NAHANT — Back in June 2022, residents expressed their concerns about short-term rentals in town to the Board of Selectmen. Now, some of these concerns may be answered at Town Meeting on May 20, when short-term rental bylaws will be on the table.
There are two separate proposals for these bylaws from the Short Term Rental Committee and a citizens group.
According to Planning Board Chair Rob Steinberg there is a community “consensus” that short-term rentals need more regulation.
“The Short Term Rental Committee approach differs from the citizens’ approach in several ways,” Steinberg said. “The most significant difference is that the Short Term Rental Committee created a process for non-owner-occupied units that wish to do short-term rentals.”
For this process, the owner would have to go through the Zoning Board of Appeals to get a special permit to operate.
“Their proposed zoning bylaw then has seven or eight criteria by which the Zoning Board of Appeals would determine whether or not to grant a special permit,” Steinberg said.
For owner-occupied units, they would just have to register in accordance with a process for establishment by the Board of Selectmen.
Steinberg said that the citizens’ petition does not provide a specific procedure.
“So the citizens’ petition, they believe there should be a permitting process, they don’t elaborate on how that permitting process would work,” he said.
Steinberg added that the Planning Board has been in deliberations recently to give recommendations for these bylaws. Next week, they will give their official recommendations to either accept or reject the proposals.
The Planning Board will then forward the recommendations to the Finance Committee, which puts forward proposals for the town at Town Meeting, he said.
“We’re just going through the process, we did have hearings last week with respect to each of these proposals,” Steinberg said. “We feel like we’ve gotten very good input from the public.”
