WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – The Planning Board discussed a proposed charter Tuesday that may be ready for the annual town meeting in May after being passed back and forth between the Planning Board and the Select Board for the past few years.

However, one board member said that there was still a lot of work to be done on the regulation.

Chairman Peter Beck showed his colleagues a draft short-term rental bylaw that would allow unlimited rentals of a bedroom or accessory dwelling unit on a property where the owner lives, as well as unlimited rentals of a primary residence where the owner lives in an ADU on the property, but would limit short-term rentals of an entire primary dwelling unit to 90 days in a calendar year.

His proposed ordinance would apply only to the city’s residential districts, meaning that in the commercial districts, any home could be listed for sale 365 days a year through services like Airbnb or Vrbo.

“That leaves a 90-day restriction on renting an entire residential unit (in a residential area) unless you live in an ADU on that property,” Beck said. “That’s all it does right now.”

“Right now, it’s just a regulation. It would just be a zoning regulation. It doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism. It doesn’t have an oversight mechanism. Those are other things we might consider adding. Right now, it’s just a zoning regulation that you have to follow, like all the other zoning regulations that also don’t have independent enforcement mechanisms.”

That doesn’t mean it would be ignored.

“Ninety-nine percent of zoning enforcement is voluntary compliance,” said Andrew Groff, community development director. “If someone calls our office and asks a question, I can say, ‘Please read this section of the ordinance again,’ as opposed to now, where it’s not clear what the regulation is.”

Beck pointed out that although the regulation is largely complied with, serious violations can be reported to the town hall, for example if the main residence is in a residential area and is only rented for a short period of time.

“If there is such a criminal issue, we can initiate enforcement,” Groff said. “If the regulations are not followed, they can appeal to the planning board or we can go to housing court.”

Beck said penalties and an enforcement mechanism could be added to the ordinance later if there are problems. Some in the city have expressed concern that the emergence of the short-term rental industry could result in housing being diverted from the full-time housing market, exacerbating ever-increasing housing costs.

The idea of ​​a short-term rental bylaw came up Tuesday in the context of a larger discussion of projects the board hopes to pursue in the coming year, including a new bylaw on open-space development and possibly a bylaw to protect the city’s groundwater, which Public Works Director Craig Clough proposed to planners Tuesday.

Beck and Roger Lawrence have remained on the Planning Board since it first considered the issue of short-term rentals in 2022. After planners decided that a citywide ordinance made more sense than one that was handled differently in different zoning districts, they asked the select committee to consider submitting such an ordinance.

When it became clear over the next year and a half that the Select Board could not agree on whether the city needed such a regulation, the Planning Board took up the issue again, but this time limited the restrictions in its most recent version to residential neighborhoods.

Cory Campbell is one of three members who did not serve on the board in 2022. On Tuesday, he said creating a bylaw limiting the number of days certain homes can be rented for was both too much and not enough.

That’s too much, Campbell said, because the city already doesn’t list STRs as a permissible use for private homes. It’s not enough because the ordinance drafted by Beck doesn’t set standards for vacation rentals.

“When I rent an apartment, I want to know that it will be safe,” Campbell said.

Groff said the city’s ordinance could require regular inspections by the health department under Chapter II of the state health code.

“We have units that go back and forth between the short-term and long-term market,” Groff said, alluding to the Chapter II inspections already performed on full-time rentals. “I don’t think it would significantly increase (the health inspector’s) burden.”

(North Adams passed an ordinance last year requiring all short-term rentals to be registered and pay an annual inspection fee; non-owner-occupied buildings incur higher fees and require a special permit.)

As for the other part of Campbell’s comment – that short-term rentals are not currently allowed in the city – Beck acknowledged that they are not covered by the ordinance, but that does not mean they do not occur.

The town has ample evidence that there is a market for short-term rentals in Williamstown—both from quick online searches on sites like Airbnb and from Massachusetts Department of Revenue reports on how many homeowners pay the state tax on the rents. And local travel and tourism experts will note that short-term rentals are useful in an area where demand is sporadic enough (e.g., big concerts at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, graduation ceremonies at Williams College) that more rooms are needed than full-time hotels can offer.

Beck said he found a case in a local Nantucket court where a judge ruled that short-term rentals were illegal because they were not listed on the town charter’s use schedule.

“Everything else I’ve seen assumes that people can offer STRs unless it’s regulated in some way,” Beck said. “Cory’s argument is that anyone currently renting short-term in Williamstown is violating our bylaws. I don’t agree with that. … I don’t think we have 200 lawbreakers using Airbnb even though they think it’s illegal.”

Campbell said if the city wants to enshrine short-term rentals as a permitted use in the bylaw, there needs to be a complete bylaw including an enforcement mechanism.

“It can’t be the neighbors’ job to inform the city of wrongdoing or negligence,” Campbell said. “If that genie is out of the bottle and just keeps spreading, then that’s just another burden on the neighbors, and I don’t want to see that happen.”

“I’m not against anything, but it can’t be one of those one-page memos that so many cities have issued that have no enforcement power and just say, ‘Yeah, it’s Airbnb, great. Do it.’ I just want it to be as informed as possible.”

Keywords: Short-term rentals,