Tourist Rooming House workload draws scrutiny

A tight staffing situation in the Oneida County zoning office has prompted at least one county supervisor to wonder if something can be done to alleviate the overload by outsourcing tourist rooming house (TRH) compliance and enforcement chores, but, after a zoning committee discussion this past week, the department and staff will be sticking with the status quo, at least for now.

Supervisor Billy Fried wanted the matter on last week’s zoning committee agenda, saying he was wondering whether, with staff turnover and shortages, something could be taken off the department’s plate that would be more efficient for the county as well as cost-neutral.

And that “something” could be work associated with TRHs, Fried said, such as identifying TRHs that might not be registered, as well as enforcement tasks.

“Making sure, if it’s in the town of Minocqua for example, they’re paying the room tax and following X, Y, and Z that I sometimes feel is not as efficient as it should be,” Fried said. “I didn’t know if there is a need by the department to look at a different way of handling them or not.”

Oneida County zoning director Karl Jennrich said there definitely could be a different way of approaching TRHs, but, for context, and referencing a memo he had previously sent to zoning supervisors, he took the committee through the county’s history with TRH permitting and compliance, particularly the county’s previous contract with a company named Granicus.

“On September 21, 2017, what ended up happening is that Gov. Scott Walker at the time signed 2017 Wisconsin Act 59,” Jennrich explained. “Prior to this act, Oneida County, in various zoning districts, prohibited short-term rentals or any rental less than 30 consecutive days. And so over the years the committee/county board sent me down to Madison to testify in opposition to various efforts to allow short-term rentals.”

On the last such occasion, Jennrich recalled, he ran into Tom Larson of the Wisconsin Realtors Association, who expressed his belief that the ability to rent a home is not a zoning-related matter. 

“‘It’s a right. Someone should have the right to rent out their home on a short-term basis for whatever reason,’” Jennrich said Larson told him. “So the realtors, and I say this respectfully, somewhat won, but the law did allow counties to regulate short-term rentals to allow for seven consecutive days or longer.”

And that’s what Oneida County did, Jennrich said, enacting an ordinance that, in certain zoning districts, renting six days or less was prohibited. 

“So therefore seven consecutive days or greater is allowed,” he said. “And during that time, we required administrative review permits on all tourist rooming houses.”

Local reaction

Jennrich said the county did not raise the permitting standard to the level of a conditional use permit (CUP).

“I was called to come before various towns because the towns were upset that the county was allowing it,” he said. “But we respectfully said, ‘We’re not. If you’re upset with this, you’ve got to talk to the state of Wisconsin.’ There were a lot of people that wanted to allow rentals. There’s a lot of people that don’t want them next to them, period. And this is going to be that way forever.”

As part of that, Jennrich said, the county signed a contract in 2021 with Granicus for about $15,000 to basically conduct address identifications. Granicus staff, Jennrich said, sold themselves as the best thing “since sliced bread.”

“They said they could take a look at all internet platforms, they could tell us where the short-term rentals were, they could tell us how long they had been renting,” he said. “And we did utilize that.”

As part of that, too, Jennrich said, then-supervisor Robert Thome wanted to establish a TRH task force to figure out what the health department was going to do and what the planning and development department was going to do because the health department issues the licenses for TRHs and the zoning department just issues administrative review permits. 

Tasks in addition to address identification emerged out of the task force’s work, Jennrich said.

“We hired Granicus to have three additional ‘modules,’ which was a 24-7 hotline, a number you could call to file complaints; mobile permitting registration; and compliance monitoring, in the amount of $14,041,” he said. “It was appropriated and the money came from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA. And identification helped in the beginning because again, we would have to look at it manually. Granicus could take a look at everything at all times.”

Sometimes, Jennrich said, their information was wrong, but at least they gave the department information.

“Sometimes the information they gave us, we couldn’t find parcel identification numbers,” he said. “Others may have had multiple listings of the same property on different platforms.”

But overall, at least with address identification, it worked, Jennrich said. 

Not so with the other modules, the zoning director added, and so the staff documented the problems they had with those modules because Jennrich said there were people who really wanted the department to keep them. 

“And the only reason why we didn’t is because at the time we converted over to Ascent,” he said, referring to a digital permit management application. “Ascent is what we use for all of our permits. It’s how we enter in permits, how we track permits. And there was really no communication between Ascent and Granicus, or it was going to be very impossible to do.”

Jennrich said Granicus didn’t quite understand that the county had a separate program that they had to integrate with, and they never could get it to integrate. 

“Granicus may have been a good product for a county that actually had nothing,” he said. “They could try to use it to regulate TRHs or to generate their permits or automatically have their permits renewed. But we use Ascent.”

Because of the incompatibility, Jennrich said the county board allowed the department to drop Granicus completely.

“And at the time I said that at some time in the future you may want to get Granicus again to see if we are missing some,” he said.

