It Will Be Up To Mount Desert Voters Whether to Cap Vacation Rentals
The potential ordinance will be on the town's warrant
MOUNT DESERT—To legislate or not to legislate short term and vacation rentals? Mount Desert voters will be answering that question at their May town meeting.
The Mount Desert Selectboard heard an additional hour of public comment about the potential short-term and vacation rental ordinance Monday night and moved for it to go onto the May 7 town warrant. A public hearing had also been held last week. Discussions about potentially created an ordinance has gone on for months.
“Let the people decide,” one Selectboard member said after the unanimous vote.
More than 50 attended in person and on Zoom to ask questions, make pleas, and explain their worries on Monday. Because three of the five Selectboard members either own vacation rentals or short-term rentals they could only move to put the ordinance on the warrant. They could not recommend or reject the ordinance because only two could vote on that due to the other three’s conflict of interest. Two is not a quorum, which is required for votes. A quorum would be three.
THE EXPLANATION
At Monday’s meeting Selectboard member Martha Dudman said, “Our year-round housing stock in our town has been eroded during the years and it’s having a negative effect on our community.”
“Part of that is the proliferation of short-term and vacation rentals,” she said, but there are other aspects.
While the town doesn’t know how many vacation rentals there currently are, she said, the registration aspect of the ordinance would help with that via licensing. The LUZO Committee, is working on other ways that deal with zoning to increase housing opportunities. She called it a tool to help the community get in balance.
She also quickly explained the three categories of rentals that the ordinance defines as:
Short Term Rentals (STR) are in a person’s primary residence, legal address. A reisdent can have as many rentals on the property as they wish.
Seasonal vacation rentals are in properties that could not be used as year-round homes. There’s no cap.
Vacation rentals are in dwellings that are not a primary residence and can be used year round. These would be capped.
All would need to get a license, which would be renewable every year. The first year of the program would be 2025 with a March 1 deadline if the ordinance is voted in. That year there would be no cap. Anyone with a short-term rental could keep renting as long as they get a license and renew a license every year. Unlike neighboring Bar Harbor, there would be no inspections required. Inspections would only happen if problems were reported, Dudman said.
There were several changes from last week’s version of the changes, which were quickly explained by Noel Musson. All those changes are highlighted in the screen shots below.
PUBLIC COMMENT
Robert Zelinsky asked how capping rentals would affect the housing for year-round people.
“I don’t see how you’re going to regain a community unless you build affordable housing at some point.” Zelinksy said there wasn’t any real industry to bring people to the community to buy houses at such high price points. “This ordinance is not answering the call for affordable housing like its mission statement says it is.”
Zelinsky asked if the Selectboard thought the property values were going to go down because of the ordinance.
According to a state report released in October, seasonal homes comprise approximately one-sixth of Maine homes. In an October 2023 Bangor Daily News article, Zara Norman writes about the report and specifically about housing stock in Hancock County, “Roughly 1 in 10 homes there are listed as short-term rentals, yet only about a third of those would be affordable if placed on the market.”
The state’s report blames scarcity and affordability. Others see those as more intricately linked to rentals. Other earlier national studies cite vacation rentals as increasing prices and lowering long-term rental possibilities.
“They can’t turn back time, but they can staunch the flow to some degree,” Dudman said of the potential ordinance. Currently, she said people are willing to pay high prices because they can make money from it.
Doris Smallidge asked about rentals assisting in expenditures for year round locals for things such as paying for roofs or tax bills. “Let’s find out why are people doing the rentals.” She wondered if they were hurting the year-round residents by having the ordinance. Others worried about the ordinance potentially expanding to include inspections, which happened in Bar Harbor.
Gail Marshall said that the story that vacation or short-term rentals helps locals to survive is just a story that people tell themselves. Instead, she said, it’s a lucrative business and a completely unregulated market. She asked if Mount Desert wanted to be a community or a resort?
Mike Olsen of Otter Creek said it wasn’t such a simple dichotomy. Olsen said that his full-time job provides his family one-third of the income that they need to survive in the community. He said he bought a dilapidated home that was in foreclosure twenty years ago and before that he sometimes lived in a tent where he’d survive on sardines and Saltines. He was saving up for that house. Now, he said, part of how his family has survived is by renting for shorter stays.
“Zero people have been helped by Bar Harbor’s short-term rental (ordinance),” he said. He gave a litany of how the Mount Desert community has typically had change. “When the summer community wanted a great hospital, they funded the hospital.” When they wanted a library, a new school, they funded a library and new school, he said.
