Facts and Feelings: Town Council Wrestles With Potential Building Moratorium for Lodgings
Council agrees that housing is a major issue in Bar Harbor
BAR HARBOR—The potential moratorium on transient accommodations didn’t pass, didn’t fail, and ended up going back to town staff for more work and more information after a Town Council meeting Tuesday night, September 19.
The meeting was a standing room only crowd for a bit thanks to a controversial special amusement permit as well as a public hearing on disbanding the town’s Cruise Ship Committee.
The moratorium also created lively discussion. Councilor Joe Minutolo was not at the meeting. Councilor Matthew Hochman attended via Zoom.
HISTORY
After remarks from Hochman during the Councilor’s August meeting, a potential moratorium on transient accommodations received a lot of press. That discussion continued at the September 5 meeting, but no action was taken since it was not on the agenda. An informal straw poll showed that some councilors were interested in looking into it. That interest continued Tuesday night.
When people visit Bar Harbor and stay overnight, they stay in what the town calls transient accommodations. Those include rooms in hotels and motels and bed and breakfasts. It also includes campsites and then also RV sites. Short-term rentals in houses are a different category than rooms rented in hotels, motels, and bed and breakfasts. They were, however, included in the moratorium’s draft language.
THE DRAFT
THE APPROACH TO THE DRAFT MORATORIUM
Interim Town Manager Cornell Knight and Town Attorney Stephen Wagner approached the moratorium by using both the state rules and the town’s rules. These rules rely on findings of fact and “whereas” clauses.
Wagner explained that the moratorium is “essentially a pause on development” and a pause on processing the applications for transient accommodations. To do that, the councilors would have to make certain findings: that the moratorium is necessary to stop a burden on public facilities and other aspects; that the existing comprehensive plan is inadequate. In Bar Harbor there is also a charter that speaks to emergency ordinances such as a moratorium.
The draft created for the September 19 meeting is an emergency moratorium ordinance, which means that the council would have to find that the creation of transient accommodations is currently an emergency and must be addressed.
Wagner said he wouldn’t advise retroactively enacting the moratorium past the date it is first officially discussed (September 19).
The charter specifies that moratoriums are for 60 days. For a longer moratorium, the Council would have to reapprove it every two months.
THE NUMBERS
As the discussion began, Councilor Kyle Shank said he wanted to ground the talk in data points. He said that Knight and town staff were helpful in pulling that data from building permits issued in the last five years that deal with transient accommodations.
“There have been ten,” he said.
What Shank found of those ten is:
Three were for the KOA campgrounds and did not result in net-new accommodations being built – they were simply replacements to existing infrastructure
Two were related to conversions of short-term rentals to transient accommodations (both in 2019)
One was a transfer of a single family dwelling unit into a 7-guest room bed and breakfast
One was a change from one kind of transient accommodation to another, with no net change in rooms
One was for an existing campground to add two new tent sites
One was for the Bluenose Inn to construct a new building to replace the one that had been decimated by a fire. This has 21 suites.
This, Shank said, leaves one net new transient accommodation, which is the Cottage Street bed and breakfast that has 45 guestrooms and is still in construction. The bed and breakfast has stirred controversy because of its size and classification as a bed and breakfast, which is allowed currently in the town’s ordinance. The building is mostly on a site that was vacant for many years, right next to the Black Friar Inn and the town’s municipal building.
“We’ve refurbished old spots and are repairing classic infrastructure, but the only approved TA building permits over the past five years accounts for 52 rooms and 2 tent sites or 54 total new transient accommodation units,” Shank said of the numbers. “Of the 5,065 rooms and tent sites currently available within Bar Harbor, this gain of 54 spaces represents a 1% increase over five years.”
Short term rentals, he said, are up 45% (438 to 647) if you look from 2019. That number includes those who also live in the homes they rent. Those rental numbers peaked in 2021 and have decreased by 103 or a loss of 13% since then.
“I don’t know what we’re putting a moratorium on,” Shank said. “It doesn’t make sense from the numbers. I understand the feelings.”
He stressed that he understood the feelings and perceptions that there is too much tourism, but he wanted to separate that from the moratorium and facts that underlie those feelings.
As the draft moratorium is currently written, it includes processing applications and permits, so all short-term rental renewals would not be able to occur under a moratorium that extended past May.
“There’s a lot of economic impact to people,” he said.
Later on in the meeting, Hochman stressed that the intent of the moratorium was not on processing short-term rental applications or other similar smaller changes.
THE INTENT
Council Chair Valerie Peacock said that the Council needed to get a little clearer about what it is looking for a moratorium to allow them to do, and what would happen during the time the moratorium was enacted as well as the end goal. She stressed that she wanted to make sure they had all the pieces together before anything was approved.