The overall picture

Permit-wise, Jennrich said the department issued 71 permits in 2024; 80 permits in 2023; 117, in 2022; and 108 in 2021. Those numbers included properties that were either sold, no longer rented, or withdrew applications, he said.

“Applications for renewal for TRH permits began in 2023,” he said. “In 2024 there were 121 tourist rooming house renewals and they paid fees of $18,151.”

As far primary enforcement of the ordinance, Jennrich said that falls on him. As far as citations go, various staff “take vacations,” Jennrich said.

“Meaning, if we get a complaint …. about a rental that doesn’t have a permit, they go online, they get the information, they take a look at Ascent. They see whether or not we have a permit and, if there’s a permit, we’d want to see if it’s in compliance with the conditions of that permit. If it’s not, it gets turned over to me, we generate a letter, we have a complaint filed, and a letter or citation goes out.”

Jennrich said there have been 113 citations between 2021 and 2025.

“And that was either they didn’t have a permit or they did not comply with the permit,” he said. “And all those citations are issued with my name on it. I’m the one who goes to court to defend those citations. The staff provides all the administrative support for that.”

In Vilas County, Jennrich mentioned, the county board gave the zoning department two part-time positions, one purely for tourist rooming house administration and enforcement, and the second person just to issue sanitary permits and do inspections. 

“So he’s got a full-time part-time position now to take the load off,” he said. “To make it more efficient, you probably could add additional staff to help with it. But again, I just realized that the money is not there for the additional staff.”

Bottom line, Jennrich said, land use specialists Scott Ridderbusch and Carla Blankenship are issuing the permits and Blankenship does all the renewals, while his name is on the letters and he’s the one following up. 

Blankenship added some detail to the contract with Granicus.

“So I think Granicus would be good for, or is designed to register an address that is rented,” Blankenship said. “When we got into it, we wanted to put special conditions, different conditions depending on zoning. They did not have a way to generate custom letters to assign conditions to each permit individually. We wanted to reference the POWTS [septic] system that was on-site to determine the number of guests that were on site.”

But that was not something they could do, Blankenship said.

“So we were going to have to use our Ascent program manually, create the letters, take out the letters that their system automatically generated just saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve registered your property’ and trust Granicus then to take our letter and mail it out on their end,” she said. “But we were losing control over what we do have and the particulars in the good work that we do do. It was getting way more muddled than it was assisting us.”

We wanted to like it, we really did

Jennrich said the department wanted the system to work: “We wanted it to work. It just did not work.”

“We were way more detailed and had way more control over the information than what their system was,” Blankenship added: “Which, like I said, was simply a registration. A registration number. ‘Congratulations, you paid your money for the year, we know you’re renting.’ And that was it.”

Jennrich said it did work for identifying those addresses that weren’t registered in the system. 

“So yes, we used it to monitor conditions and we issued a lot of citations based on Granicus,” he said. “We got a lot of people registered in those years, …, and that’s due partially because we had Granicus plus staff was actively — the term I used — going ‘on vacation,’ going on the internet.”

Blankenship also said some of the information in Granicus’s address identification was different than information the county had, much of it because “they didn’t know the history of each property.” 

“So then we would get reports from them and they would say, ‘Look how great we’re doing. You have 298 properties that are non-compliant,’” she said. “So we went through all of those and really only 30 of them were, but we were doing the manual work going through their report and figuring out the criteria as to why it really wasn’t. It was completely different information.”

Also, huge numbers of TRHs were being reported, Jennrich said, but he said the numbers were inflated for various reasons, perhaps counting properties multiple times because they advertised on different platforms, and there was an issue with the county line in that the report swept in some properties in Vilas County.

Still, Jennrich said, it did help them as far as the identification in the beginning. 

Fried said staff didn’t need to defend not using the vendor. 

“That’s up to you,” he said. “I was just looking to make sure there wasn’t an option that’s not being considered to fill a void that might be with the TRHs, especially with you missing staff.”

As far as enforcement right now, Jennrich said, the department is doing what it can until another administrative support person is added, but it’s a low priority.

TRHs in general are a real concern to him personally, Fried said, given what he thinks it has done to available housing.

“There’s two things,” he said. “One, you want consistency. So the ones following the rules are following the same rules that the other person is. But the other thing is, personally, I don’t think we should be making it easy for people to do this. That’s the concern. And if we’re overwhelmed and we’re concentrating on other things which are higher priority, great. But if we’re missing an opportunity for someone else to stay after these, I would want to know if there’s an option out there.”

Jennrich said the only other option is that he did get direction from the committee that he shouldn’t be issuing citations right away but instead sending warning letters.

“The only thing that galls me a little bit is, the administrative review permits say, this is what the occupancy is, this is what your length of stay is,” he said. “We get a complaint, go online, and all of a sudden they’re saying, instead of six people, they have 10 people. Instead of one week, they’re saying three days. And I would like to issue citations right off the get-go just because they just got the permit and they know.”

Ultimately, Jennrich said, the department is holding its own, at least as far as enforcement. 

That may change as the season progresses, Jennrich said,

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.