New(ish) Moratorium, New Mission: Planning Board Takes on Lodging Rules
Comprehensive Plan Scheduled for March 10
BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Planning Board made apparent, February 5, that as one giant town planning project gets closer to its ending, another begins in earnest.
And when it comes to looking into the rules related to Bar Harbor’s zones and lodging, it’s going to be a lot of work.
“The council approved extending the moratorium for another 180 days. The chair spoke quite eloquently, I thought, about the areas we’re going to be involved in. Things like density issues downtown, things like building height, whether or not some forms of lodging should be allowed close to schools, those sorts of issues,” Planning Board Chair Millard Dority told board members.
He said he didn’t see the road forward with all those things the board needed to do happening with the board’s current schedule of just one meeting each month.
Before delving into discussion about the council’s directive that they work on matters related to the town’s new 180-day lodging moratorium, the board members unanimously moved the 2035 Bar Harbor Comprehensive Plan to public hearing in council chambers. That public hearing on the document that’s meant to guide Bar Harbor’s future planning decisions is set for March 10.
It’s been three years in the making, involved massive public engagement, and its last step will be to go before voters in June.
The moratorium’s timeline is a bit shorter. The town has 180 days to determine to tweak or not tweak the issues surrounding lodging.
“When I listened last night—and I had a nice talk with Val—there’s a lot to do,” Dority said, referencing Val Peacock, town council chair.
“I am heartily supportive of that,” Vice Chair Ruth Eveland said. “We have told the council that we want to help. We have a job to do. We can help with it. Please give us something to do. They’ve given something for us to do, we should do it.”
Work specific to the moratorium is on the first page of the town’s newly adopted work plan, Bar Harbor Housing and Community Planner Cali Martinez said.
Martinez is creating a task list for Staff Planner Cameron Sands to collect data on parcels going back five years, potentially back to 2015 and show land use areas. Residential, lodging, institutional uses to see change through time on a parcel level. They’ll also look at environmental areas and look to see if any lodging uses are in environmental buffers. They’ll also look at the allowed uses table created by former Code Enforcement Officer Angie Chamberlain and add to that.
There will potentially be a GIS analysis of looking at districts and seeing the percentage of actual uses in each district for lodging.
There is already a GIS map of vacation rentals.
Dority also wanted to fact check statements about whether the number of beds available as lodging is increasing or decreasing.
“We’ve got to bring this all together,” Dority said.
To do so, the board is going to schedule workshops—most likely monthly—solely devoted to its tasks.
“There’s a lot to do and it’s not going to get extended again,” Dority said.
Eveland believes that the work plan created by the planning department gave the council confidence to justify the pause in lodging construction and expansion throughout the town.
No members of the public attended the Bar Harbor Planning Board meeting that also scheduled a public meeting for the proposed Bar Harbor Comprehensive Plan, which cost just over $202,000 and took three years to complete. It also involved multiple levels of community engagement.
Planning staff presented the changes that had occurred since its members last presented the plan to the board last week. The largest change is a clarifying note on the maps, which states that the map encompasses mixed use and primarily residential areas. There is a new sentence on the future land use area focus area one. Most changes are the correction of small typos or slight tweaks.
“Our only job here today is to decide whether or not to move this to a public hearing,” Planning Board Chair Millard Dority said.
The board unanimously moved it forward. The meeting will be on March 10 at 6:30 p.m. Guy Dunphey had an excused absence from the February 5 meeting.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Comprehensive plan presentation slides: /DocumentCenter/View/7875/Bar-Harbor-2035-Presentation-slides-112124
Draft Bar Harbor 2035 Comprehensive Plan and Accompanying Documents: https://www.barharbormaine.gov/501/Comprehensive-Plan
Contact Information:
If you have comments or questions on the Bar Harbor 2035 Comprehensive Plan, call the Planning Office at 288-3329 or email planner@barharbormaine.gov.
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