BAR HARBOR – A public hearing Tuesday night on the town’s proposed land ordinance amendments generated a lengthy and sometimes emotional debate over the issues of landowner’s rights and the future of development on Mount Desert Island.

“We feel that we have a responsibility to our land, not just our pocketbooks,” Barbara Fenderson, secretary of the planning board, said. “The stewardship of the land depends upon us.”

Board members have worked on the amendments since September, when a six-month moratorium on residential subdivisions went into effect. They drafted measures with the intention of reducing unplanned sprawl while encouraging growth and neighborhood development, officials have said.

The town council voted after the hearing to put all but one of the 14 proposed amendments on the warrant for a special town meeting on June 13.

Most of the debate centered on part of the one amendment that councilors vetoed – whether or not to double the minimum lot sizes in rural areas from 1 acre to 2 acres.

“This amendment is the wholesale slaughter of every average working family in this town and if it’s adopted we should change the name of this town to ‘Bar Harbor, elitist community,'” resident Loren Hubbard said to applause from some in the 70-person crowd.

Opponents to the amendment said that many who live in the town’s rural districts depend upon high land values to serve effectively as a savings account. A 1-acre lot in Bar Harbor, even without ocean views, can cost in excess of $100,000. If the amendment passed as written, it would have reduced the value of that savings account, some in the audience said.

“This is a major, major change in the economics of the land,” Doug Maffucci said. “If you ask somebody, would you like to take away your neighbor’s personal savings, the answer is no.”

Others in the crowd said that concerns about the future and the environment ought to weigh as heavily as those economic considerations do.

“I feel as if we’re tentatively creeping towards trying to achieve some kind of sustainability,” Jim Perkins said. “We often lose sight of the winner, which is posterity and the future.”

After the council voted not to put the so-called dimensional controls amendment on the warrant for the June vote, some planning board members registered their dismay that the final choice was not left to residents.

“All those sections that we proposed are interrelated,” Fenderson said. “It’s rather sad that we couldn’t have put it to the town. … I think we were certainly well-represented by the business community, the development community.”

Ellen Dohmen, planning board president, said she was glad that most of the proposed amendments were approved for warrant, but that the relationship between the dimensional controls and other zoning tools passed by the council might not have been clear enough.

“We worked very hard and we wanted very much for the voters to have an opportunity to approve or disapprove what we did,” she said.

Board members said they planned to rework the language of the draft amendment to take the council’s concerns into consideration.