Proof of residency for vacation permits looms as 1st big test of new BH council
Previous council left plenty undone as town faces multiple challenges
BAR HARBOR, June 15, 2025 - The new Town Council will be tested as soon as Tuesday night when it will hear from the public on the proposed amendments to Chapter 174 of the town code governing vacation rentals.
The proposal gives the code enforcement officer new powers to crack down on scofflaws who have resorted to what council member Earl Brechlin called “skulduggery” to end run the rules permitting owner-occupied rentals.
Critics, including the town’s own former code enforcement officer, have said legitimate landlords will be ensnared in the wide web being cast to try and catch a small number of violators.
The council’s task after the public hearing will be to decide whether the proposal to arm the code officer with more authority than an ICE agent is the proper remedy to police violators of “VR-1” applications.
It will be the first clue as to what kind of a legislative body residents may expect of this group. The previous council spent all of last year obsessing over cruise ship visitation leaving the town with multiple unfinished business - a moratorium on hotel development, defining sustainable tourism, a property revaluation mess, a goliathian budget, a looming solid waste crisis and the perennial housing crisis.
Three newly elected council members will be in attendance.
They are:
Randy Sprague, who spent four unmemorable months on the council as a fill-in for State Rep. Gary Friedmann.
He received the fewest votes of the four who were elected. (Incumbent Brechlin was the top vote-getter with 993 votes.) Sprague said at the candidates forum May 19, “I really think that we need to be careful with our growth because the businesses really are impactful on the residents.”
Former Warrant committee member Steven Boucher.
Expect the real estate broker to replace Matt Hochman and Kyle Shank as the mouthpiece for the tourism bloc. He can start by telling us who helped finance his campaign as his signs were posted at virtually every APPLL business, and he flooded inboxes on the last day before Election Day with email marketing.
David Kief, who crushed Nina St. Germain by 286 votes (848-562).
The 46-room Pathmaker Hotel on Cottage Street, co-owned by St. Germain and her husband and built under the guise of a bed and breakfast, has come to symbolize how susceptible the town is to political insiders. The hotel is sited ironically next to the Town Office Building and will serve as a constant reminder of the town’s lack of guardrails. Kief is the citizens’ best hope to reverse the one-way street to OZ paved by the Chamber of Commerce and to begin to restore the voice of year-round residents.
Brechlin was the only councilor who was previously elected. He won great support from the average voter. He kept poking the St. Germains - pressuring the authorities to crack down on illegal parking next to the Pathmaker Hotel and citing them (not by name) as vacation rental violators. Brechlin’s influence on the council is at its peak.
But there is no obvious watchdog in this group to provide some true oversight of he town manager James Smith who clearly is out of sync with local sensibilities. (Is he still commuting from Brewer?)
The proposed amendments to Chapter 174 was another example of more of his sloppy work along with the town planner and the town’s outside counsel.
What started with good intentions to police vacation rental scofflaws ended up like one of Donald Trump’s executive orders, a blunt instrument overstating its welcome. Instead of surgically attacking the violators, the new Chapter 174 casts a net over the entire cohort of VR-1 renters, making everyone a suspect.
How could they have allowed such sweeping authority for the code enforcement officer? Does the town really want him to handle sensitive tax returns? Other sections included this language:
“In the event a property owner is unable to produce three of the required documents listed … the Code Enforcement Officer, or their designee, shall have the discretion to determine whether the property qualifies as the owner’s primary residence.” (One homeowner said this is a definition of cronyism.)
“The applicant for a STR (short-term rental) renewal registration must demonstrate that the property is registered with the Maine Revenue Services for the collection and remittance of Maine sales tax on taxable rentals.”
“The CEO may conduct random audits, defined as unannounced site inspections conducted between rental periods when the unit is not occupied by renters, to verify ongoing compliance with all applicable standard and regulations.” (The code officer will have more authority to enter a home than ICE agents.)
