Stonington’s short-term rentals ordinance is useless

Stonington First Selectman Danielle Chesebrough has spearheaded her town’s response to the thorny issue of regulating short-term rentals, which, based on my chats at the post office and in grocery store aisles, are exploding in number and are among the community’s more pressing problems.

Chesebrough and Selectwoman June Strunk — Selectwoman Deborah Downie was missing in action for the critical vote — agreed to put their wishy-washy ordinance for registering the rentals to a referendum vote March 13.

Residents will have a chance to comment on the issue at a Town Meeting on Monday, but their comments won’t change the proposed ordinance, which does virtually nothing to address the vexing complexity of the problem.

I plan to vote no March 13 and hope that sends a message that the town —when it’s under new leadership perhaps? — needs to decisively address the problem.

It seems absurd to me that the town is going to the great trouble and expense of bringing residents out for a vote on an ordinance that does little more than create a registry of short-term rentals.

Even worse, the registry plan would seem to legitimize the zoning violation involved in running a business in a residential neighborhood.

Why not give people a chance to vote “yes” or “no” on regulations that would have a real impact? Propose some rules with teeth, and then let people have a say.

I know lots of people who believe short-term rentals, many run by outof-town investors, have become commercial enterprises that are ruining many of Stonington’s residential neighborhoods.

But those people have no way to express that opinion with Selectman Chesebrough’s watered-down referendum proposal.

Putting this nothing burger of an ordinance to a vote, as if it would change anything, is a spectacular failure in leadership.

If registering the short-term rentals is an appropriate first step, then that could have been done without a town-wide vote.

Instead, town leaders will claim, no matter what the outcome of the vote on their useless ordinance, that they are listening to what voters had to say. Please, voters, don’t let them get away with that.

I live in Stonington, and I fall on the liberal end of the spectrum of opinions on short-term rentals. I have one on my street that doesn’t bother me, and I am sympathetic to people who want to rent a room or apartment on their property

to offset homeownership expenses.

I am especially sympathetic to all the families who for generations have rented their summer vacation homes in Stonington for a few weeks, to pay taxes and other bills, and use them the rest of the time themselves.

Those don’t seem like businesses to me.

And yet there are a large number of properties now, especially near Mystic, that have essentially been converted to hotels and inns, removing the most important element of a neighborhood: Owners or long-term renters who live there and care about the place.

People who are being made to live next to a noisy commercial hotel in their residential neighborhood, a clear zoning violation, are being cheated by a town government that allows it.

Chesebrough herself noted in a recent interview with a television station that the fact that she can bake and has a good oven doesn’t mean she can open a bakery in a residential neighborhood.

Don’t ask me how she lost the simplicity of that wisdom in proposing a toothless referendum solution to the short-term rental problem. She’s proposing, essentially, a registry of illegal bakeries.

I understand there is no magic bullet here, but I would think the town could look at some compromises. Limit the number of weeks that can be rented in a residential neighborhood? Require owner residency of the property for some part of the year? Address it, with regulations, as the zoning issue that it is?

I don’t have all the answers, but I would not put my lack of answers to a townwide vote and call it a solution.