To the Editor:
While I do appreciate the desire of the town of Tisbury officials, especially the board of health, to enact some sort of local regulation that will address the issues of substandard and overcrowded housing, I write to suggest to Tisbury voters looking at Article 20 of the special town meeting for April 10 that the proposed residential rental registration bylaw is overly burdensome, and needs to be significantly redrafted to be fair and reasonable, and so as not to be another reason not to want to rent to tenants on a year-round basis.
It will certainly have what I believe to be an unintended consequence of helping owners to decide to not bother with renting at all due to the burdensome costs of licensing. The proposed bylaw requires owners applying for a license for an unknown sum of money (leaving the same to the selectmen to decide) to state under penalties of perjury, a criminal offense, that their property complies with the state building code.
Massachusetts has just adopted a variant of the eighth version of the building code, with many new international sections. If one were to merely believe, but not know for certain, that their proposed residential property complied with this entire new and very controversial building code, one would be committing a crime in merely signing and applying for a rental license. Essentially then, to avoid this prospect, the proposed bylaw virtually requires an owner to essentially retain an engineer to inspect their property to determine the level of compliance with the current building code. This is not a simple inspection, but requires all kinds of detailed analysis costing many thousands of dollars. This is a very different bylaw than those previously proposed in other towns, which would require a periodic but simple inspection by the board of health using a simple checklist that would itemize only those state sanitary code violations that would otherwise require immediate repair by a landlord (and would otherwise not trigger any violation so long as the unit was not then occupied) to assure that the housing unit meets minimum standards of safety and thus permit a license to be issued. Once a tenant took occupancy, then the state sanitary code in full would apply, and the lesser violations would have to otherwise be addressed, as is the case now, regardless of any licensing bylaws.
Such a bylaw, I believe, would be reasonable so long as the licensing is low-cost and required only every few years, or, if a violation is discovered. In fact, these inspections could be of use to owners, to assure that they are not running afoul of the major provisions of the sanitary code, and would provide some level of defense against unfounded claims of tenants. But the bylaw, as drafted, goes too far, demands too much for what one would need for a license, and uses a stick, not a carrot, approach. Let’s start with a simple carrot and see how that works. As for now, send the proposed bylaw back to the board for refinement in accord with the humble suggestions of this author.
Benjamin L. Hall Jr.
Edgartown
Hall is an attorney who handles tenancy issues. –Ed.