Knight said he asked the Planning Department to draft a memo about the ordinance changes for June and November. There is a memo from Code Enforcement Officer Angela Chamberlain explaining the three areas they are working on: shared accommodations, employee living quarters, and lodging definitions. All of those changes as well as adapting to the state’s new LD 2003 about affordable housing and housing density are meant to increasing housing opportunities.
Councilor Earl Brechlin wondered if there is “a tsunami of applications and the town is being buried in this.”
He said the moratorium sounds good, but that the town is already taking the steps to fix the system.
Council Vice Chair Gary Friedmann said that affordable housing is an urgent issue and the “community is being gutted every day by the conversion of year-round residences to short term rentals and the increase of property values.”
No new short-term VR-2 rental permits have been issued since the town passed the short-term rental ordinance in November 2021, which took effect on December 2, 2021, and enacted a 9% cap on VR-2s. The 9% cap is 9% of all dwelling units in Bar Harbor. A person can still get a VR-1 permit for their primary residence.
He said the town and park appear to have reached their carrying capacity and the traffic is a sign that something is happening. He said there are constant traffic jams all day, every day, between Bar Harbor and Ellsworth.
In an earlier September meeting, Planning Director Michele Gagnon presented a traffic report that showed peak traffic at the head of the island and traffic trends.
Gagnon said at an earlier meeting that the peak hours in January are between 6-7 a.m. and then 3 p.m. in the afternoon. The peaks in August occur later in the morning and then again at 3-4 p.m.
The average workday has more traffic than the weekend. The morning peak traffic is also more than the afternoon peak traffic. However, the data is coming from the traffic light at the beginning of the island. In the morning, not all vehicles funnel through that light. They do in the afternoon.
“I think it’s reached the tipping point,” Friedmann said where the quality of life is deteriorating. He said they are all in it together and they need to do something about it. “We’ve got some major challenges.”
Peacock said she didn’t see how a 60-day pause was going to give them more housing or cut traffic. Friedmann said he didn’t think 60 days does anything and it would need to be longer.
“To me saying that we have an emergency in Bar Harbor is a reality,” Friedmann said.
Like Brechlin, Peacock said that the town is doing the work on housing. The Comprehensive Plan focuses on it. The Planning Department is working on expanding employee living quarters and shared accommodations, changing lodging definitions, and that the town has already had four ordinances that went through really easily. All were meant to help with housing.
“Every month that goes by that another family moves off island,” Friedmann sees as a loss, he said. Friedmann said the changes aren’t fast enough. “Development in Bar Harbor is accelerating. It’s not just a steady increase.” It’s a rapid increase, he said.
“Some of the information you stated as facts we got information in our last council meeting are not facts,” Shank said, though he does believe that housing is the town’s main issue.
“What are not facts?” Friedmann asked.
Shank reiterated that there is not increasing transient accommodations. “Our short-term-rental ordinance is working,” he said. “I think housing is our number one problem and I say that as someone who has moved 13 times on the island in ten years.”
The moratorium, he said, doesn’t fix housing. The number of new dwelling units is down. The net is at a loss in the five-year timeframe.
Shank worried that a moratorium could have unintended consequences such as making traffic worse in the long term by offloading accommodations to other communities such as Ellsworth.
Councilor Maya Caines said she agrees with Hochman and Friedmann, and it’s something that they need to take action on, but maybe this isn’t the right method. Caines said she had questions for the Planning Department in order to make that decision. She asked if they are losing valuable pieces of land that aren’t being used for housing.
PUBLIC COMMENT
During the public comment section of the discussion, multiple people stated that they are only living in Bar Harbor because of the free employee housing provided to them by Stay Bar Harbor, which is run by Brandon Monroe and owned by Stephen Coston.
Chris Ruck said that he’s lived here for a year and a half. “You present this crisis of development. We’re talking 1% in five years. That confuses me.”
While on vacation, he got in a conversation with Coston about how he would love to live here. He lives in employee housing for free. It’s part of the compensation package. He now has family who want to live with him. He said he sees his guests parking in the lodging’s lot and going out and about on foot or using the Island Explorer. He doesn’t hear his guests complaining about lines in Acadia.
Tom St.Germain said there are even more reductions than Shank had mentioned. “There are a 140 negative transient units,” he said, because Ledgelawn was included as transient accommodations. Coston agreed, later saying that Ledgelawn is currently housing, which decreases the total number of transient accommodations.
St.Germain wondered if there was a traffic study about lodging being the cause of the traffic jams, the timing of which, he said, seems the opposite of when people come and go as tourists.
Under the draft ordinance, St.Germain worried about currently existing TAs that wanted to change signs and then have to go to the Design Review Board. Under the draft moratorium, they couldn’t get a building permit because of that simple change. If a business wanted to fix an aging staircase to make it more ADA accessible, they couldn’t do that under the draft, he said.
He said he supported the Planning Department’s action about affordable housing, but that this proposal wouldn’t help. He urged the completion of the Comprehensive Plan before tackling the land use ordinance issues. The plan is meant to look at the town’s future vision and provide a guide for the Council and town committees to follow to enact that vision.
