By Lauren Dorsey, Staff Writer
Last week, Woodstock village officials acknowledged that the village is currently not enforcing its new Short-Term Rental (STR) Ordinance, which officially went into effect on the first of the year. “There are so many rules and so many ordinances, and I would love to be able to enforce them all at all times, but that is unfortunately not possible,” Woodstock Village Board of Trustees chair Seton McIlroy told the Standard on Saturday. “Our staff just doesn’t have the bandwidth.”
Originally designed as a joint set of rules for STR owners in Woodstock town and village, petitions were filed that required both municipalities to hold public votes on it. Voters in the town decided to abandon the new ordinance, while voters in the village upheld it.
In the lead-up to the vote, the municipal manager, the village trustees, and town selectboard members characterized the ordinance as setting a new standard for fairness and enforceability. “This is going to be an ordinance that will be much easier to follow and much easier to enforce,” Municipal Manager Eric Duffy said during a trustee meeting on March 12 of last year. During the town’s informational meeting preceding its public vote, selectboard member Laura Powell also characterized it as “easily enforceable.”
In the immediate aftermath of the village and town’s split votes, McIlroy said the boards’ commitment to STR regulation enforcement had not wavered. “What you will see that will be a change from before is despite having two [different] ordinances, there will be a real focus on having people in compliance,” McIlroy told the Standard in August.
Part of McIlroy’s optimism stemmed from the town and village’s joint purchase last year of a new STR enforcement software, which voters approved during the town and village’s annual meetings in March. The software, which costs $25,362 — a price that will increase by 7% each year Woodstock chooses to renew it, scrapes STR advertisements from hundreds of websites to identify local STRs that are operating out of compliance.
According to Duffy, the problem is that the software currently does not differentiate between properties in the village and town and does not automatically separate posts from hotels from those by private STR operators. “All these things can be changed, but it [takes] employee time to go through this and work with [the software company],” Duffy said during a trustee’s meeting last week.
Woodstock also does not have the staffing capacity to parse the software’s information manually, Duffy claims. “If we had someone dedicated, say 20 hours a week, we could definitely have all this streamlined and know that there are, for example, 15 people in the village operating and 11 registered and we could bring those four people up to code,” Duffy said during the Tuesday, Jan. 14 meeting, “Right now, it’s just Stephanie [Applefeller] and [she’s] running around every day doing 8,000 different things.” He was not able to give a date by which Woodstock’s staff will start working to shift the software’s parameters or start sifting through the available data.
In addition to identifying STRs, the software also helps facilitate permit applications. As of Jan. 21, Duffy said that the village has received 11 applications for STRs, which will generate an estimated $19,500 in revenue — less than the annual cost of the software subscription.
Duffy noted that until Woodstock’s staff begins using the software to identify out-of-compliance rentals, the village will also not be responding to individual resident complaints about STRs operating outside the limits of the ordinance. “We want to try to treat this equally,” Duffy told the Standard on Tuesday. “We’re not going to pick and choose and only enforce it if someone is coming in and saying, ‘My neighbors are doing an illegal short-term rental.'”
Both the town and village’s proposed budgets currently allocate funds for renewing the software this year, which voters will weigh in on at the town and village meetings in March. “We have to have that software,” said McIlroy. “Even though we’re not in the position we had hoped to be in, we need that data in order to be able to move forward and to make decisions.”
McIlroy emphasized that she and the rest of the trustees are “holding Eric’s feet to the fire — in the nicest way possible” on beginning to enforce the ordinance, but she declined to identify a specific deadline by which she wanted to see the process started. “If we got six months or nine months into it, I would probably get a little antsy,” said McIlroy. “But this is a second-tier priority. The first priority is the everyday work that goes into running [Woodstock].”