Where and How Will Bar Harbor Grow?

Comprehensive Plan Committee and Planning Board Meet in First of Three Workshops

Sep 15, 2023

BAR HARBOR—Where will Bar Harbor’s growth be? It’s a question that the Comprehensive Plan needs to address. What uses does the town want to promote or not?

As Town Planner Michele Gagnon and consulting firm Resilience Planning and Design bring the Comprehensive Plan Committee and town through the process, those questions as well as “where is Bar Harbor headed” and “what does it take to get there” are the questions that the plan focuses on.

According to consultant Steve Whitman, Bar Harbor’s plan will be thematic this time. That means, he said, that it “allows us to better emphasize the biggest needs, and ensure strong links and understanding across topics.” The belief is that this will also make the development and prioritization of the implementation aspects of the plan more effective.

This work leans on the Existing Conditions Analysis Report that the town created last year. The report shows the state of many aspects of the community: housing assets and needs, population, economy, marine resources, how much land we actually have that isn’t preserved by conservation or the National Park System.

The state mandates that municipalities update their comprehensive plans and the plans are meant to guide the town and help officials implement plans for Bar Harbor’s future, including development, protection of natural resources, and other pieces that the town deems important.

On Wednesday night, the Comprehensive Planning Committee and the Planning Board met in the first of three collaborative workshops, but this first gathering was a bit more of a discussion of what the committee has learned so far, with Resilience doing much of the presentation.

The other joint work meetings for collaborative discussion as they get into the nitty-gritty of the plan development will occur on September 27 and October 11 at the Municipal Building on Cottage Street. These are also open to the public and will most likely begin at 6 p.m.

VISION STATEMENT AND PILLARS

On Wednesday, Whitman said the vision statement is usually featured as a vision statement and then the pillars are presented. A plan can also be organized around the pillars. The themes inform actions, he said. Those actions bring the vision and land use strategy to life. The themes become part of the checks and balances for the plan.

Consultant Liz Kelley said that the pillars also give value to how different people are reading and consuming the plan. The pillar and vision statement are helpful to people who do not read the entire plan, which will likely be quite long.

The pillars, Gagnon said, are a way to integrate policies rather than have different silos. “They are going to structure your plan in a different way.”

That way? She said it’s thematic or more holistic rather than a compartmentalized document.

Planning Board Vice Chair Ruth Eveland said one of the problems with the last plan was that it was unclear because of competing goals in those different sections (or chapters) of the plan.

“That was one of the things that was so frustrating,” she said. In the 2007 plan, goals would be in different sections, but worded slightly differently, and then that would be up to interpretation. It is in the differing interpretations that the process could get bogged down or stall.

The plan’s vision, Whitman said, is intended to be aspirational. It’s meant to be what the community believes is important and worth working toward. The themes help the committee think through the cohesion of the plan.

LAND USE MAPS AND LAND USE

“This is probably several generations worth of work,” Whitman said about the land use strategy and zones. The land use plan allows the committee to step back and look at a pattern that might emerge when working toward the plan’s vision.

It looks at things like how the goals work with the current land use zones and how, when encouraging and discouraging different aspects of growth, those zones might be tweaked or changed.

“Maybe it affords us the possibility to maybe being able to combine them to reduce that,” Planning Board Chair Dority said of the town’s 40 different zones.

Design Review Board member Erin Cough asked about the lesser focus on business development throughout the plan. “Is there something that’s actually going to be an economic driver over balancing the business portion of this?”

Whitman said the larger poster talks about both. Whitman said the second pillar talks about economic strengths, but that the rest of the plan needs to support and delve more deeply into it.

“There are conversations that still need to happen,” Whitman said.

Residential and environmental are mentioned multiple times in those pillars, Cough said, but not business. One of the issues with the 2007 Comprehensive Plan was that it didn’t deal with housing. She hoped there was more balance in this next iteration.

Kevin DesVeux wondered about people’s feedback or feelings that they don’t have enough input on what they could currently do with their land. Where can things be built in a town that has a lot of land owned by non-profits, conservations, the federal government, or is unbuildable?

“We’re going to do what we can. There’s not imaginary land to use,” Town Councilor Kyle Shank said.

LD2003, the new state law, pre-empts all municipalities from being more restrictive about density. That will make the town allow more housing density than it allowed before, Gagnon said. The town currently has until June 2024 to figure out how to implement those mandated changes into its own land use ordinance.

If the comp plan identifies a growth area, that then triggers more opportunities for density via LD2003, Shank said.

“We’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” Whitman said, and he emphasized that the group needed the town and board’s assistance in getting things right.

IMPLEMENTATION

The council is responsible for following the resident’s adoption of the goals, committee member John Kelly said.

Planning Board member Joe Cough said the Planning Board’s charter tasks the members to follow the comprehensive plan’s guidance. When there is interpretation of the comprehensive plan, the Town Council could potentially ignore or reinterpret the Planning Board’s recommendations.

Val Peacock said the map looks like it reflects where Bar Harbor density is right now, which makes it not feel revolutionary. She wondered what a downtown density might look like visually. What those patterns look like in reality would be a helpful visual, she said. Whitman said that this might be better to do in the implementation part of the process.

Maximum build-outs tend to scare people, Dority said.

“With 40 zoning districts, we aren’t going to do that,” Gagnon said. “We aren’t voting on a zoning ordinance right now. We’re just voting on where we want targeted growth.”

DRAFT THEMES

As they’ve worked through the plan, Whitman said that his group and the town staff came up with six themes for the plan.

“In many communities, I wouldn’t think that putting regulatory revisions” as a whole theme would be necessary, Whitman said. But he thinks it is for Bar Harbor.

Shank thought that the themes captured the discussion well.

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FOCUS GROUPS

The town staff has met or will meet with the different town boards and committees looking at the 2007 plan and seeing if the town has met those goals in that plan, is working toward them, or if those goals no longer apply. These focus groups will continue to be organized and meet.

TIMELINE

There will be no time to bring draft actions in October, Whitman said, but it will be in November.

“The State of Maine, their review process has been lengthy,” Whitman said. They are in discussions with the state, who has had just one person to review each community’s comprehensive plan.

Shank said that any hang-up postpones the approval of the Comprehensive Plan, which happens at the town meeting.