Greenport Village is again seeking public input on what form a revised rental housing code should take and how, if at all, the village code should be amended to address short-term rentals. A public hearing has been called on a draft revised code for 7 p.m. Thursday. (See draft code below.)
The current code, adopted in 2013, exempts seasonal rentals and transient or temporary rentals from the requirement imposed on a property owner to obtain a rental permit. Seasonal rentals are defined by the code as rentals of a one-family dwelling for a term of less than four months, some part of which must be summer. Transient or temporary rentals are defined as those for period of 29 days or less.
The trustees are not of like mind about whether or how to address short-term — or transient — rentals in a revised and revamped rental code. It’s an issue they’ve been grappling with for more than a year-and-a-half. In January 2015, the trustees opened a 90-day public comment period on the issue, but the village code committee has not reached consensus on how to handle transient rentals. A public hearing on a draft code originally set for November was called off.
Trustee Doug Roberts is cautioning the board against making the village’s rental code more onerous, more complicated and more difficult to enforce. Roberts is pushing to limit short-term rentals with a numeric cap. He’d like to see the Village Board set a number of rental properties that may be rented as transient rentals and suggests that the number be set at 20-percent of the the total number of rental properties in the village.
“We should be considering a way of leveling the playing field in the village,” Roberts said. “The cap is the best idea I’ve come up with. It may not be the best idea, but it’s the best I have come up with,” he said.
But Mayor George Hubbard and trustees Mary Bess Phillips and Julia Robins took issue with that approach during a discussion at Thursday’s work session.
Hubbard argues that the village really doesn’t yet know what the total number of rental properties is, given that seasonal and transient rentals are not required to have rental permits.
“Every rental in Greenport should be registered so we know what they are,” Hubbard said in an interview today. Setting the number of transient rentals allowed at 20 percent of all rentals might actually result in increasing the number of transient rentals in the village, he said. “We shouldn’t do anything like that until we have an accurate number on how many are already out there.”
Phillips and Robins both expressed strong reservations about the notion of the village setting a number and deciding which properties could be used for short-term rentals.
“I don’t think it’s the place of the board to go through the village and say, ‘you can do this and you can’t.’ We’re over-reaching — and it’s unenforceable,” Robins said.
“If someone is looking to buy property here, you’re trying to tell someone looking to invest in our community what they can do with it,” Phillips said.
Roberts said other communities have imposed caps on short-term rentals. “It’s being done effectively in places,” he said at the work session. “It’s the best way to enforce against every house in this village becoming a short-term rental. I’m not against short-term rentals but I am against every house becoming a short-term rental,” Roberts said.
The board agreed that the discussion draft would be posted on the village website Friday afternoon, so residents would have a week to review it before Thursday’s hearing.
Hubbard said today the draft “went around and around” in the code committee for nine months and went nowhere. “Instead of the trustees continuing to go around and around for months, I’d rather have the public hearing now and let the public have their say.”
The board will hear the public’s comments on the subject and then come to some agreement on the final form of any changes it will adopt. There will be a formal public hearing on the final draft before the board takes any official action.
The mayor — for now, at least — favors simply changing the rental law to require short-term rentals to be registered and permitted.
“If every rental was registered, then we’d know exactly what we have,” Hubbard said today. “Then we’d know that they’re there and that they’re safe.”
The village can then “tackle the short-term rental issue” after it knows what it’s dealing with, the mayor said. “Maybe by then the county hotel-motel tax and the lawsuits will all play out.”
“I don’t want to put something out there that will right away have 10 lawsuits filed against the village,” he said.
It’s a sticky subject, Hubbard said. Village homeowners have long relied on seasonal rentals to help them meet expenses, he said. But the profitability of the nightly rentals has hurt the year-round rental housing market, he acknowledges.
Businesses that rely on tourists like the boost short-term rentals gives to local tourism, he said. “But if everything becomes Airbnb and it’s all just tourists,” Hubbard said, “then there’s no place for their workers to live.”
The mayor and Roberts agree on that. “Locally, the data are clear,” Roberts wrote in his July monthly report. “Rental housing has become more expensive and the market for year-round rentals is impacted by STRs [short-term rentals],” the trustee wrote. He said it is time for “a reckoning” on the village’s rental code. “Is it helping the village ensure safe, affordable rental housing?” he asked. If not, he wrote, the village should consider another approach. All the village really needs to do, according to Roberts, is have the building inspector inspect all buildings for violations of the state fire code, “including its provisions on overcrowding.”
Roberts referred the board to a July 3 N.Y. Times article about the negative impacts of “anti-growth sentiment” reflected in zoning laws is “a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy.”
Greenport Village Draft Chapter 103 Rental Properties (July 18 2016) by East End Local Media Corp. on Scribd
