May 19, 2022 at 12:35 p.m.
Tourist Rooming House regulations: Enough is enough
Tourist Rooming House regulations: Enough is enough
They are busy bees, though, we will give them that. They spend every day humming with the excitement of being living, breathing birthing bodies for new regulations. These regulators do not believe in regulatory abortion, either: They bring every new restriction to full term, and then throw it into the dump with all the others, so many they can't even keep up with them, or even remember the names of half of them.
The latest frenzy is the absolute overregulation of tourist rooming houses (TRH), which are mostly people renting out their homes to our seasonal visitors. It really should be a win-win situation: We need the rooms in a booming tourist economy and these days these rentals are just the kinds of accommodations people are looking for. On the other side of the equation, people can make money by renting out their homes.
And it would be a win-win were it not for the regulatory assault that zoning committee chairman Scott Holewinski and the zoning committee have launched against those trying to run TRHs. It's already a regulatory nightmare.
Start with the licensing overreach. If you want to rent your house out, you have to have a state tourist rooming house license, a county administrative review permit, and, in most cases, a town permit.
The occupancy is strictly governed. So is off-street parking. So is signage. And if you run a TRH, you are prohibited from having recreational vehicles, campers, tents, or other temporary lodging to provide additional accommodations for paying guests, or anybody else, for that matter.
You have to have weekly garbage pick up, and you have to prove that to the government by showing a contract with a licensed garbage hauler or giving the name of a private party responsible for weekly trash removal.
You can't have outdoor activities between 10 p.m and 7 a.m., even if you're in a cabin in the middle of the woods. The deer are trying to sleep.
And if you are in a single-family zoning district, or forestry 1B or 1C, or Manufacturing/Industrial, or rural residential, you have to rent for at least seven consecutive days.
If all this isn't bad enough, thanks to supervisor Bob Thome and the surrender of the previous zoning committee, the county has launched an expensive effort to track down, fine, and punish those who aren't complying, including hiring an outside company to spy on residents and perhaps to grow county government by hiring new personnel to stalk people who dare try to contribute to the Northwoods economy.
Apparently, there are quite a few who are evading the permitting process, or trying to. That's not surprising, given how absurd all the regulations are. The county is committed to aggressively hunting down the cheaters, much as if they were World War II war criminals still on the run, partly to make money for the county (a highly dubious proposition) and partly because saddling people with overburdensome regulations and then hounding them when they don't comply makes the county's leadership feel good about themselves.
It gets even worse. This last month we learned that the county isn't just prosecuting the cheaters, it's prosecuting those it thinks will cheat .. before the fact.
That is to say, some people have been advertising weekend or daily rentals when they can only legally rent for seven consecutive days, and, if these people have a permit in hand, the county has been citing them to the tune of a $438 fine.
That recently drew the ire of supervisor Mike Roach, a new member of the zoning committee, who believes prosecuting someone without any proof that the person actually rented for fewer than seven days is egregious policy for multiple reasons.
First, it is conflating the act of advertising with the actual act of renting, and it presumes the person is guilty of the ordinance violation without any proof. So far, the court has convinced at least one judge to go along in a case in which the property owner said she did not actually rent her place for fewer than seven days. The judge was Michael Bloom, president of the good-old-boy's club and, based on this decision, a future game-show host. Or, if Democrats keep control of the presidency, a Supreme Court justice.
Anyway, the county is prosecuting permit citations without any evidence of a permit violation.
Second, by regulating the language a TRH permit holder uses in ads, the county is infringing on the free speech rights of its citizens.
Let's say a person advertises a home for a weekend rental, and, when a customer calls, the person tells the potential customer they really can't rent it for less than seven days. Maybe the customer says, OK, I'll do that; maybe the customer says no thanks. Maybe they bargain and negotiate.
What's the harm in that? Either way the permit holder has not violated any condition of the permit. No matter. In the county's eyes, the property owner is guilty anyway.
To be sure, in egregious and rare instances, a customer might file a truth in advertising claim, but even then that's a deceptive advertising complaint - bait-and-switch is illegal - in the state's jurisdiction, not the county's. The county could enact a policy of revoking a permit of someone found guilty of deceptive advertising - we're guessing it would likely never happen - but that's a lot different than pursuing every advertising claim as absolute proof of guilt, without any investigation or evidence.
Even more disturbing is that the department is no longer sending warning letters before issuing citations, as was the long-standing practice. There is no outreach, no attempt to discuss the situation with the property owner, or to find our what the situation is. It's hammer them first. And even more disturbing is the fact that it was the zoning committee's and not the department's idea to bring the hammer down without warning and to prosecute those who merely advertise.
We hope that the addition to the zoning committee of Roach and supervisor Tommy Ryden will move it in a different direction, but in recent years under Holewinski the direction reminds us of the worst days before Gary Baier, when anti-property rights corporation counsel Larry Heath ruled the roost and was the de facto zoning director and committee chairman.
None of this is to say there should be no regulation of TRHs.
We understand that, even though single-family zoning is largely a negative construct, it is the central principle of modern residential zoning. And people do buy in single family neighborhoods for the peace and quiet that can be quickly disrupted by endless house parties at the house next door weekend after weekend. We also recognize that in resort areas around the country, corporations are buying up single-family housing on lakefronts and on beaches with the express intent to rent them out year-round, turning those properties into commercial enterprises in residential zones.
So reasonable regulation is necessary, but it must be balanced with private property rights, with the constitutional right to use your property freely, so long as it does not interfere with the rights of others. On that note, a couple of suggestions.
First, quit prosecuting people for mere expression in advertising before you get sued. Second, limit the committee's search and destroy mission to merely identifying TRHs that haven't received a permit. That's as far as the county's surveillance effort should go.
Then, remove all the absurd regulations. Remove the length-of-stay restrictions. Remove the 10 p.m. curfew. Remove the occupancy restrictions. Remove the public health restrictions. Remove the parking restrictions.
That is to say, let the market work. If people rent a place that is unclean, they won't return. If the parking is cramped, they might not come back. All the conditions the government feels compelled to impose would be far more efficient if left to the invisible hand to impose. And not only won't they come back if they suffer a bad experience, they will post reviews that warn others of the conditions they will find.
The market can do much better than the government in maintaining real-life quality standards. All of which brings us to the real complaint - the house parties and large crowds late at night and other effects that ruin the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. And this has an easy solution as well.
And that is, let the ordinance be complaint-driven. That is, let local complaints trigger ordinance enforcement. If a house party is going on in that cabin in the woods, and no one hears, is it even a house party at all?
If a house party is going on in a residential neighborhood and nobody cares, why should county government care? If they do care and complain, then the county should act, and only then. That's exactly the way the DNR handles pier violations - it is complaint-driven enforcement, and it has worked well for years.
Much of the county's TRH enforcement is complaint-driven already, but enforcing length-of-stay restrictions to try and ensure peace in the neighborhood is an inefficient guardrail and an artificial mechanism that unfairly restricts property owners, and inefficiently so because of the difficulty of enforcing the provisions anyway.
Let the regulators be the people in the neighborhood rather than one-size-fits-all bureaucrats. That's why we call them neighborhoods - left to their own initiative, neighbors will build the neighborhoods they want, some more restrictive, some less so.
Empowering people rather than government regulators is the surest way to secure the peace and prosperity, to balance the competing property rights of single-family zoning and of the individual.
That's a lesson Holewinski and especially Bob Thome need to learn. They should fill in the regulatory garbage pit and close it forever. Then they should go a rent a TRH for two days in a quiet neighborhood. As they stroll around, they will be pleasantly surprised how fresh the air of freedom smells.
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