Ellsworth’s planning board has approved a project to build an 83-room hotel along the city’s busy High Street corridor.
The board gave its final approval for the proposed Home2 Suites on Wednesday evening, according to City Planner Matt Williams. The hotel from Witham Family Hotels is planned for an empty lot next to the Hampton Inn, which is owned by the same lodging group.
The hotel proposal comes at a time when tourism continues to rise in the Mount Desert Island area, but officials on MDI are questioning how many more lodging properties their towns can handle. Ellsworth, which is only half an hour away from Bar Harbor, has been getting more lodging and housing development as available lots on MDI are becoming hard to find and increasingly expensive to buy.
Ellsworth’s approval of one of those proposals — a 36-unit condominium complex on Beals Avenue — was overturned last week by the city’s appeals board, however. The planning board had given that developer a waiver on sightline requirements for vehicles leaving the property, but the appeals board ruled that the waiver should not have been granted, Williams said.
That developer now will either have to contest the appeals board decision in court, or figure out how to make changes to its proposal to meet the city’s sight line requirements, according to Williams.
The proximity of the Home2 Suites site to the Hampton Inn factored into its approval, the city planner said. City standards normally would require the Home2 Suites property to have 100 parking spaces, but the board granted it a waiver that will allow it to build 86 parking spaces and then to share 14 spaces currently at the Hampton Inn property with the Hampton Inn, he said.
In a couple of years, that arrangement will be reviewed by the city’s code enforcement officer to see if it is working, or if the Home2 Suites property should have 100 spaces to itself. If the city decides the extra spaces are needed, Home2 Suites would acquire the 14 shared spaces from Hampton Inn and Hampton Inn would then build 14 spaces for itself on the far side of that property from Home2 Suites, Williams said.
