Could A Professional Mediator Help Break Nantucket's Short-Term Rental Stalemate?

Could a professional mediator finally break Nantucket’s short-term rental deadlock? We may be about to find out.

At a meeting on Wednesday, the Select Board discussed the possibility of bringing in a mediator to hold closed-door sessions with key stakeholders in an effort to craft a short-term rental (STR) bylaw for the 2026 Annual Town Meeting that could finally gain the backing of enough voters to pass.

With the shadow of Michael Vhay’s decision in favor of Silver Street resident Cathy Ward in her lawsuit against her neighbors and the Nantucket Zoning Board of Appeals hanging over the discussion, the Select Board expressed interest in finding a solution that could allow Nantucket to pass a zoning bylaw governing STRs.

“I couldn’t agree more that this is the right thing to do to pursue mediation,” Select Board member Tom Dixon said. “Town Meeting has got to agree on some form of codification…that’s got to be figured out, and I think that the only way that I see as possible to figure that out, and to see what folks are willing to accept, is through some kind of process like this where it’s open and people can speak their minds without fear.”

The Town has looked to a neutral third party to find a compromise before. After a series of Town Meetings yielded little in the way of comprehensive answers to the STR question, the Select Board formed the STR Work Group, which, with the help of a facilitator, crafted bylaws that met the required threshold of support from seven of its nine members. But it didn’t matter: the bylaws were defeated at Town Meeting. Some Select Board members wondered why this time would be any different.

“Haven’t we done this before?” Select Board member Malcolm MacNab asked. “We’re going to be arguing for probably several weeks about who is going to be on this, whose going to be represented, I’m just—I’m skeptical right now.”

There are crucial differences between facilitation and the mediation option that town counsel George Pucci suggested at Wednesday's Select Board meeting, however. One is that this mediation would be closed to the public.

“Mediation, as I’m proposing it, is not the process you have gone through so far,” Pucci said. “In a confidential mediation session, people are more free to speak their mind about what really their position is, what they’re willing to compromise on, what they’re willing to support and not support, and not have to worry about that being made public.”

That said, mediation can only work if enough relevant parties agree to participate, and it’s not yet clear whether the key players in Nantucket’s STR debate are willing to come to the table. Caroline Baltzar, who sponsored a failed warrant article at the 2025 Annual Town Meeting that would have codified STRs in the island’s zoning code as “Nantucket Vacation Rentals,” an allowed use by right in all zoning districts except the commercial/industrial (CI) district, said that no one she had spoken to in her efforts to gather support for a warrant article would be interested.

“There’s a large group of voters who have been participating in gathering signatures and signing a citizen’s warrant article, and none of those people that I’ve spoken to would be interested in returning to something that is so muddying as mixing a whole bunch of different people in a conversation,” Baltzar said. “I actually think it’s a public health concern, at this point, and to interrupt the process of just trying to get back to answering the judge, which is what the voters obviously were trying to do on May 5th…I think would be disrespectful.”

Ultimately, the bottom line may be that Nantucket is out of other options. If the voters can’t find a proposal to support, the courts will decide for them.

The Select Board will revisit the issue at a future meeting, likely later this month, and is seeking additional input from the community.