BAR HARBOR, Maine — The six candidates running for two open seats on the Bar Harbor Town Council have a range of views on housing, cruise ship limits and other issues affecting the tourism hotspot.
The candidates include two incumbents seeking reelection, Gary Friedmann and Joe Minutolo. They’re challenged by Michael Boland, Charles Sidman, Nina St.Germain and Nathan Young. Voting will occur June 11, 2024 at the Bar Harbor Municipal Building auditorium on Cottage Street, after the budget is approved at Town Meeting on June 4.
Full profiles of the candidates are available at Bar Harbor Story.
They expressed their views during a forum Wednesday night hosted by the Town Hill Village Improvement Society and moderated by the Mount Desert Islander and the Bar Harbor Story. Approximately 60 people attended.
The candidates gave opening and closing statements and answered questions about the town’s municipal budget, land use ordinance familiarity, cruise ships, housing, and conflicts of interest.
Budgets
Candidates were asked how versed they were in the town budget, what they’d tweak in parts of the budget the Town Council can impact, and how they would balance the needs of residents facing escalating property taxes with the expectations for a continuation of receiving services from the town.
Boland said that he was well versed in budgets.
“I live with them every single day,” he said because he has a couple of hundred employees at his restaurants and has to make payroll and pay expenses and take in income each week. “I’m very versed with financials.”
He said as a business person, he’s been much more focused on revenues. He’d look to departments for cuts, but with the understanding that by cutting departments, you can try.
“You want to increase your revenue as much as possible as you can,” Sidman said, but every business person, every homeowner, knows that you also have to look to expenses.
“But the town has not done that,” he said.
The taxpayer has finite salaries and resources, and the town needs to make potentially painful decisions.
“Budgets are tricky,” said Minutolo who spoke about his time on the warrant committee as well. “We honestly try to do a good job of providing good services for our community and trying to be fiscally responsible.”
The employees of the town have a good handle on that fiscal responsibility, he said, adding they are up to speed with budgets and understand the town needs.
The problem with the budget, he said, is how it’s funded. The state needs a lodging tax, he said. “The town of Bar Harbor has to put together a dog and pony show” for the state, he said, to show that the town has needs. Only a small number of people are prospering from tourism, he added.
Young said that he’d prepared and submitted 22 budgets as Bar Harbor’s police chief. The budget goals, then, he said, were set by council, and department heads would prepare budgets to meet those amounts. “I’ve sat through many colorful meetings with warrant committees through the year,” he said and while he doesn’t advocate to going back to the time of thread-bare police cruiser tires, “I just don’t understand the willingness to spend today.”
“You may know me as a liberal, but I’ve been a budget hawk since I got elected to the council,” Friedmann said.
For the first years he was on Council, he said, the tax bill didn’t go up a lot. During that time, there was a lot of deferred maintenance. The total budget is mostly impacted by the voter-approved bonds (like for the new Conners Emerson School and the town’s infrastructure project), school budget, high school budget, and county budget.
St.Germain said she’s worked on both for-profit and nonprofit budgets and is more versed on ways of increasing budgets rather than cutting. “I think a lot of spending as opposed to payroll,” is a place to look and that the town’s been fortunate and lucky to not have to had major cuts to services and personnel in the past ten years.
She suggested increasing parking prices to visitors while also giving stipends to locals, and also advocated for the local options tax.
Cruise ships
In a five-part question, candidates were asked what they thought of the current cruise ship trajectory, what they’d have done differently in the process, how they’d mitigate the financial loss to the town’s budget with less cruise ship disembarkations occurring now and in the future, what is the right number of cruise ships visits in a year, and if the public should be engaged more in the process currently.
“There was a vote of the decision in November 2022. I’m not one to question the will of the voters,” Young said.
“The ordinance was passed, and that’s the ordinance that stands,” he said, unless the citizens make a new petition to change it.
Boland said that the public should always be as involved as possible. He said people are concerned about tourism and the volume of tourism. Cruise ships, he said, are an easy target, literally and figuratively. The question is whether it’s the real problem or if that’s effective advertising that brings people to the island, short-term rentals, or other factors. “I don’t think it’s only cruise ships.”
He doesn’t think an entire elimination of cruise ships should happen, and there should be less than 200 and more than zero visits each year. He doesn’t have a solution to mitigate the town’s losses.
“The citizens voted and they did so intelligently,” Sidman said. He would create the ordinance “pretty much” the same way. He is distressed that it hasn’t been implemented yet, and he said he disagrees with the notion that its implementation will decrease cruise ships completely. He said the ordinance doesn’t prevent small cruise ships from visiting.
