At a hearing on short-term rental regulations and fees Tuesday night, the Tisbury select board heard from homeowners unenthused about the additional costs the regulations would impose. Tisbury is the only Vineyard town to make demonstrable progress on regulating short-term rentals, but thus far has yet to flesh out all the fine details.
At the get-go, following a number of constructive suggestions posed to the board through letters, select board member Jeff Kristal suggested the regulations should be considered a “living document,” and as such, subject to “changes periodically.” He was in favor of voting in what was drafted thus far, and having the Tisbury’s short-term rental task force continue to provide input, with an eye toward a future hearing when the regulations could be updated.
Select board chair Jim Rogers agreed, and recommended the task force be transformed into one of the town’s “standing committees” going forward.
Select board member Larry Gomez spoke in favor of tabling the regulations to allow for more taxpayer comments to reach town hall.
Homeowner Rachel Wild told the board she saw the costs contemplated in the regulations as burdensome, and likely to diminish the rental revenue she uses to offset her expenses, such as her water bill and mortgage. Wild questioned the efficacy and cost of inspectors, and said she was thinking about moving out of town.
Rogers told her the task force considered local versus nonlocal classifications for rental units — as he put it, “residents who are actually just renting out a portion of their home to afford their home versus people [who] don’t even reside here, and they’re just renting out their homes to make a profit.”
Rogers said he was “certainly amenable to looking at something like that.”
Wild questioned why Tisbury was the only Vineyard town trying to implement regulations on short-term rentals.
“This all started because we had some issues in town with code violations,” Rogers said. “We had a very serious situation where people luckily got out of the building alive.” He described the regulations as a “proactive” safety measure.
The select board authorized the assembly of a short-term rental task force in January 2019. Among the issues the task force was charged with exploring and making recommendations on were wastewater and inspections. The inspections component was punctuated by a fire at 209 Franklin St. on the evening of Jan. 11, 2019. Firefighters were forced to climb through a smoky warren of debris and belongings in the cellar of the building in search of inhabitants. A ganglion of extension cords was found to be the source of ignition. The property was later condemned, and questions arose about room rental conditions in town, and how to safeguard occupants. Another charge of the task force was revenue, and Tuesday night the select board weighed several fees and penalties. These included a $150 fee for rental unit inspection, a $75 fee for rental unit reinspection, a $225 annual fee for a rental unit certificate of registration, and a $300-per-day violation penalty.
Kristal said Tisbury was exploring regulations even before the state adopted the short-term rental tax.
Fred Rundlet, a member of the short-term rental task force, said state law directs municipalities to develop their own regulations. “Why the other towns aren’t doing anything, I have no idea,” he said.
Kristal seized upon something he said he recently heard from Rundlet, that other towns will see the value in Tisbury’s regulations initiative because it helps to show “who’s buying up these properties and running them as businesses.”
Kristal went on to say, “And there’s a lot of people in the town of Tisbury that want our town back so it’s not going to corporations who are running rental houses, and Rachel [Wild] is the farthest thing from that — I understand that — but there [are] people in neighborhoods [who] are literally buying up houses sight unseen, and doing them as a business.”
Wild said there was “a lot to be said” about that subject, but suggested the phenomenon was more prevalent in Edgartown than Tisbury.
“My biggest concern is I love Tisbury, I grew up in Tisbury,” Wild said, “and I’m sorry to say, like, I second-guess selling my house every single day now, and moving out of Tisbury. I’m concerned about having a school for my son to go to …”
Wild went on to say people who care for the town and wish to remain residents may face undue hardship with the short-term rental regulations, taxes, and fees. She said she wanted to see more attention put toward offsetting the cost of the school, and said the cost of compensating short-term rental inspectors would be better used to lessen the cost of the Tisbury School project.
The select board told Wild additional staff isn’t anticipated for short-term rental inspections.
Tisbury Fire Chief Greg Leland later told The Times the inspections the building, fire, and health departments plan to conduct would be relatively short. As far as his department is concerned, elementary safety items like smoke detectors, egress, and emergency contacts are among the things that would be checked in an inspection.
At the meeting, Wild continued to express disapproval of the regulations and the costs associated with them. Rogers offered to make her a member of the committee to be formed from the short-term rental task force.
“I would love to be actually part of that committee,” Wild said. “I honestly would.”
Carol Adelson, a seasonal resident and retiree, also expressed concern about the regulations. She read a letter she penned into the record.
“My house is rented a few weeks in the summer to cover expenses to enable me to maintain and live in my house,” she read in part. “My property has been consistently well-cared for. The proposal would take quality time away from my limited stay on the Vineyard by requiring me to deal with the potential of considerable red tape, and would impose an additional financial burden … I’m already paying an average of $1,550 more in property taxes than year-round resident that receive a residential exemption. Vineyard Haven is the only town that discriminates between seasonal and year-round residents.”
Adelson went on to note that nonresidents are subject to a quarterly “content tax” for interior furnishings. Tisbury stood alone on-Island with such a tax, she said. Adelson said she’s about to pay her February tax bill, which is up $311.47 from last year. With taxes as they stand now, plus the prospects of rental taxes and fees and a tax increase from the school project, Adelson, who has a fixed income, said she feared an untenable future for herself in Tisbury.
Building commissioner Ross Seavey said the inspection short-term rental criteria merely reflect law already on the books concerning safety, habitability, and zoning.
Task force member Doris Clark said the board might consider waiving the registration fee at the outset, but she thought it was important to get units registered for safety’s sake.
The board took the comments under advisement, and voted unanimously to continue the hearing until March 9.
Town meeting rescheduled (loosely)
The select board opted to scrap its previous town meeting date of June 5 — that date supplanted a previously voted date of May 1 — and went all in for an annual town meeting, two special town meetings, an annual election in June. The board voted unanimously to reserve June 12, 13, and 14 for the meetings, but stipulated the times and order would be hashed out later. Town moderator Deborah Medders was adamant the vote for the Tisbury School renovation and addition project, a major Proposition 2½ debt exclusion, have a dedicated special town meeting, and all other town business be handled in the annual town meeting and a separate special town meeting. Medders also made clear her preference was to hold the meetings in the afternoon.
Kristal pitched having the school project as the first article on the annual town meeting, and Medders wouldn’t hear of it. “I would not do that to the townspeople,” she said. “I would not support that.”
On the recommendation of town clerk Hillary Conklin, the board voted unanimously to schedule the annual town election for June 22. The select board was hoping for an election held a couple of days after town meeting, but Conklin said she found that infeasible personnel-wise, and unwise for a number of other reasons. She vowed to bring her “A game” to the election.
“Voting in an election is sacred,” she said, “and to be honest with you, I don’t think there’s anything more American than an election.”
In other business, the board voted unanimously to approve a raft of changes and updates for town fiscal policy put together by finance director Jonathan Snyder. The board also began deliberation on changes to building department fee schedules, many of which Seavey characterized as overdue modernizations. Among the changes was switching building permit fee calculations from project cost to square footage.
Jeff Kristal, as an inn owner, should not be participating in these rental fee discussions.
This is crazy if you rent to summer people and have a house that is unsafe of rundown then good luck getting rentals. Personally I have installed more safety equipment and keep my house in better shape because I rent to tourists in the summer. The house they mention on Franklin St was owned and lived in by a full time resident and they were renting individual rooms short term to full time residents (the fire was in January remember), it was a completely different thing then renting to tourists in the summer. This is just adds more red tape and is honestly a money grab as inspecting every rental property in Tisbury yearly would require an army. You want to know which homes need to be looked at read the reviews of rental homes on AirBNB, those reviews will tell you which houses are run down and in need of inspection.