Oak Bluffs has once again decided to hold off on proposing a controversial new bylaw at town meeting that seeks to regulate commercial events at residential properties.
At Tuesday’s select board meeting, the board narrowly voted to postpone asking voters if they’d like to force commercial event hosts at private homes to get the town’s blessing beforehand.
Voters tabled a previous version of the bylaw at town meeting in April, and select board member Mark Leonard spearheaded the rewrite presented this week. He said it was designed to mitigate safety concerns that arise from a lot of people congregating in one place by making event holders apply for a permit with the town 30 days prior to the event.
The bylaw would have applied to events with paid participation or ticketing and would have exempted nonprofits and political groups.
“If you want to have your daughter’s wedding at your house, perfectly fine, no issues. It’s your house, you can have as many people as you want,” he said. “If you start renting out your house to have weddings, now you’re becoming a commercial event in a commercial venue, and so this requires those people… to apply for a permit.”
The bylaw received pushback from members of the public earlier this year, as many feared it would cut their ability to have events at their homes.
Among the concerned was Keija Minor, who appeared virtually at Tuesday’s meeting to express her opposition to the bylaw as written.
“The idea that 10 people, 20 people, is going to be a public safety threat or disrupt the neighborhood, I don’t know if we’ve seen data that shows that,” she said.
Ms. Minor said Mr. Leonard invited her specifically to a small group to workshop the bylaw. But she criticized the process, noting that agendas, minutes and schedules for the small group were not made public.
“To do this in the shadows, I think, is a misstep that we won’t be able to undo,” Ms. Minor said.
Select board member Emma Green-Beach said she was not aware that meetings were taking place to craft a corporate events bylaw. She contrasted the process with the working group headed by select board member Bill Cleary over the past several months to hammer out a short-term rental bylaw. Meetings for that group were advertised to the public with agendas and minutes.
“That concerns me a little bit,” she said.
Under state law, town boards, committees and subcommittees are required to post agendas 48 hours ahead of a meeting, and then keep minutes of those meeitngs. While the short-term rental working group was formally created by the town, making it subject to these rules, Mr. Leonard told the Gazette that his group was not created by the select board, meaning it did not need to adhere to open meeting law.
“This work group invited people. Everybody got copies of minutes. Everybody got copies of different drafts. We incorporated inputs, and it went forward through a process,” Mr. Leonard said at Tuesday’s meeting. “It just was not on an agenda published on the town website.”
Select board vice chair Sean DeBettencourt both acknowledged Mr. Leonard’s efforts and said he wished the process had been more transparent.
“I would celebrate member Leonard’s efforts to try to engage with as many stakeholders as he could … and he went out of his way to make that process more transparent than potentially it needed to be, in that he could have simply written [the bylaw] and brought it to us…” Mr. DeBettencourt said. “I do wish [the meetings] had been agendaed. I do wish they had been posted.”
“The fact that the select board asked member Cleary to lead the [short-term rental] process and go through the public meetings doesn’t mean that every bylaw requires that,” he later added.
Ultimately, Mr. Leonard and Mr. Cleary voted to move the bylaw forward, while Ms. Green-Beach, Mr. DeBettencourt and select board chair Dion Alley voted against the measure.
“I do think that we have all worked really hard to gain and keep and build trust in Oak Bluffs and all the different facets of all the hard work that we do, and a lot of hard work went into this,” Ms. Green-Beach said. “We know that, but if other people don’t feel that, then … there could be detriment to that.”