He also reminded attendees, “the big reason for the ordinance is that our streets got absolutely swamped and congested.”
Minutolo mentioned his time on the ferry terminal advisory committee.
“This has been the most controversial and hottest issue that we’ve had in my time on the council,” Minutolo said.
The people have spoken for a dramatic reduction, he said. The council is trying to implement the voters’ will but do so by listening to stakeholders and legal counsel. “The council hears loud and clear that the town wanted a reduction. There’s no doubt about that. Going about it is the issue and that’s what we’re trying to figure out right now.”
St.Germain said the town is heading to a court decision because the town was slow to create a community decision together.
“The days of the four cruise ships are gone, and I think we’re all very clear on that. I think there’s a way that we can make a decision together,” she said.
The status quo, she said, of reducing revenue and increasing costs can’t continue, and advocated for a solution that would supplement taxes “without gutting local businesses,” and increasing citizen access to the waterfront.
Friedmann said, “When I first got on the council, the town thought that cruise ships were the answers to everything.”
Then, he said, they realized that they had too much of a good thing. He considers the ships a bane environmentally and in terms of their impact to the town.
The problem with the citizens initiative, he said, is that because it’s in the land use ordinance, there are problems with its implementation that makes the town vulnerable to lawsuits. He thinks that the town can put another plan before voters that would allow up to 2,000 passengers a day and well under 100,000 a year total.
Housing
The candidates were asked about housing needs in Bar Harbor; if short-term rental regulations and caps have made an impact on housing opportunities; and their thoughts on short-term rentals.
St.Germain said that both she and her son have vacation rentals.
“It’s been a really important thing to my livelihood because I work from home,” she said.
When she stopped working at the family’s restaurant, they started renting their small house. She said that after talking to real estate agencies, she’s learned that there hasn’t been more housing since the caps. What the town needs to do is reduce minimum lot sizes and encourage multifamily housing. She advocated for projects like the YWCA at Hamilton station, which is in progress.
Friedmann said, “I think that non-hosted short-term rentals are the scourge of Bar Harbor.”
He said they increase the prices for all homes in the community. His neighborhood used to be filled with kids. “Now, in the winter, most of the homes are dark.”
Friedmann said that’s because they are either employee housing or short-term rentals. He believes the regulations have made a difference and that the number of rentals are decreasing. He is fine with people renting while also living on the property.
“I’m sorry, it’s not a scourge. There’s a lot of problems we have with housing,” Boland disagreed.
Boland said he’s had a weekly rental, had voted in favor of the ordinance, and wishes he still had the rental. He thinks the ordinance should have been tweaked to allow permits to transfer between family members.
He said he bought his weekly rental in town for $300,000, fixed it up, and eventually sold it without the permit for $900,000, which would be evidence against the rising housing sales prices being correlated with vacation rental use. The problem of housing, he said, is complex, and he advocated working with agencies like MDI365 and Island Housing Trust, and tweaking zoning, but doing so in a way that is sustainable. He cited another home on Roberts Avenue that went for $100,000 over its asking price without having the weekly rental permit transfer.
“We need to do a lot of things on affordable housing,” he said.
Sidman said that he doesn’t believe the rules are doing a lot at all.
“They came about through market forces,” he said, and there are families that need those rentals as part of their income stream. He understood the motivation for the rules, he said, but they aren’t having the desired effect.
“I think they stopped the hemorrhaging,” Minutolo said. “It seemed like houses were disappearing at an incredibly fast rate.”
The ordinance is not perfect, he said, nothing is, but it’s reasonable, especially distinguishing different types of rental ownership. “Property values are unbelievably high because of the interest in living in Bar Harbor,” he said. “Our zoning is still a disaster.”
There are 40 zones in the town, and to change that and incentivize housing and disincentivize things the town doesn’t want, while protecting and preserving residential areas is important, Minutolo said.
“I do not believe the vacation rental ordinance is going to have an impact on housing,” Young said. The area’s market value is established by the nature of where the town is, he said. Weekly rental ordinances first came into play with life safety inspections, he said, a long while ago. “I’m real hesitant to step on people’s individual property rights.”
Still, he said that when you don’t have consistency in a neighborhood, it’s hard to have a neighborhood. That’s been something that’s been going on for a long time on Mount Desert Island, he said.
“What we need to do is like we do with everything. You don’t wait 18 years or 10 years or 12 years to make adjustments to the ordinance.” The town needs to keep a running tally on what’s going on, he said, instead of letting things fester for years.
More of the candidates’ responses are available at Bar Harbor Story.
This story was originally published by The Bar Harbor Story. To receive regular coverage from the Bar Harbor Story, sign up for a free subscription here.
