Weekend rentals not dead yet in Oneida County

After a debate that was at times circular and somewhat confusing, the Oneida County Board of Supervisors voted 12-3 on Tuesday to keep the door open for single-family housing rentals for less than a week, declining to pass a zoning committee resolution that recommended denial of an ordinance amendment to allow shorter-term stays.

In August, after holding a public hearing on a town of Three Lakes’ proposed ordinance amendment to allow one rental per seven-day period for Tourist Rooming Houses (TRH) in single-family zoning districts — essentially allowing for a shorter stay within that week — the zoning committee sent the resolution to the full board recommending that it be voted down.

The board did not do so on Tuesday, but the vote did not actually approve shorter than weekly stays. The status quo remains for minimum stays of at least seven days, at least for now, but the vote returns the matter to the zoning committee for further consideration. Had the denial recommendation passed, the issue would be dead. 

Support for the status quo minimum of seven-day stays came primarily from the town of Minocqua, as reflected in the votes of supervisors Billy Fried and Bob Almekinder to maintain the seven-day minimum. The only other supervisor voting with them was supervisor Steven Schreier.

According to the corporation counsel, the no vote sends the ordinance amendment back for further review or for crafting a different version. 

At the outset of the board meeting, supervisor Dan Hess said the committee acknowledged mixed feelings across the county’s municipalities. He pointed to serious housing shortages, as well as concerns expressed by many townships and residents about protecting single-family zoning districts.

“Some towns were for it, some were against it,” Hess said. “It came back where we decided to go with a no on it.”

Later, Hess said he understood the changing dynamic of tourism.

“I think with the change of society, how it goes right now, people are coming up for the weekends,” he said. “I mean, they’re in kids’ sports nonstop. They can’t come up here for a full week’s time. So I understand that aspect of it as well.”

In recommending denial, Hess said the committee offered an option of creating an additional special zoning district for towns that they could adopt to allow one rental for a seven-day period within that particular district.

However, Hess himself stated that, as a town official, he believed towns would find it burdensome, and supervisor Collette Sorgel agreed.

“I respectfully urge you to consider modifying the ordinance to allow one rental for a seven-day period which preserves the intent of the current law, allowing the two- or three-night rental or weekend stays,” Sorgel said. “This common sense solution supports local economies, tourism, and property owners alike, while limiting turnover and disruption in our single-family residential neighborhoods.”

She asked the board to keep the issue alive: “What we’re asking for is the board to talk about this more, and if you vote no today, it does come back and we can have more discussion.”

Would it make a difference?

Supervisors raised several issues throughout the deliberation. At one point, supervisor Russ Fisher, who presided over the board meeting in the excused absence of county board chairman Scott Holewinski, said one issue was Three Lakes’s lack of a hotel to accommodate tourists.

Sorgel said a hotel wouldn’t solve the problem.

“Even if we had a hotel, it wouldn’t be enough rooms for the events we have in the area,” she said. “We still would have questions on ‘can people rent for less than a week?’ because families come up for baseball. We have a lot of activities and no place to stay. So the hotel would help, but it’s not the only reason we want this. We need more rooms in our county.”

For his part, supervisor Robb Jensen said he appreciated the housing shortage concerns but didn’t know if the TRH seven-day restriction made any difference.

“I can just share with you a 50-foot lot next to me, maybe 120-feet deep by 135-feet, sold for $340,000,” Jensen said. “I don’t know if these properties are taking away from the housing shortage of people who are coming in to work in Oneida County. I don’t know that. …. So I’m a little bit concerned about how it affects the shortage. I don’t think we can tell somebody who has a seasonal home here in Oneida County that they shouldn’t.”

Jensen wanted to know how many complaints there were, specifically for his town of Crescent, and he asked, too, about enforcement. If someone rents a house for three days on two occasions during the same week, how does the county know?

Hess said he didn’t think the county would see a huge change with shorter rentals.

“I don’t see a huge difference with it,” he said. “One rental per seven days is basically what you’ve got now, and I’ve said that in the zoning meetings.”

As for enforcement, assistant zoning director Todd Troskey said there were about 100 complaints a year.

“Some [relate to] longer stays, others to shorter days, and to noise complaints and things that we don’t really regulate,” he said. “It’s all over the board for complaints that actually come in here.”

Troskey said enforcement was key.

“The county will enforce it if we have a zoning district,” he said. “It always comes down to enforcement, and to me, this is a similar thing. Some of the supervisors here who have been on the planning committee before might remember our overlay districts that we used to have where certain towns wanted minimum house sizes. And so it would be a similar type of situation to that where we would develop a single family zoning [district] and then all the other districts that would apply to that, like residential farming. The other ones would also have to be set up in the same way and have to be a separate district within that already created district as well.”

