The township’s 14,300 citizens want to protect the character of their affluent neighborhoods from the summer weekend bacchanals that have increasingly been invading their hometown.
“Every board meeting we had last year, we had considerable public comment about short-term rentals. The first hearing, we had 40 people. The second, it was 220 people,” said township Supervisor John Nash. “The bottom line is simple: Who pays for the enforcement, the medical responders? The people who live beside the short-term rentals who don’t want them there. Let’s say you want to buy a house in a nice neighborhood and all of sudden it’s full of rentals. The fabric of the community starts to go down and the owner of the rental lives in Timbuktu. They don’t care.”
After eight months of study and debate, the township voted unanimously in December to pass an ordinance that limits, but doesn’t outright ban short-term rentals in the community. It was the town’s best solution to a problem that township officials are sure will explode even more as online rental sites such as VRBO and Airbnb begin to proliferate.
But then, the state Legislature introduced a pair of bills in the House and Senate earlier this year that would limit local communities’ abilities to set rules and regulations for short-term rentals. It’s just the latest measure that preempts local ordinances, in favor of statewide rules that communities must live by.
Republicans, who are the primary sponsors and supporters of the local preemption bills, say they’ve proposed the limits on local officials to avoid patchwork regulations across the state.
“We’re trying to avoid a patchwork of having to do things one way in one county and another way in another county,” said Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive. “If everybody gets treated differently, then that makes it hard for anybody to do business.