the members agree, it will join several other town committees that record and air meetings on the town’s YouTube channel.

The request and special meeting was due to an inquiry by Lincoln Millstein, a retired media executive who runs the Quietside Journal, Town Manager Alex Kimball explained in a message to town committee and board member chairs in October.

In the email, Kimball explained that the Selectboard would hold a meeting just to discuss the recording and broadcasting of meetings, with a focus on the Warrant Committee.

“This meeting arises from a specific request from Lincoln Millstein that the town record and broadcast Warrant Committee meetings, but his request also raises larger issues that the Selectboard felt was best discussed publicly,” Kimball wrote.

Millstein’s Quietside Journal Substack, he writes on the site, “chronicles the steady decline in quality of life wrought by unchecked tourism on Mount Desert Island, Maine. The QSJ is written in the traditions of Pamphleteers in the late 18th Century and Muckrakers in the early 20th Century.”

He often covers local issues and events as well as relating them to national or statewide issues.

“The question at hand will be: Because we have the ability to record and broadcast via the Town of Mount Desert YouTube channel any meeting held at the Town Hall, should we try to record and broadcast all those meeting, or more of the meetings than we do at present? It is a simple question, but one with many nuances to the possible answers. My discussions with various interested parties on this topic have tended to land right down the middle in terms of opinions, with many finding themselves presenting both sides of the argument even as they state their personal opinions. This suggests that this is in fact a topic that warrants a more in-depth conversation,” Kimball wrote.

Kimball also wrote that the discussion would be residents’ opportunity to chime in.

No members of the public who were not on committees, other than Millstein, did.

Millstein advocated that having committees’ meetings viewable online does multiple things.

Recordings, he said, open up representation.

They allow people who can’t attend a meeting live in the late afternoon, evening, or workday to go back and view it later on and be informed.

The recordings also allow the press to report, verify quotes, and/or attend meetings after-the-fact when they’ve been tipped off by a reader that something important has happened.

He applauded Southwest Harbor’s increased recordings of meetings and bemoaned the school system’s lack of recordings. Throughout the system, which hosts multiple school boards and committees, only one meeting is recorded and posted on that YouTube channel: the AOS 91 Board meeting.

Some Warrant Committee members did speak at the Selectboard meeting as did Kathy Miller of Somesville who serves on multiple committees.

One time after a meeting that was online, she said, she was called by a business that was scraping information off the internet and offering its services.

“AI is scraping everything and so whatever goes on in here is out in the pile,” Miller wanted to note.

Gail Marshall, who chairs the town’s LUZO Committee (land use and zoning ordinance) and sits on its School Board, Planning Board, Comprehensive Plan Committee, and Assessment Review Committee sent in written comment against more broadcasting though she said she is in favor of transparency in all public-serving activities.

She could not attend the Selectboard meeting because she was at other school meetings. The MDI High School Board and AOS 91 Board meetings were on the same night.

Marshall said that online participation offered by videos is less efficacious and sometimes meetings can turn into “ugly, racist, violent” screeds or be Zoom-bombed with pornographic videos.

UMA-Technology defines zoom bombing as “the practice of disrupting a Zoom meeting by uninvited guests—most often malicious individuals—who enter the meeting and interrupt it with unwanted elements. These disruptions can range from spamming the chat with inappropriate messages to sharing obscene screen content, and in some severe instances, using the platform for hate speech, harassment, and even criminal activity.”

Similar incidents have happened in Bar Harbor, which uses Town Hall Streams, Zoom, and YouTube for various reasons and shares its Town Council, Appeals Board, Design Review Board, Planning Board, and Warrant Committee meetings on both Town Hall Streams and YouTube.

Planning Board, Harbor Committee, Selectboard are always uploaded and recorded, Kimball said. Those can be seen on the town’s YouTube channel.

“That ties to the decision-making authority and ties to the fact that we’ve always got a staff person assigned to them,” Kimball said about why those specific government bodies are online.

They try to do the same for many other committees, he said, but sometimes there is no staff available and sometimes there are glitches.

This happened for a recent Comprehensive Plan Committee where no one realized it wasn’t being recorded via the Owl, which is the tool that the town uses to record sound and video.

“Sometimes the internet can be acting up and so sometimes it just doesn’t work, and I think that’s the piece where we need to remember we are a small town unless we really want to go down the path of staffing all of them and having really an AV person for all these meetings, and that’ll be the primary expense is that cost of just having an extra staff person on hand to manage those. And again if it all works great. It’s fine. But it just rarely . . . There’s always something,” Kimball said.

The Warrant Committee allows remote participation, but doesn’t record its meetings. It takes minutes, which are posted online.

Not all advisory committee meetings minutes are posted.

Vice Chair Wendy Littlefield also mentioned the Zoom bombing that has occurred during Selectboard meetings.

Kimball said that Zoom bombing moments are edited out, which is allowed, he said, via state statute.

”I would typically always lean toward transparency, communication, accessibility,” Selectboard Secretary David MacDonald said, echoing Chair John Macauley’s comments. “I’m mindful that although they’re not voting residents of the town, we have a big summer community that pays a lot of taxes and is not here. So having them able to understand what’s going on week to week just in the name of open lines of communication, I support that. Um but I do want to hear from people who serve on these committees to understand if making a change would affect the quality of the discussion, the quality of the decisions, um your participation.”

The town, he said, does a good job, but could potentially do more.

“I don’t want to impose something that it’s not reasonable on a staff that’s already, you know, got a lot of hats on and doing a lot of different different jobs,” he said.

Selectboard member Martha Dudman said her hope is that people can be informed as much as they can even though she personally doesn’t like Zoom and that it can be trickier on smaller committees.

“My inclination is that as much as possible our meeting should be recorded and available on YouTube. The warrant committee I think is especially important,” Dudman said.

Gerard Miller, of the Warrant Committee, said he has no problem with recording the Warrant Committee meetings.

“I think it’s all to the good,” he said.

Lichtenstein chairs the Warrant Committee, Sustainability Committee, and the town’s Investment Committee.

He worried that recording the meetings might inhibit a Warrant Committee from talking during the process.

“I don’t want to hold people back from being able to speak your mind,” he said.

Craig Roebuck, a Warrant Committee member, said that he could go either way.

“For several years, it has come up and majority of the group says we don’t want to be recorded. I’m not sure why that is,” Roebuck said. “I also have a concern about all the town’s people, the town employees that come to our meetings. They have to be amendable to being recorded, too. I don’t know if that influences them.”

Millstein advocated that by broadcasting the recordings, the Warrant Committee would be better representatives to the community. Dudman said that if the town updated its policy, which basically stems from the COVID-19 era, it would be great.

Macauley said, “The warrant committee is supposed to represent a cross-section of the town and I’m puzzled that anyone would feel uncomfortable sharing their opinions with the people they’re representing.”

In the town charter, it says that the Warrant Committee decides its own rules and procedures, Kimball said.

Lichtenstein said that he’d bring the question back to the Warrant Committee so that it can vote on it. He’s open to whatever the committee decides, he said, but he wanted to empower his committee.

“The bottom line is that people need to be better informed. Too many people are showing up at the polls and voting on things that they don’t understand and that has to stop,” Macauley said.

As of press time, the town’s most watched video on YouTube is not a meeting, but a Waste Hub tour with 200 views. The second highest watched within roughly the last year was a November 3, 2025 Selectboard meeting with 121 views.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

For more about boards and committees in Mount Desert (including openings).

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mPLHAb3jp4k?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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