Inspections in Bar Harbor made it expensive and unthinkable for many to continue short-term renting there, he said. “This is cutting deep.”
“You say ‘you.’ Everyone in this audience says ‘you,’” when talking about the potential changes to the board, Selectboard member Wendy Littlefield said. “I am one of those families.”
Littlefield said that she may have to sell a family home. Her daughter is in a similar situation.
Tracey Aberman said she had to put a $30,000 roof on her house, which she would not have been able to do if she hadn’t been able to rent. “It feels like a violation of our privacy, our homes, and our ability to survive.” Landscapers and housekeepers are people that are impacted as well. “You’re not looking at anything else that short-term rentals do for our town.”
Others disagreed about the impact of short-term rentals and vacation rentals.
Selectboard Chair John B. Macauley said, “I’ve seen the whole time get darker and darker in winter. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.” He said this ordinance is the first step and there could be Draconian steps afterward.
Earlier in the meeting Dudman said something similar, stressing that the ordinance was just one element in the town’s attempt to increase year round homes and population.
One member of the audience asked about removing the caps in the first year of licensing so that there isn’t a rush to get places permitted and skew the results of how many properties are actually in the town.
Lincoln Millstein, a summer resident of Mount Desert and founder of the Quietside Journal, said Bar Harbor went through this process and in 2021 had 740 registrants and many people registered because they didn’t know what would happen.
“Today, it’s 642. Over the last four years, that gold rush has subsided,” he said.
One person said people switched from using real estate agencies to AirBnB and VRBO sites and online platforms, which is why it looked as if there were no rentals prior to those sites’ domination of the market. Millstein also objected to the closing of public comment after roughly an hour.
NEXT STEPS
Tonight, Tuesday, March 19, at 6 p.m., the Warrant Committee will have its final votes on the town warrant, meeting at the town hall meeting room at 21 Sea Street in Northeast Harbor and via Zoom.
Mount Desert’s town meeting is Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at 6 p.m. at the Kelley Auditorium at MDES School.
OTHER BUSINESS
The Selectboard also granted public space special event permits to the Garden Club of Mount Desert; withdrew the public space permit for the Sustainability Committee Sports Equipment Swap; withdrew the public space permit for the Sustainability Committee Tool Swap.
It reviewed and approved the rejection of bids for construction of sidewalks in Somesville; authorized a public space special event application to the Neighborhood House for its Annual Memorial Day Community BBQ and reviewed and approved the acceptance of a bid from C+C Lynch Excavation, LLC for sidewalk improvements in Seal Harbor in the amount of $491,647 contingent upon approval of funding at the 2024 Annual Town Meeting.
The Selectboard reviewed, had its final votes, and signed the town warrant for May 6 and 7, 2024, Annual Town Meeting for Article 22, Article 28, Article 29, Article 30, Article 31, Article 32, Article 44 (amended, revote) and Article 59. Most of those votes were unanimous with an occasional abstention. Article 22 is the rental ordinance. Article 28 is “to see if the Town of Mount Desert will vote to accept Denning Brook Road and Timber Ridge Road, serving the Denning Brook Estates Homeowners’ Association (DBEHOA).” Article 29 is a bond not to exceed $355,000 to pay for a solar photovoltaic purchase. Article 30 is if the town should “issue general obligation bonds or notes of the Town in a principal amount not to exceed $1,600,000 to pay for professional, technical, and construction services for the construction of or improvements to sidewalks and curbing in four locations.”
Article 31 is another bond. This one is “$650,000 to pay for professional, technical, and construction services for improvements to Old Firehouse Lane, the existing Town-owned “Grey Cow”, and “Great Harbor Maritime Museum” parking lots (Project).”
Article 32 is detailed in the screenshot below.
Article 44 is the amount of revenue that the Selectboard recommends the town raise for the next fiscal year via taxes, service fees and other sources. The board recommends $2,509,664.00. The Warrant Committee has not yet made its recommendation. Article 59 is whether the town residents will increase the property tax levy by $443,576.00.
All the warrant articles are included in the packet, which is the third link below.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
warrant_committee_agenda_3-19-24.pdf (with Zoom link)
TO READ THE PACKET, WHICH HAS THE PROPOSED ORDINANCE
Disclosure: I own a short-term rental in Bar Harbor that I intend to move back into once all our children have graduated although our oldest daughter has professed that she’s coming back soon and she’s going to live there first.