The Broad Vision for Bar Harbor's Future
Comprehensive Plan Presented
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Side Street Cafe’s New Year’s Eve Party.
BAR HARBOR—The Bar Harbor Comprehensive Plan is over 100 pages long and years in the making. If you include the data and the other reports that helped to create it? The page count tops over 700 pages.
It’s been state approved, found consistent with the state’s growth-management law, tested and formed in public interaction and engagement and surveys and listening sessions. The state required no changes.
“There was nothing to be changed and that is a very rare occurrence,” Town Planner Michele Gagnon said.
Now, town staff hopes that the town’s proposed comprehensive plan will be approved by voters in June 2025. Comprehensive plans are meant to guide an area’s plan for the future. This plan is intended to look toward 2035.
“I really hope it passes. I hope people are supportive of it,” Gagnon said. “It’s still a plan for the people that I hope they see themselves in it.”
To help people understand the plan, what a comprehensive plan is meant to do, and how it interacts with other town documents and visions and action steps, the Bar Harbor Planning Department presented the draft comprehensive plan to a group of approximately 20 people in person and 10 attending via Zoom on Wednesday night.
Bar Harbor Housing and Community Planner Cali Martinez explained that a comprehensive plan usually lasts 10-20 years, setting the stage for a town’s short-term and long-term actions and goals. Much of the night’s discussion centered around growth areas for more homes such as downtown Bar Harbor and Hulls Cove. Both of those areas are served by the town’s infrastructure (water and sewer). More gentle density is meant to occur in Hadley Point, Salisbury Cove, and Town Hill.
“Downtown creates the greatest opportunities,” Planner Hailey Bondy read from the plan. “It’s really seen as the center of the community.”
”Gentle density for us is defined as focusing on developing for what the land is reasonably able to accommodate,” Bondy said. That includes environmental factors and the character of the area.
During the discussion, both Eddie Damm and Sharon Knopp spoke about growth areas and changes since the 2007 plan. Knopp asked how the plan impacts where and how lodgings can be built.
“This plan goes into the details of areas where we want small scale development or we want gentle density,” Martinez said. It provides guidance of how to change the land use ordinance to align with the visions in the plan. The future land use plan should align with those strategies outlined in the plan.
Stewart Brecher asked if there were any ideas in the document. “It doesn’t seem any different than the old one that didn’t have any ideas in it. There’s no directions. It’s like a teachers’ lesson plan.”
“Maybe it’s not as visionary as you would like,” Gagnon said, “but the vision can also come from where we do deep-dive specific plans for areas.”
Others talked about nitrates in groundwater and the potential elimination of nitrate modeling.
“The plan calls for other methods to make sure that we maintain a healthy environment and healthy drinking water,” Gagnon explained.
Gagnon said that they are looking at build-out analyses for developments. That would deal with a development’s potential ecological impact in an area. There was discussion about sustainable tourism and amenity traps, about key priorities particularly for housing and tourism management, but the plan also, the planners said, gives space for the town to prioritize specific actions. This is a bit unlike the 2007, which had been more minutely detailed.
The town’s prioritization and actions occur via processes such as town council goals, department priorities, seeing what is occurring in the town, and also, they hoped, via yearly reviews of what the town is doing next in relation to the comprehensive plan, including implementation oversight, and understanding the progression of the town in relationship to the plan.
Resilience Planning is the consulting firm for the project. Its contract was extended in December 2022 to allow the committee to gather more public input, data, and to work on the plan for a longer period. That extension also came with an additional $100,000 from the town’s budget.
Comprehensive Plan Committee Members included Elissa Chesler, Jaquie Colburn, Greg Cox, Kevin Desveaux, Cheri Galyean, John Kelly, Jim Mahoney, Calistra Martinez, Michael McKernan, Kristen Murphy, Misha Mytar, Val Peacock, Allison Sasner, Kyle Shank, and David Woodside.
The Bar Harbor 2035 Comprehensive Plan is now available for public review and comment. The plan describes the community's vision for the future and outlines steps to achieve it. Comments are welcome through December and will be considered as the plan is finalized. https://www.barharbormaine.gov//CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1511
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LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Bar Harbor 2035 Comprehensive Plan (September 2024) - not including appendices
Implementation Plan (September 2024)
State statute and rules about comprehensive plans
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