Recently, turning on a faucet has been stressful for Mike Staggs; he isn’t sure how much longer his home will have water. Staggs lives in Town Hill, part of Bar Harbor, on Mount Desert Island, in a subdivision where water already is in short supply. The past two summers, he has had to manage his water usage carefully or face a dry well. Neighbor Elisa Hurley said her home ran out of water for half-day stretches at a time.
“We’ve had to let the lawn and plants go,” she said. Nearby, Michael Rosenstein said he’s lost water too. “It was enough to induce a sense of panic,” he said.
Their troubles may be just beginning. Three major subdivisions bringing 60 to 70 new houses are in the works in Town Hill, all near or abutting their properties. The new housing units will use shared or individual wells.
Once those houses start drawing water, the local water supply won’t be able to keep up, said Staggs. “Someone else runs the washer and we won’t be able to take a shower,” he said.
Town Hill residents aren’t only concerned how many wells will come online, but also how development and new septic systems might impact wetlands and a nearby creek critical to their water supply.
Well water has become a contentious issue on the Mount Desert. Town and neighborhood water meetings can draw 40 to 50 people. Disputes have grown heated, pitting residents against developers. At one point, some Town Hill residents even tried to physically block a developer’s construction equipment with their bodies.
Some homeowners said they’ve pleaded in vain for the town and developers to scale back the planned subdivisions.
“They were begging [one developer to] put in fewer houses,” said Jane Disney, head of the Mount Desert Island Water Quality Coalition and a member of Bar Harbor’s conservation commission.
They’ve been told the current construction plans are legal under town ordinances and will proceed as planned.
Meanwhile, one developer who agreed to speak on record for this story felt he was following overly-restrictive rules to the letter, but still had to contend with angry neighbors.
“Once they get their house, they don’t want somebody else developing,” developer Tim Gott said. “We’ve all got to live somewhere.”
The battleground issue is how much development the island’s groundwater can support. That can be hard to gauge, said Disney, adding, “We don’t have real aquifers on MDI.”
Most public water for the island’s towns comes from large ponds and lakes within Acadia National Park’s borders, but the island’s well-users rely on groundwater captured in irregular granite crags. Disney said the amount available in those crags can differ widely from area to area.
Several studies have been done on the island’s water supply, including a College of the Atlantic study that showed the island had enough groundwater to allow the current pace of development until 2034. But critics say island-wide studies often don’t take into account localized groundwater supplies.
Bob Gerber, a civil engineer with Stratex, a Maine water engineering company, said whenever houses are clustered together, there’s a danger of exhausting the local water supply.
“They start overlapping,” Gerber said. “They start drawing each other’s well down.”
Ironically, high-density housing designed to maximize green space and minimize sprawl, like a proposed workforce housing project in Town Hill, can exasperate the problem.
“To do that kind of dense development, you have to have a public water supply,” Gerber said.
Gerber and fellow Stratex engineer Lissa Robinson co-authored a 2004 Bar Harbor water study that said there was evidence to justify the town protecting its water supply from development. The study also gave concrete suggestions for land use ordinance changes to help with that goal.
But Gerber said the town council couldn’t focus on the report when it came out because it was dealing with a controversy concerning weekly rental housing (WWF April 2006). Gerber said even now it will still take some time before any Stratex study suggestions might be implemented.
Another Stratex study will soon come out that looks at development’s effect on localized groundwater supply on the island.
Most agree Bar Harbor’s current comprehensive plan and land use ordinances are out of date. Town planners have been working on a new comprehensive plan for voters to consider. The town voted for a half-year development moratorium to give planners time, but that moratorium expired last year and the plan won’t be voted on until this fall. In the meantime, development applications are judged under current land use ordinances. Town planner Anne Kreig said she understood people’s frustration, but another moratorium just isn’t feasible.
“We can’t do another one, I don’t think that would hold up in court,” Kreig said.
If the proposed comprehensive plan is approved by voters and the state, it will still be at least two years after that before all land use ordinances are updated.
Town Hill residents like Staggs pin little hope that updated land use ordinances will help their situation. “That’s going to be way too late for all [this] stuff out here,” Staggs said.
Some are having their wells tested and documented for future reference, others continue to speak out at town meetings, and a few are mulling legal action, but funds are limited. But they all have little hope they can stop the development that may make their wells go dry. Instead, they watch, turn on the faucet, and wait. “I’m not sure what else there is to be done,” Rosenstein said.