Off-Grid Living in Beals, Maine

I'll be upfront: for a town as small as Beals (population around 443, out on the Beals-Jonesport islands in Washington County), there just isn't much official documentation sitting online. No Municode or eCode360 page, no posted zoning ordinance, no code-enforcement website that I could find. So a lot of this brief is "here's the Maine state default, and here's who to call to find out what Beals actually does."

Zoning. Beals is an organized town, not part of the unorganized territory that the Land Use Planning Commission (LUPC) governs, so LUPC rules don't apply here. Maine law does require every coastal municipality, Beals included, to have a Shoreland Zoning Ordinance covering land near the water. Whether Beals has a broader town-wide zoning ordinance on top of that, I could not confirm from an official source. If your land isn't in the shoreland zone, it's genuinely unclear what, if any, zoning restricts what you can do with it. That's a question for the Town Office.

Dwellings, tiny homes, RVs. I found nothing Beals-specific addressing tiny homes, RV living, or seasonal-dwelling definitions. Not confirmed either direction.

Building codes and permits. Here's a solid state-level fact: Maine requires municipalities with population over 4,000 to enforce the Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code (MUBEC), and towns under that threshold are not required to enforce it (and generally can't substitute their own separate code). Beals, at roughly 443 people, is well under that line, so it's likely not required to enforce MUBEC. But "not required" isn't the same as "no permit needed." Whether Beals has its own building-permit process is something only the Town Office can tell you.

Septic and composting toilets. Maine's subsurface wastewater rules are administered locally by a Local Plumbing Inspector (LPI), a role usually filled by the code enforcement officer, under state DHHS oversight. I couldn't find a Beals-specific LPI page, but the state Subsurface Wastewater Program sets the baseline rules statewide, and any septic or alternative toilet system in Beals would need to satisfy that baseline at minimum.

Greywater, rainwater, wells. No Beals-specific rules turned up for any of these. They default to whatever Maine's state baseline requires, which I'd describe as generally permissive but not fully documented here, so treat these as unclear until confirmed locally.

Living off-grid / disconnected from utilities. No ordinance found addressing this directly.

Bottom line for research purposes: Beals doesn't publish much online, so the phone is your best research tool here, not a search engine.