5 candidates running for 2 seats on Bar Harbor Town Council

Jun. 7—Bar Harbor voters on Tuesday will pick from five candidates in two races for open Town Council seats.

Jennifer Cough, Gary Friedmann, Joe Minutolo, Peter St. Germain and Nathan Young will have their names on the ballot for two available three-year terms on the seven-seat council.

Friedmann and Minutolo are incumbent councilors, having been first elected in 2012 and 2018, respectively. Friedmann is a consultant for not-for-profit organizations while Minutolo is the co-owner of a local bicycle shop.

St. Germain is a former Bar Harbor town councilor, having last served from 2009 through 2018, while Young is the town's former police chief who was dismissed from the job in January 2014. Both of them own and operate local lodging establishments while Cough, who serves on the town's cruise ship committee, owns and operates a local shipping and printing business.

The only other contested races on the local ballot are for one-year terms on the town's warrant committee, which considers budget items that go before voters at town meetings. There are seven candidates running for five, one-year terms on the committee. The candidates are Julie Berberian, Steven Boucher, Robert Chaplin, Stephen Coston, Cara Ryan, Eben Salvatore and Jeffrey Young.

Bar Harbor held the open session of its annual town meeting last week. At that session, held June 1 at Conners Emerson School, voters in attendance approved an overall annual municipal budget of $16.4 million and decided to borrow $750,000 to pay for the installation of a fiber optic communications network at all of the town's buildings, according to the Mount Desert Islander newspaper.