Letter From Our Readers

November 17

---

URGING A MORATORIUM

Bar Harbor Town Council to discuss moratorium on Tuesday, Nov. 19

We strongly urge the council to enact a moratorium on new lodging (transient accommodations) at its meeting Tuesday, November 19.

The dictionary defines an inflection point as a time of significant change in a situation, a turning point. We believe the town has reached a crisis/inflection point, where new lodgings are seriously impacting our traffic, safety, infrastructure, and quality of life. The steps the council takes now (or doesn’t take) will have significant consequences on the future of our town.

Citizens and council have been working on plans to regulate and limit cruise ships. The town has successfully managed vacation rentals. Now it seems imperative that the town tackle another issue that is contributing to over-tourism, congestion, and a diminishing quality of life for residents: the continued development of transient accommodations.

Just about everyone in town agrees that we need more affordable housing. Yet each new transient accommodation takes away from that, either by utilizing intown lots that should be prioritized for housing; by taking down existing houses to build lodging; or by purchasing and utilizing what should be year-round housing for seasonal workers.

The newly proposed hotel on Eden Street raises numerous concerns. The first is traffic.

The driveway is in an area that has two major intersections, Cottage and West Streets, where traffic is already often tied up in the summer and where numerous close calls happen each year involving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. The driveway is also close to the school crosswalk where lots of Bar Harbor children cross on their way to and from school.

In addition, we have not yet even seen the effects of the opening of the Pathmaker Hotel on Cottage, where 44 rooms will generate a huge increase in traffic on Eden Street and Cottage. If a traffic study is required for the new proposed hotel (and it should be!), then it must be done during our busy summer season and after the Pathmaker Hotel is open. This summer there were numerous times when we came back to town on Eden Street to Mount Desert Street, and had to wait through four cycles of the traffic light before we could actually get up to the intersection and make the turn. This situation will only be made worse by the addition of more hotel rooms.

We are also very concerned about the safety of the children in the schoolyard at the Conners Emerson school. Do we want hotel rooms with windows and possibly balconies looming over our schoolyard, where numerous strangers can privately watch our children at play, and also where our children may have views into rooms of things they are not meant to see? The safety of the town’s children is paramount and should trump all other considerations.

We are also concerned about the impacts on the town’s infrastructure. Recently we walked beside Eagle Lake (Bar Harbor’s water source) and were shocked at the low water levels in the lake and some feeder brooks, and in the outflow into Duck Brook. If we have a dry winter and spring, lake levels can be further compromised. How can we keep increasing the demand on our resources? More areas around the globe are experiencing climate impacts. How many dry seasons will it take before our water has to be rationed? And who will be prioritized then?

An interesting article in the New York Times on September 23, 2024 (“Tourism’s Next Battlefront: Water”) talked about water issues in tourist towns. Will it be the residents who are given priority to the water, or—as on one of the Greek islands—will it be the hotels while residents are forced to cut back? What does our future look like?

Like many residents, we were appalled to hear that a local dentist was offered a large sum of money to sell her building to a developer. Dr. Reznik provides an essential service that is increasingly difficult to find, and she serves hundreds of year-round residents. We are grateful that she is committed to this community and rejected the offer. But it certainly demonstrates that huge numbers of townspeople can be disenfranchised from an essential service by developers prioritizing their own greed and desire to maximize their profits over the good of the town. This should cause every citizen to sit up and take notice.

The core issue facing Bar Harbor, as Dr. Reznik so accurately expressed it, is this: What kind of town do we want to be? Do we want to be a thriving year-round community where people are happy to live and welcome tourists, or do we want to be an overrun tourist town that prioritizes tourists and making money over the needs of residents? Do we want to be a hollow shell of a community that closes its doors and lights when the season ends, and where the ever decreasing numbers of residents must travel off island to meet their needs? We believe this truly is a crisis point and that a moratorium on new lodging must be enacted to give the town time to address this ongoing but ever increasing problem. A moratorium would also give the town time to finalize the comprehensive plan, which has taken years and cost many thousands of dollars to complete.

This plan should be guiding and prioritizing certain kinds of development in our town. Instead, it feels as though we are always several steps behind and reacting to each new development proposal. Increasing density in the downtown was supposed to be for the purpose of housing, not for adding more hotels. Please enact a moratorium now!

Sharon Knopp and Enoch Albert, Bar Harbor

---

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR POLICY

We welcome letter submissions to The Bar Harbor Story; for details on our policy, please visit our about page and scroll down or just visit here.

The beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints expressed by the writers of letters to the editor and included here do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints or official policies of The Bar Harbor Story.

---