How Many Types of Lodging Uses Are There in Bar Harbor?

Maybe 15 Types Too Many. Town Starts To Try To Simplify

Jul 06, 2023

BAR HARBOR—Bar Harbor voters may get to weigh in on a lodging amendment, but not before Code Enforcement Officer Angela Chamberlain makes sure that there are public workshops and discussions with the people who could be potentially impacted by changing the town’s definitions of lodging.

The potential changes to lodging definitions, according to Chamberlain, is meant to help with at least four identified problems in the town’s land use ordinance sections about lodging.

“We currently have 19 different types of lodging uses and many of them are closely defined. There are inconsistent standards for many of those uses, including level of permitting, parking standards, and standards for each particular use,” Chamberlain told the Bar Harbor Planning Board members during her presentation July 5.

To address these problems, her department hopes to “reduce the number of lodging uses from 19 to four, develop clear and workable definitions of those uses and related terms, require that all lodging uses obtain site plan approval to ensure the uses are adequately reviewed with a public participation process, develop reasonable parking standards, and ensure that all lodging uses are subject to fair and consistent standards.”

Originally, her proposal used the terms “motel” and “hotel,” but that has been tweaked to “lodging 1” and “lodging 2,” to help reduce confusion, particularly over the definition of “motel.”

“I think some of the terms that we commonly use may not always fit what a use appears to be to some people. Motel for example may not be the term someone would typically use for cottages. I wanted to use terms that people don’t associate with a building type,” Chamberlain said.

The town’s land use ordinance regulates where certain uses of property is allowed and where it isn’t allowed. Chamberlain’s presentation included a chart where lodging 1 would be allowed and not allowed.

She created a table of current existing conditions of all the existing lodging uses that she’s found, including the number of guest rooms and the district the buildings are located in. She also showed the proposed parking standards. Everything with an F in it is downtown residential. Everything with a red arrow is where she didn’t add lodging for this proposal. Blue arrows are where the use would be allowed.

Visual of the existing and proposed uses comparison. Click to enlarge.

“The intent of this is to avoid creating nonconformities whenever possible,” Chamberlain said.

The downtown residential district needed the most consideration. She added Lodging I as an allowed use to downtown residential. This district also currently allows: hospitals, parking garages, medical clinics, museums, and other commercial uses.

“With that said, I recognized that DTR is a large and wide-spread district so I limited the lodging one use to only those two sections of the Downtown Residential district where those uses already exist. It looks like there is one lot in the DTR district which has an existing lodging use on it that would be outside of the two areas I included. That’s Sand Bar Cottage on West Street,” Chamberlain’s presentation notes read.

“Once I got everything on paper and could visually see it, I decided that it was not appropriate to allow lodging two in those districts where restaurants were not an allowed use. If a restaurant is not permitted in an area, it made sense that the lodging use should be limited to those with facilities for their guests only. I eliminated lodging two from Mount Desert Street corridor downtown residential, Salisbury Cove dorridor, Salisbury Cove residential, and Town Hill residential districts. I kept Lodging II in the districts where TA-8 is currently allowed regardless of whether restaurants were an allowed use,” she said and wrote.

“As far as the shoreland districts, I didn’t add any new lodging uses regardless of whether any currently exist. The shoreland zones and their uses are guided by the State DEP guidelines and if were to add uses to some of those districts, it may not be found consistent with Chapter 1000 and this amendment could be deemed inconsistent by the DEP commissioner,” she said.

PLANNING BOARD REACTION

After Chamberlain concluded her presentation, Planning Board Chair Millard Dority said, “I think this is terrific. It is badly needed.”

He did, however, have a couple of questions. He asked about putting the number of guest rooms into the definition saying that he’d heard arguments both for and against doing so. Chamberlain explained that she thought the bed and breakfast use needed a hard limit or else bed and breakfasts can have 40 rooms, a situation which created outcry when one such project was approved on Cottage Street near the town’s Municipal Building. The current proposal has bed and breakfasts limited to 12 rooms or less.

The worry for creating a limit on the number of rooms is that a lot of large houses might have 12 bedrooms or more. If a single-family dwelling is converted to a multifamily dwelling or bed and breakfast can it be converted back, Secretary Elissa Chesler asked. A few members worried about large, historic homes having a viable way for owners to use and maintain them. The balance becomes having the flexibility for homeowners to do that conversion away from a single family home, but also to make sure that one type of conversion or use doesn’t proliferate in an area. The current definitions have dates of construction attached to them, which is meant to help with that balance. Chamberlain’s proposal does not. She said that she will dive into that topic more.

Vice Chair Ruth Eveland said that one of the points of land use ordinance and defining lodging is to show what type of lodging is allowed where. There are too many districts and too many definitions, she said.

If step one is changing the lodging definitions, what happens if the districts are redefined because of the work that the Comprehensive Planning Committee does, she wondered. She wants to make sure whatever is done now doesn’t conflict with district changes down the road, but said she was really happy with the way the definitions are going.

Chamberlain said that she’s trying to mirror what is already allowed and capture the uses that exist and not make them nonconforming.

Board member Joseph Cough said he liked the proposal in its simplicity and the idea of going forward with it, but he too wondered about the Comprehensive Plan’s potential changes and these changes. “They may collide and then where are we?” he asked.

Dority said he’d hate to put off simplifying the definitions until the town is redistricted though he understands what other members are saying. Making progress is important he said.

“Every time I put my eyes on this, it’s something else,” Chamberlain said.

Another visual representation of existing conditions. These are all the existing lodging uses with the number of guest rooms, and the district in which the use is located. Chamberlain added columns to show what new uses would be allowed for each of the specific lodging establishments. (Black means it’s not allowed.) The blue represents the existing establishments in the Downtown Residential which would allow the Lodging I use. The green is the only existing establishment in Downtown Residential which would not allow Lodging I. Click to enlarge on this and all images.

The changes are far from a done deal. Chamberlain stressed that her presentation and documents are not final, but working drafts. She hopes to bring everything back to the Planning Board in August after checking all her documents again. Then, she’d like to communicate with all the lodging property owners and ask them to come to a workshop or the board’s September meeting for feedback.

“I would also like to note for the public that this is not a final draft, this is a working document and there is lots of time for public input and participation and I welcome it,” she said. “I want to really reach out to people and have them involved in this process.”

All images are from Chamberlain’s presentation. We will have at least one more article about this marathon 3.5-hour meeting.