How embarrassing was it for the town manager and planning director to have Angela Chamberlain, the town’s code officer for more than two decades, post a letter the weekend before Election Day publicly attacking the amendments?
“Where in the Purpose of the ordinance does it say anything about it being the Town’s business to ensure a property owner pays tax to the Maine Revenue Services?” she wrote.
“As far as I am aware, no other use in Bar Harbor is required to prove that they pay taxes to the Maine Revenue Services.”
Chamberlain is no wallflower. She went after the St. Germains when they continued to operate a vacation rental without a permit. They admitted to the violation and paid a fine.
Bar Harbor residents voted in 2021 to grant no more permits for short-term rentals such as those on Airbnb.com until they fall to 9 percent of the housing stock for fear that year-round residents were being evicted by owners who saw bigger profit margins renting out rooms for one night as equal to what they could get in one week.
The rentals fell into two categories - VR-2 for non-owner-occupied units which had a longer rental period and owner-occupied units, VR-1s, with less restrictive requirements.
Starting in the second half of 2024, Brechlin and others began to hear of applicants who lied about their status.
In 2024, there were 143 VR-1 permit renewals and a record-high 47 new applications.
Some of those applications were from VR-2 permit holders who had lost their permits either because they forgot to renew or could not sustain a business which the town required a minimum stay of four nights.
Instead of delivering a workable document with easy passage, the town manager, planner and attorney instead delivered another political headache for the council six months after their notorious Chapter 50 debacle.
The council may approve the Chapter 174 amendment as written. But if it revises the language, then the revision will need to go back to another public hearing, according to Town Clerk Liz Graves.
That will only assure more billable hours for Rudman Winchell, the town’s law firm.
The Town Hall Streams video of the council meeting May 20 is worth watching starting at Hour 1:28 when planner Michele Gagnon opened discussion of the amendments by saying it was just “buttoning up” some “housekeeping” matters.
Code officer Michael Gurtler testified he already knew “darn well” who the violators are.
“I've talked to people and they're like ‘oh yeah I'm gonna call this my primary residence’ and I know darn well that it's not right,” Gurtler said.
If Gurtler knew who the violators were, why didn’t he go after them? Why did he need a wholesale change of code, a public hearing and two town councils to run up the legal cost of drafting more documents?
No council member was curious how Gurtler had a presumption of guilt before any evidence was even presented. How many councilors besides Chair Val Peacock actually read the one big, beautiful Chapter 174?
Tuesday night the council will either begin to act like a representative body or continue to behave, as one council candidate said, like one big “giggle fest.”
FOOTNOTE: Voters defanged the Chamber bloc on the Warrant Committee, which may allow it to restore its rightful place as the town’s watchdog against the council’s profligacy. Only Kevin DesVeaux and Shaun Farrar remain as reliable votes for the Chamber on the committee. The vacancy created by the departure of Boucher will be filled temporarily by the committee until the town holds another election.
Boucher’s anomalous council victory had insiders buzzing because of the 614 blank votes which were cast in the race for two three-year seats. That was far more blanks returned than the other two races. Some theorized voters were confused and did not know they were entitled to two votes.
Boucher is the lone survivor of business-friendly councils which pushed the Chamber detritus against the current for more than a decade.
But in November 2022, residents pushed back with an overwhelming vote to cap cruise ship passengers coming on shore.
In 2023, Cara Ryan drew a heroic line in the sand at the annual town meeting against giving the chamber taxpayer’s money after it joined APPLL, which was suing taxpayers. (Town Manager James Smith restored that money. Did he have the authority?)
The changing tide continued last November, when the cruise-ship friendly Chapter 50 went down by a slim margin.
Last Tuesday, citizens came close to completing the sweep, by ousting virtually every remaining Chamber factotum running for office except for Boucher.
Kief will be in the hot seat as the newest member of the council with only a one-year term. He will be the first to be called on in every vote. Brechlin was in that seat for two years but used it well to set the tone for the rest of the council.
Kief only needs to remember why 848 of his friends and neighbors cast their vote for him every time he has a decision to make.