Permit Fee Increase Under Consideration By Nantucket Board Of Health

JohnCarl McGrady •

Shutterstock 2475997497
Image via Shutterstock

The Nantucket Health Department is considering a revision to its fee schedule for permits, which was last updated six years ago in 2019.

Under the new rules, which are set to go into effect on the first day of the new year, many permits would become more expensive.

“It’s not something we want to do on businesses and such, but we do put in a lot of time with a lot of these things, and that’s just the way that it operates,” said John Hedden, Nantucket’s chief environmental health officer.

In most cases, the increases slightly outpace inflation. The cost of a pool permit offers a typical example. Currently, the permit costs $150. If the new rules go into effect, it will cost $200. Adjusting the old cost for inflation would yield a pricetag of around $190.

But town officials say that, at least in many cases, the costs of Nantucket’s permits are lower than average, and the increases are necessary to account for the cost of the time town staff members put in for each permit.

“Our food permits were lower than many of the towns. Definitely the Vineyard and Cape, and even other towns,” Hedden said. “I would say 80 percent of the towns’ fees were higher than ours for food.”

The cost of some other permits, including for wells and innovative-alternative septic systems, will remain unchanged, and the cost of a plan review for certain food establishments will actually decrease.

In another change, the fines assessed for installations of wells and septic systems without a permit will no longer be calculated as a multiple of the initial permit fee. The same is true for fines assessed for the permitless operation of an establishment that requires a permit. Instead, the penalties have all been set to $500 under the proposed rules.

“It’s kind of more of a financial administration thing in our department,” Hedden explained. “It says the permit should cost this much, and then you multiply times four, but that’s not really in our system. It has to be manually entered differently, so we thought that just a flat fee of $500 for operating without a permit is much easier financially, time-wise, to handle.”

This means that violators will often end up paying less than they would have if the old multiplier were applied to the new, increased permit costs.

“If someone has a pool they’re operating without a permit, four times that fee would have been $800 now, and now it’s only $500,” Board of Health vice chair Meredith Lepore said.

The Board of Health is still accepting public comment on the new fee structure.


Current News