Acadia National Park is looking for an architect to design new housing in the park to provide beds for between 50 to 60 seasonal employees.
Construction on the project — located next to Kebo Golf Course in Bar Harbor on Harden Farm Road —could start as early as next year, park officials said. The housing would be used for seasonal Acadia employees as well as seasonal workers for Friends of Acadia and for the Island Explorer bus system.
Amanda Pollock, spokesperson for the park, said the park is soliciting bids for the design phase of the project. The park has received funding to develop a design, but Pollack declined to specify how much funding Acadia has for the project to encourage architects to submit low bids,
“We don’t want to compromise the contracting portion of this,” Pollock said. “We’re definitely in the early stages.”
The lack of affordable housing on Mount Desert Island, where most of the national park is located, is increasingly an obstacle for a wide variety of employers on the island, who say that the lack of employee housing is the biggest challenge they face to filling seasonal jobs.
Acadia has 174 seasonal jobs but has only filled 114 of those positions for 2023 so far, said Brandon Bies, deputy superintendent for Acadia. The park made job offers to 30 people who declined, he said, and difficulty finding housing could be why some prospective employees turned down offers.
“This has been a challenging year for filling seasonal positions,” Bies told the park’s citizen advisory commission on Monday afternoon.
The planned new housing on Harden Farm Road is part of the park’s goal of directly providing housing to 125 to 150 seasonal employees. The park is looking to partner with the town of Bar Harbor and Island Housing Trust to develop workforce housing on a parcel of undeveloped land that the park owns on Crooked Road.
The park also rents housing from local landlords to house some of its seasonal employees. Friends of Acadia, which in March bought the Kingsleigh Inn in Southwest Harbor, plans to use the former inn as seasonal housing for people who work in the park.
Bies said that building new housing on Harden Farm Road, where the park already has seasonal housing for eight employees, makes sense because of the location. It is just off Kebo Street, which is convenient both to the park and to downtown Bar Harbor, and can be connected to the town’s water and sewer systems. And though it is centrally located, the nearest properties are a cemetery and the golf course, which will help to minimize the impact of the seasonal influx of workers on nearby residents, he said.
“It makes total sense to build here,” Bies said. We are excited that this is happening. This has been the plan for a long time. There just hasn’t been the funding to make it happen.”
The existing apartments at Harden Farm Road, which were built in 1962, will be kept and continued to be used as housing, Pollock said. She said the park will likely be built to the immediate south of the existing housing. Details about the style of housing haven’t been determined yet.
