Williamstown Planning Board Again Takes Up Short-Term Rentals
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Planning Board on Tuesday discussed a bylaw proposal that might be ready for May's annual town meeting after bouncing back and forth between the Planning Board and Select Board the last couple of years.
But one board member said the regulation needs a lot more work.
Chair Peter Beck showed his colleagues a draft of a short-term rental bylaw that would allow unlimited rentals of a bedroom or an accessory-dwelling unit on a property where the owner resides and unlimited rentals of a primary home where the owner lives in an on-site ADU but limits the short-term rental of an entire primary dwelling unit to 90 days in a calendar year.
His draft bylaw only would apply in the town's residential districts, meaning that in commercial districts, any home could be on the market for services like Airbnb or Vrbo 365 days a year.
"What that leaves is a 90-day limitation on renting an entire dwelling unit [in a residential zone] when you're not living in an ADU on that property," Beck said. "That's all it does right now.
"Right now, it's just a rule. It would just be a zoning rule. It doesn't have an enforcement mechanism. It doesn't have a monitoring mechanism. These are other things we could consider adding. Right now, it's just a zoning rule that you have to follow, like all the other zoning rules that also don't have independent enforcement mechanisms."
That does not mean it would be ignored.
"In the case of 99 percent of zoning enforcement, it's voluntary compliance," Community Development Director Andrew Groff said. "When someone calls our office to ask the question, I could say, 'Please review this section of the bylaw,' as opposed to now, it's not clear what the regulation is."
Beck pointed out that while most compliance with the bylaw just happens, egregious violations — like a primary residence in a residential neighborhood that functions only as a short-term rental — could be reported to Town Hall.
"If there is an actionable piece like this, then we can set enforcement," Groff said. "If there's no compliance, they can appeal to the Zoning Board or we can move on to Housing Court."
Beck said penalties and an enforcement mechanism could be added to the bylaw later, if there are problems. Some in town have expressed concern that the emergence of the short-term rental industry could lead to housing stock being pulled from the full-time housing market, thus exacerbating an ever-increasing cost of housing.
The short-term rental bylaw idea came up on Tuesday in the context of a larger discussion about projects that the board hopes to continue in the year ahead, including a new open-space residential development bylaw and, perhaps, a rule to protect the town's aquifer as suggested to the planners on Tuesday by Public Works Director Craig Clough.
Beck and Roger Lawrence remain on the Planning Board from the days when it first took up the short-term rental question back in 2022. After deciding a townwide bylaw made more sense than one that operated differently in different zoning districts, the planners asked the Select Board to consider proposing such a bylaw.
When it became clear over the course of the next year and a half that the Select Board could not reach a consensus on whether the town needed such a regulation, the Planning Board took back the issue, this time narrowing the restrictions down to the residential districts in the latest iteration.
Cory Campbell is one of three members who was not not on the board back in '22, and on Tuesday he suggested that creating a bylaw that limits the number of days some homes can be rented is both too much and not enough.
It's too much, Campbell said, because the town already does not list STRs as an allowable use for homes. It's not enough because the bylaw drafted by Beck did not create standards for the vacation rentals.
"If I'm going to rent a place … I want to know that it's safe to be there," Campbell said.
Groff said that town bylaw could require regular Board of Health inspections under Chapter II of the state sanitary code.
"We have units that go back-and-forth between the short-term and long-term markets," Groff said, alluding to the Chapter II inspections already performed on full-time rentals. "I don't think it would increase [the health inspector's] burden significantly."
(North Adams passed an ordinance last year that requires all short-term rentals to register and pay an annual inspection fee; buildings that are not owner-occupied pay higher fees and also require a special permit.)
As for the other part of Campbell's comment — that short-term rentals are not currently permitted in the town — Beck agreed that they're not covered in the bylaw, but that does not mean they don't happen.
The town has ample evidence that there is an STR market in Williamstown — both from quick online searches of websites like Airbnb and reports from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue on how many homeowners are paying the state tax on the rentals. And local travel and tourism experts will note that short-term rentals are useful in an area where demand is sporadic enough (major concerts at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Williams College graduation, for example) to need more rooms than full-time hotels can supply.
Beck said he has found one local court case from Nantucket where a judge found that because short-term rentals are not included in the use table of the town bylaws that they are illegal.
"Everything else I've seen has assumed people can [offer STRs] unless you regulate it in some way," Beck said. "Cory's argument is everyone currently doing short-term rentals in Williamstown is breaking our bylaw. I don't agree with that. … I don't think we have 200 scofflaws Airbnb'ing, even though they think it's illegal."
Campbell said if the town is going to enshrine the short-term rental as an allowable use in the bylaw, it needs to have a complete bylaw, including an enforcement mechanism.
"It can't fall to neighbors to notify the town about misconduct or negligence," Campbell said. "If this genie is out of the bottle and it's only going to become more pervasive, then that's just more burden on neighbors, and I don't want to see that happen.
"I'm not opposed to anything, except it can't be one of these one-page memos that so many towns have put out that have no enforcement value and just say, 'Yeah, it's Airbnb, great. Do it.' I just want it to be as informed as it possibly can be."
Tags: short-term rentals,
