Bar Harbor’s voter-approved restrictions on short-term rentals will remain in place after Maine’s highest court ruled in favor of them on Tuesday.
A local real estate agent had sued the town over the rules, which were first passed in 2021 and banned some weekly rental licenses from being transferred to new owners after a property is sold. But on Tuesday, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that those rules were fairly passed by voters at the time.
Bar Harbor residents originally voted 1,260-840 for the restrictions, which are meant to preserve affordable year-round housing in Bar Harbor by reducing the number of non-owner occupied rentals.
Real estate agent Erica Brooks, who has served on the town’s planning board, has opposed the rules, claiming that they infringe on the rights of property owners and would unfairly reduce the resale value of properties.
In the lawsuit, Brooks and another plaintiff, Victoria Smith, have argued that the rules should not have been passed on procedural grounds, because the planning board had originally split its vote, 2-2, on whether to recommend them. According to their lawsuit, that should have required a larger margin of votes for the rules to be adopted.
At the time of the proposal, only a simple majority of votes was required to adopt measures recommended by the planning board, but a larger margin — two-thirds of votes — was required if the board had opposed them, according to the town’s land use ordinance. (Voters later repealed that two-thirds requirement.)
The town has defended its process, arguing that the planning board’s tie vote still counted as a recommendation, and a lower court affirmed the local restrictions last spring.
Brooks and Smith then appealed the ruling to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. But on Tuesday, the court again sided with the town.
It found that the restrictions did not need to clear the two-thirds threshold because that rule was only in the town’s land use ordinance — not in its charter — after the Maine Municipal Association put forth that argument in an amicus brief.
