Bar Harbor’s elected town council voted unanimously Tuesday night to extend its temporary ban on new lodging development for another six months.
The seven-member council first adopted a moratorium on permitting new construction of lodging businesses last fall, after many residents objected to the construction of the new Pathmaker Hotel on Cottage Street.
Residents who have voiced concern about hotel development say that the demand for services from the town may be accelerating faster than the town can expand those services — though department heads have said they are confident that the town’s water, police, fire and other departments are not overextended yet.
As part of pausing such development, town officials said last fall that staff would collect data to gauge the impact that the tourism industry is having on the town and whether to adopt new measures to regulate hotel growth.
Eben Salvatore, director of operations for Bar Harbor Resorts, spoke against the moratorium extension, saying it would delay the company’s efforts to redevelop the former Park Entrance Motel property in Hulls Cove, even though that project would reduce the number of lodging rooms at the property — not increase them. The buildings there are too old to make renovation worthwhile, he said, and the moratorium would prevent tearing them down.
Tom St. Germain, another hotel owner, also spoke against extending the moratorium, saying he was worried it would continue to linger and could prevent lodging development for another year or more.
Most of the handful of people who addressed the council said they support the extension.
Kevin Knopp said that town staff need more time to collect data to determine what sort of impact continued growth of hotels and other lodging was having on infrastructure, residents, and other aspects of the town.
“I think it could give us some of the answers we’ve been looking for for a while,” he said.
Sharon Knopp said she thinks there is a way to balance out the town’s tourism industry with local residents who want local home prices and services to remain affordable, but that the town needs to investigate how to strike that balance.
“We need to make sure the tourist part is not hollowing out our community,” she said.
Several members of the council cited the need for town staff to gather more data so the town can make informed decisions about whether more needs to be done to control the growth of the tourism industry.
Val Peacock, the council chair, said that while feelings people may have about the growth of the local tourism industry may be valid, the data being collected by the town may dispel some of the concerns residents have, and support arguments for allowing lodging construction to resume.
“We have to get to a place where we talk about ‘is it real or not?’ Peacock said of the industry’s perceived impacts.