Supervisor Bob Almekinder said adopting the Three Lakes proposal would force the shorter stays down the throats of every town, but creating a new zoning district would give each town an option.

“We recommended creating the new zoning districts for the towns to adopt so they could opt into a system where they could have one rental per week — two days, three days,” Almekinder said. “Some of the towns don’t want this, and we don’t want to force it on all towns. We’re giving the towns the opportunity to adopt their own if they want it but not forcing it on the towns that don’t want it.”

And there are a lot of towns in the county that don’t want it, Almekinder reiterated. However, Sorgel countered that assertion, saying at one point that four towns sent letters of support for the ordinance change, four sent letters of non-support, and the rest said nothing.

Almekinder said that special zoning districts were already in place in towns.

“This gives the towns the opportunity to adopt that new zoning district so they can have the one rental per seven days,” he said. “We represent 21 towns here. There’s already districts in the county — downtown Minocqua is one of those districts, downtown Lake Tomahawk is one of those districts, downtown Woodruff is one of those. We can adopt those different districts to accommodate this for those towns.”

Steven Schreier, who represents Rhinelander, expressed concern about an enforcement quagmire. 

“My biggest concern with what I’ve heard so far personally is that there’s the potential to have 21 different zoning ordinances that planning and zoning would have to enforce,” Schreier said. “Am I wrong? Because I don’t think the towns are going to enforce this. It’s going to be planning and zoning. Unless there are towns who have their own planning and zoning enforcement, I’m guessing this is mostly going to be dumped on an already pretty overburdened department to ask them to keep track. I think this is overly burdensome on not only the department, but also on the towns as well, to say, figure out what you want.”

Schreier said he was unsure that, regardless of how supervisors voted, anyone would be very happy.

“Ultimately at the end of the day, I don’t know that I necessarily have a particular concern or an issue with the denial,” he said. “It’s just that we do have to recognize that it is probably not going to make a certain percentage of people happy. And it is also probably going to embolden some others to feel like, well, at least I forestalled all that for its foreseeable future. But I don’t see this issue going away. I really don’t. I think Airbnbs and tourist room houses, it’s going to be one of the more contentious issues that we’re going to be dealing with in the foreseeable future.”

Throughout the debate, there was back-and-forth about who supported each side.

Fried pointed to a public comment from a resident who was concerned about single-family districts.

“If any of you can tell me you’ve had someone who lives in a single-family district call you to support this, I’d love to hear that,” he said. “I’ve had no one, not one person, ask me to change any of the wording. The discussion is always how can we limit it more? How can we get it out of single-family? So I hope you’ll support the denial.”

Sorgel countered that the department had “quite a few letters” in support of moving to one rental per seven-day period, but Fried said it was his impression that all the correspondence, at least that he had seen, seemed to come from people who were renting in single-family districts.

Supervisor Ted Cushing said he had short-termers next door, and there was no problem.

“I live on Lake Katherine in Hazelhurst, and we have a home alongside of us that is a corporation shared by eight families,” Cushing said. “Talk about short-term rentals. We have an understanding with these people that if they don’t like things we’re doing, they come and tell us. If we don’t like things they’re doing, we go tell them. We get along fine.”

Cushing also said the town’s plan commission supported the Three Lakes proposal, as did the town board. The issue came up at a vociferous town board meeting, he said, with 100 people attending on another matter, and no one got up to make a comment about it. 

“So I’m going to just tell you I am supporting the way the plan commission voted and the way the town board voted,” he said.

Supervisor Kyle Timmons said that he dealt with the issue directly because of his position working for the town of Woodruff.

“So I’ve been doing all the fire inspections for our town, for the Airbnbs,” Timmons said. “Those are the only people that have been for it. Yesterday I was mowing roadsides and three people in one subdivision came out. They didn’t know who I was. They just wanted to vent and they were against it. They wanted to try to stop it somehow, some way in their subdivision. … So I haven’t heard any support besides the people that actually own the houses.” 

Supervisor Lenore Lopez said she agreed about the housing shortage issue, but said that missed the point.

“However, this doesn’t alleviate the housing shortage issue,” Lopez said. “Does it encourage more people to purchase homes to make them tourist rooming houses? I don’t think so. And then where did all those motorcycles stay [during this last week’s fall ride]? Right? They’re not here all week. … I am just asking. It was only a weekend that they were here. Were they staying at these tourist rooming houses or did they fill up hotels? Because I sure didn’t see all the hotels in Minocqua filled with bikes, so they must’ve been staying somewhere. So again it would come down to enforcement.”

In other county board action, the board unanimously and without comment approved hiring Chad Lynch as the county’s new corporation counsel, succeeding former corporation counsel Michael Fugle.

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