Eight new bedrooms for Acadia National Park employees have been built and are ready for occupancy, but more housing is needed if the park is going to be able to fill positions for the 2025 tourist season. To that end, park officials announced Tuesday that another employee housing site in Bar Harbor will soon be expanded by at least 28 units.
The park made that announcement during a ribbon cutting ceremony with Friends of Acadia and other local officials for the new Dane Farm housing project in Seal Harbor, which abuts the park and will provide housing for eight of its seasonal employees next year. Friends of Acadia, an organization that supports and advocates for the park, purchased the 4-acre property last year from the Rockefeller family and is donating it and the new dorms.
The project is one way that the park and Friends of Acadia are working to address the severe shortage of affordable housing on and near Mount Desert Island. The lack of such housing has made it difficult for area employers such as Acadia to fill positions, which in turn has hindered the park’s ability to provide services to millions of tourists who visit each summer and fall.
“It is a critical issue, not just for Acadia but for all of America’s national parks,” Kevin Schneider, superintendent of Acadia, told people at the event.
He said in the past couple of years, the park has only been able to fill around 115 of its 175 positions, most of which are seasonal, because of the housing shortage. To address those issues, the park has set a goal of being able to directly provide housing to between 125 and 150 seasonal employees in the coming years.
“This still isn’t enough,” Schneider added. “There still is more to do.”
Also on the park’s housing to-do list is expanding the Harden Farm site in Bar Harbor, which abuts the Kebo Valley Golf Club. The site already has apartments built in the 1960s that can house eight employees, but Acadia is planning to expand it to so it eventually can accommodate 56 more employees, for a grand total of 64 at that site.
Park officials said Tuesday that they have hired King Construction Services of Machias and Ellsworth to build the first phase of the Harden Farm expansion, which will include construction of four more buildings that can house a total of 28 employees. The budgeted cost of those four new buildings at Harden Farm is “just under” $10 million, according to Amanda Pollock, spokesperson for Acadia.
Construction of the first phase at Harden Farm is expected to begin Nov. 1, park officials said. Acadia has tentative plans for a second phase of four additional buildings — for a total of eight buildings that can house 56 — but has not yet secured funding for it.
Park officials said they plan to use the same small dormitory design at Harden Farm that was used in Seal Harbor in order to help reduce construction costs and the time needed to permit and construct the additional buildings.
The park has other locations where it has secured housing or hopes to build some for its employees.
Last year, Friends of Acadia purchased the Kingsleigh Inn in Southwest Harbor so it can lease it to Acadia as employee housing. The former inn has room for 10 park employees.
The park also is in preliminary stages of planning to develop 50 acres it owns in the Bar Harbor village of Town Hill into employee housing. Schneider said the park is looking to partner with the entities including the town and Island Housing Trust to develop that site so that part could be used for Acadia employees and part could be used for other types of workers.
“That would be a perfect location for year-round workforce housing,” Schneider said. “That’s where I see that housing for teachers, firefighters, police officers, nurses, and potentially the Coast Guard, would be an important piece of it.”
