A group of Ellsworth residents who live near a proposed 28-site RV campground on Bayside Road are asking the city to pause all new campground developments in rural zones.
The neighbor coalition says the proposed Anchor In Campground will bring a litany of issues to their quiet pocket of Bayside Road, including new noise, traffic, and environmental and safety concerns.
The pushback underscores the occasional tension that’s come with the city’s expanding tourist lodging options, which have grown significantly in recent years as many homes, old and new, have become weekly vacation rentals that cater to Acadia National Park visitors.
But they plan to bring a broader proposal to the City Council in mid-August: As Ellsworth’s current city ordinances are written, a campground and other commercial sites could be approved in any number of rurally zoned, residential neighborhoods around the city.
“The town is sort of saying through their current rules that anyone with a couple acres can build a campground anywhere they want to in a rural zone, and it doesn’t matter what’s around them,” said Kelly Brackett, a resident of Alton Avenue, which is adjacent to the proposed campground, who has helped organize local opposition. “Obviously it’s more timely for us at this moment, but we want to make sure that this is not happening to other rural neighbors as well.”
The group hopes the city will address two specific areas of concern: that Ellsworth’s city ordinance has a single rural zone — rather than different types for varying land uses, such as rural residential and rural commercial — and that all campgrounds are categorized the same, Brackett said.
“There are primitive, like tent-site, campgrounds, and then there are RV campgrounds,” Brackett said. “The rules around those two different types of campgrounds should be very different from each other.”
The proposed RV campground, which is slated to open as soon as next summer, would serve seasonal and short-term visitors on a 52-acre, mostly wooded property at 566 Bayside Road, on the east side of the road about a mile and a half past Beechland Road toward Trenton.
The 28-space RV campground was proposed by Superior Realty Inc., a Maine business with an Ellsworth address.
Richard Newman, the CEO of Superior Docks on Christian Ridge Road and the developer for the campground proposal, said “the land is zoned for the proposed use and the neighbors have the right to have their voices heard.”
If the City Council declines this month to pause rural campground developments, the development proposal will go before the planning board for final review in September, according to City Planner Brittany Merrill. The neighbors group will have legal counsel for the August council meeting, Brackett said.
Outside of land use concerns and noise complaints, the coalition of residents say the development also poses safety risks.
“We have concerns about emergency services — there’s already been 2 RV fires in Ellsworth and Trenton this summer,” Brackett said. “If we have a campground at the bottom of our neighborhood, where our only exit is, if there’s a fire down there that shuts it down and we can’t get out.”
An Ellsworth man died in mid-July of injuries he sustained from a propane explosion on a converted school bus. On Aug. 4, an RV at Narrows Too Campground in Trenton caught on fire, but no injuries were reported, according to the Bar Harbor Story.
Casey Stofflet, who said she and her Coast Guard family moved to Ellsworth from Sanford in 2024, is concerned the new development could disrupt the privacy and safety of Alton Avenue.
“We decided that this is an area that we wanted to raise my son because of the community that my neighborhood has, the safety that we feel there,” Stofflet said. “From our perspective, having RVs that miss the turn or people who just want to go for a walk in the campground and come up our road because it’s easy to access, that has safety considerations and lack of privacy implications for our family.”