After hearing, planning board recommends limiting short-term rentals

LACONIA — The city’s planning board approved a proposed short-term rental ordinance amendment Tuesday night, narrowing the districts where homes can be booked by visitors.

The proposed amendment will likely appear before the council at their next meeting at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 9, at City Hall downtown.

Because both boards have already held public hearings, no additional hearing is needed. Residents can offer their thoughts during the general public comment period at the meeting.

Key changes to the ordinance include excluding the residential single-family zoning district as permitted by special exception, and raising the total number of nights a unit may be rented consecutively from 14 to 28.

Property owners within the single-family district, if not already permitted to operate a short-term rental, would have to seek a zoning variance, rather than special exception, in order to do so — a higher bar.

The proposed amendment is also intended to shore-up accountability and enforcement. For example, property owners operating a short-term rental would be required to provide data to the city’s planning department, and a copy of their rooms and meals license.

“As you guys know, we’ve been working on short-term lodging for quite a while now, I believe you guys have already had four or five public hearings at this point. After we took your language and presented it to council, council had two changes. They also had a public hearing as well at their most recent meeting,” Assistant Planning Director Tyler Carmichael said Tuesday night. “The two changes that they’re looking to make from the language that you sent them is they want to increase the timeframe for short-term lodging from 14 days to 28 days. So if you’re renting a parcel for 27 days or less, it would be considered short-term lodging.

“The only other change that they recommended was that they remove [the] residential single-family [zoning district] from the permitted uses and from the special exception,” he said. “In other words, it would not be permitted in the residential single-family.”

Ward 6 Councilor Mike Conant, who represents the council on the planning board, said he generally agreed with the proposal, other than the change pertaining to the single-family district.  

“What we tried to do, I believe, with this ordinance, is give it strength and give it enforceability. That’s the big thing, giving it enforceability,” Conant said. Single-family zoning makes up about 20% of the city.

“So we’re telling 20% of our population that they would have to jump through hoops, that they would not be allowed a special exception, they would need to go get a variance. I just don’t think that we need to, nor should, take that right away from 20% of our population.

“With the exception of excluding the [single-family] zone from being able to do it, I think written as it is, is wonderful. It gives it some more teeth, it gives reportability back to the planning board, and with that hopefully we can rule out, and weed out, the bad apples that are trying to take advantage of what we have available,” Conant said. “I am all for the new ordinance as it’s written, with the exception of excluding 20% of our population from having the right to short-term their property.”

Members of the planning board approved the proposed changes 4-1, with Conant opposed, and Dave Ouelette, Gary Dionne, Jacob Roy and Amy Lovisek in favor.

Members of the public and city councilors were among the audience at the meeting Tuesday night, expressing views for and against the proposed amendment. 

Mayor Mike Bordes told members of the planning board he does not support the suggested change to the ordinance, that he’s an example of someone who became a member of the city community through his prior booking of short-term rental properties.

“If communities like ours, where tourism is not just a seasonal boost but a year-round economic growth — we have Gunstock [Mountain Resort], people come to ski during the winter — many of those renters use short-term rentals,” Bordes said. “For many people, short-term rentals are more than an economic statistic, they are a doorway into our community.

“The proposed ordinance changes raise serious concerns about property rights,” Bordes said. “When government begins to dictate how often a homeowner can use their own property, who can stay there, or what qualifies as an acceptable use, we cross the line from reasonable regulation to overreach.”  

Ward 5 Councilor Steven Bogert said he’s lived on the same street for over 23 years and expressed an alternate view. 

“Everybody wants to say, ‘tourism, tourism, tourism’, but we do have another side of our town. It’s called manufacturing, we have other jobs that are year-round jobs, and those folks live in residential, single-family homes. They don’t live along the lake, they don’t look at having to short-term rent. They want to go back to their palace and they want to sit in quiet and peace. They want to know that their neighbor is their neighbor,” Bogert said. 

“In taking this out, people are saying it’s taking their rights away — it’s not taking anybody’s rights away. You’re given a variance, and, yes, a variance is harder to get, and it should be in a residential single-family home development,” he said. “It should be the hardest, because you are changing the environment of the neighborhood, you’re changing the cohesiveness of all the neighbors that know each other. You change that forever, because once it’s done, it’s done forever.”

Marc Burrell of Ward 5 said he does not support the proposed change. 

“How about we concentrate on the laws that we have, instead of creating new ones that we can’t control anyways,” he said.

“For 20% of our families that made that decision, they decided to buy in a residential setting, to reside there full-time with other people who chose to reside there full-time. I think that provides them with predictability and I think it also has a stabilizing effect on the housing market in a community. Because you don’t have as much transience, which I think secures the tax base if at the cost of some marginal benefit from people who are renting short-term,” Roy, an alternate on the planning board, said.