Charles Sidman said the proposal is an activity in concern or sensitivity signaling. “It’s a panic button.… I don’t see what the panic button is connected with.”
He wondered what the town could rapidly accomplish during the time of the moratorium.
Coston said, “I have heard so many counterfactual statements in this meeting. Kyle is straight-up giving you the data.” He later added, “If you say the sun is green, it doesn’t make it green.”
“At the end of the day, I’ve been the primary developer of TA accommodations in the past eight years,” he said.
He’s made 64 rooms in those years and asked, “This is what we’re panicking about?”
He said that he is generally the target of the public ire, but he provides free housing for 40 people in downtown Bar Harbor. He added that Friedmann is right and that housing is a problem. However, he added that tourists arrive at disparate times, he said, times which he doesn’t believe coincide with the data Gagnon presented at the last Council meeting.
Many employees and property managers who spoke said that the free housing provided by Coston and other transient accommodations owners was a great thing because it allowed them to save money to buy their own property.
Maria (no last name given) said, “Hotels are not the problem for traffic. The problem is around 9-to-5.”
Carol Chappell said she’d like the Town Council to look at section 7 of the draft moratorium, specifically concerned about potential current projects in the pipelines. She said that people spend thousands of dollars to get permits. To stop that in process, she said, wasn’t equitable. “I think that’s hurting your local people.”
Many of those who spoke mentioned facts about employee housing or the difficulties in building.
Diwas Thapa said, “We have facts on one side and on the other side we drive down Cottage Street and see that new building being built and think, ‘Ah, that is an emergency.’” He said that even though his partner is a contractor and he himself owns multiple properties, he can’t build a unit because of regulations. “It is not easy to come in and build a transient unit.”
Brandon Monroe, CEO of Stay Bar Harbor, said that the company employs about 100-112 employees. “We house about 1/3 of them.”
He said the moratorium was a feel-good move that targeted hotels. “The council should not move forward with this because you don’t have a plan afterward.”
Tourism numbers as they relate to traffic and therefore transient accommodations and congestion was also touched upon. Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Everal Eaton said, “A lot of members are saying that this season has been more in line with 2019.”
The park numbers are down 1.8%, he said, Tourism seems to be down and if it’s believed that this is the worst year, there has to be other factors than tourism that is causing traffic congestion.
Conor Kenny said that he’s 26 and has looked for places to move into. “It doesn’t look realistic to me anywhere across the country.” He currently lives for free in employee housing. He also said the moratorium isn’t going to solve the housing issue.
For Britny Look employee housing is how she stays here. “I am now a year-round resident of Bar Harbor” because of Coston and his lodging businesses, she said.
She was raised in Bar Harbor. Her mother was a housekeeper. Her grandmother was a housekeeper. She’s capable of growing within the business and staying in the town the women in her family worked in because of transient accommodations, she said. “This is kind of a witch hunt for developers.”
Traffic, Anna Durand said, seems related to expansion of the lab and the 9-to-5 traffic due to lack of affordable housing. “You can hate infill. You can hate sprawl.” But hating both is difficult. She said that the zoning is important to think about when thinking about housing.
HOUSING COSTS AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING
During the public discussion, Ed Hamor, disclosed that he believes that the main way to deal with affordable housing isn’t a moratorium that could potentially put construction workers out of work, but through nonprofits like the Island Housing Trust.
Hamor said, “The lack of affordable housing on the island is tough to begin with. I’m a builder. I know what it costs to build a house. I know what it costs to buy a piece of land. So, that is a big problem.”
The average piece of land on MDI is $150,000. It costs between $275 and $300 per square foot to build a house.
“Putting a moratorium on these hotels and motels isn’t going to solve the problem of affordable housing,” he said.
Hamor said he is personally trying to build houses for under $400,000.
“And I can’t do it,” he said.
This is even though he’s selling the lots for $75,000.
He employs 18 people and if they can’t pull permits, it will devastate his business. The moratorium? “It’s not the solution for the housing crisis that we have on this island,” he said.
DECISION TO CONTINUE DISCUSSION
In the end, the Council agreed to continue the discussion and try to find more information. Brechlin called it a moratorium in search of a purpose. Shank said he’s always happy for more information. Caines said she’d like more guidance from the planning department about what they can do in the short-term.
Knight said that he thinks adding a moratorium just adds more pressure on the Planning Department that’s already working on multiple areas of zoning, affordable housing, and land use, intending to bring changes to the voters in June and November 2024.
Howdy Carrie! This is Kyle Shank. I just wanted to slightly correct myself last night: my family and I have moved in *and out* of Bar Harbor over 13 times in the past decade. While we've had 7 different residences in Bar Harbor since 2012, we've also moved out of Bar Harbor several times. Just realizing I misspoke a bit during the flow of the conversation last night and wanted to be clear. Thank you as always for the fantastic reporting.