By John Francis
The Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula is trying to find an appropriate way to handle the steady increase in Short-Term Accommodations (STAs) in our area.
It’s very much a moving target — 30 years ago a few private cottages were available for weekly rental. Last year, MNBP staff estimated that there are 600 properties currently available as STAs. This number is likely to continue to increase. A number of people have demanded that a regulatory framework be put in place to prevent STAs from taking over/ruining our communities. A number of STA owners have pushed back, arguing that complaints are few and overblown and that regulating STAs would be a waste of time and effort.
MNBP hired a consultant, Skelton Brumwell, to survey public sentiment and make sense of the situation. Skelton Brumwell delivered two documents to MNBP before Christmas. One is a Background Report detailing “Best Practices for Short-Term Accommodations”, essentially a summary of the approaches taken by other municipalities in Ontario. The second document offers “Recommendations for a Strategy for Short-Term Accommodations”.
These documents are 11 and 14 pages long and make very interesting reading. They are easily found on the municipality’s website.
The consultant’s report proposes that STAs be required to register with the municipality. It proposes that there should be three classes of STAs based on several criteria:
• Class A would be cottages that are rented by the week, no more than four weeks per year.
• Class B would be for overnight rentals to no more than 6 people, no more than 180 nights per year.
• Class C would allow up to 8 people for overnight rentals and would allow unlimited nights per year.
The report also proposes a system of registration fees and administrative fees plus a complaint management process including penalties. The report suggests that all three classes of STAs must have a local representative or manager in the municipality 24/7 during the rental period.
The report also proposes “that Class B and C licences be subject to a 4% Municipal Accommodation Tax (MAT)”.
A group of STA operators has written a response to this report; see Guest Column on page 4, a summary of a longer brief submitted to MNBP Council. They “support reasonable and minimally invasive regulation of STAs in the municipality” but argue that “almost all of what is needed to ‘regulate’ is already enshrined in existing bylaws. A failure to enforce those bylaws should not give rise to an additional regulatory framework”. They argue that many of the report’s recommendations are poorly thought out.
Most people in MNBP don’t own STAs and haven’t given a lot of thought to regulating them. As the Reports themselves and the STA operators’ responses show — this is a very complex issue.
There is one person in MNBP who is uniquely positioned to see this issue from both sides: Mike Campbell. He worked for Bruce County for 18 years as a Planner; the last 10 of those years he was the County’s Senior Planner. Then in 1995, he resigned to work on a new business — Bruce Peninsula Cottage Rentals (now rentcottage.com). He sold rentcottage.com in 2012 and is in the process of selling his last rental property in April of this year. That is to say: he understands both sides of this issue very well but has no vested interest.
He is broadly supportive of what the consultant’s report proposes — much of it is consistent with a brief he submitted last May — but he thinks that many of the regulatory recommendations would prove difficult or impossible to implement.
The report proposes a relatively low registration fee with a complex system of administrative fees and penalties. The (not mentioned in the report) rationale for this probably stems from the fact that if an STA operator is fined in a Provincial Court, the prosecuting municipality doesn’t get a cent. But “Administrative Fees” are like parking fines — the municipality can keep them.
Campbell suggests that this is not practical. The administrative work involved in handling these $2,500 “Administrative Deposits” would cost more than the “Fees” would generate. He feels that it would be a lot simpler to set up a self registration portal where STA owners can self register for a reasonable fee (say $200 per unit per year). Costs to the municipality would be minimal since it would be a self registration model. $200 from every unit, collected online, ($200 times 600 = $120,000) is a much better source of income than trying to get $250 “administrative fees” from a small number of violations. How many violations would there be from 600 STAs? Campbell suggests there might be 20-30 valid complaints per year. He bases this on his 17 years of renting 160 places for an average of 6 weeks per summer. That’s 960 rentals per year. Mike and his wife/partner Jean Marie responded personally to most of the complaints they received over those 17 years and there weren’t that many of them. Quite a few of the complaints were also completely unreasonable, he notes, such as a campfire smoke complaint from a cottage 100m from the fire or people talking at night around a campfire.
Don’t spend a lot of effort on the registration process, he recommends. Make it easy to register and pay online. Let the operators fill out a form online, pay online, scan and submit their septic inspection forms online. If you make it difficult or expensive people won’t register and will just go underground. Figure out how much enforcement is going to cost you, he continues, and make sure the registration fees cover that cost. Don’t worry about fines as a revenue source.
He also feels that trying to control STA development by Zoning is going to be difficult to design and impossible to enforce. There have been zoning bylaws in place for over 40 years and all of a sudden STAs are an issue now? What has changed? “Just licence them and move on,” he says.
He feels that concerns about septic systems at STAs are overblown. Rentcottage handled 900 properties over the 17 years he was involved and there were a total of nine septic failures. That said, he approves of the idea of requiring a pump-out every two years.
“If you have nightly bookings, that’s not a cottage, it’s a hotel.”
Campbell says the best way to deal with complaints and capacity issues is through removal of an STA’s operating licence. But he warns that enforcement is going to be very difficult. Determining what constitutes a valid complaint is very subjective. Who should make that decision? Does the Bylaw Officer have to carry a dB meter to measure noise? If the identity of the complainant is secret, what’s stopping people from lodging fictitious complaints against neighbours they have a beef with?
Campbell likes the idea of the three classes of STAs but he has doubts as to how the municipality could police the maximum number of rental nights permitted in each category of licence. For example a Class A licence would only permit a total of four weeks of rentals. It would be very simple to get around this limitation. If questioned, the owner could claim that a family member was using the place for three or four weeks. If the municipality has no ability to audit how many weeks an individual is renting, how on earth can they possibly enforce the limitation?
But there are important areas where Campbell disagrees with both the consultant’s report and the STA operators’ response. He feels that the minimum stay for all classes of STAs should be five nights. “If you have nightly bookings, that’s not a cottage, it’s a hotel.” Bookings of less than five nights are in direct competition with motels and are too disruptive of the neighbourhood. They should be more heavily regulated.
Think about that one for a minute.
That would address a lot of the complaints, wouldn’t it?
The STA regulation process is still unfolding. The report’s recommendations are conspicuously labelled “Draft”. The municipality is still accepting feedback. Give them some.
