ACK Now Responds To Former Ally

To the editor: Due to ACK Now’s previous association with Nantucket Neighborhoods First (NNF), we feel it is necessary to respond to Matt Peel’s recent letter.

While ACK Now supported NNF in the past, we are not now connected with them in any way. We contributed to their efforts in 2024 because they said they were interested in protecting neighborhoods on Nantucket and that they were 100 percent behind their zoning Article 2. In the weeks leading up to the Town Meeting, we had very little communication with NNF, and they dropped their minimum stay requirement at the last minute. That requirement was later added as a positive motion on the floor of Town Meeting at the behest of the Nantucket Land & Water Council and others.

Notwithstanding the divergence of our paths, Article 2 garnered a 55 percent majority vote at Town Meeting, only 97 votes short of the 67 percent majority needed. One wonders what would have happened if all of us had worked together.

Now it appears that NNF has sided with commercial interests who love everything about their article 69, except the 70-day limit, which they will try to change on the floor of Town Meeting. Although we believe many of the NNF group are well-intentioned, Matt Peel’s article 69 protects the wrong interests. It protects investors who recently purchased houses to run mini-hotels while it shuts out year-round and seasonal homeowners who have owned homes for 25 years or longer and haven’t rented recently. The result will be that commercial operators, who are ruining neighborhoods and sucking-up housing, get rewarded with scarcity value; and homeowners, who may need to rent to make ends meet, get shut out. What about the right to rent? To say this is fundamentally unfair and possibly illegal is an understatement of the first order.

The process for becoming licensed under article 69 will make Nantucket look like Pamplona with a crush of people who will claim they rented. The winners will be those that can show online platform transactions bringing house parties and multiple cars to Nantucket. And, in three years we are back at it again with all the new data and keen management which NNF promises to deliver. We don’t think so. Article 69 is complicated and impossible to administer.

Another flaw of Article 69 is that it attempts to change zoning by legalizing STRs in residential neighborhoods with a general bylaw. The Attorney General should not approve it because it allows investors to run mini-hotels, and the Land Court ruled in Ward 1 that a STR can’t be the principal use of a dwelling in residential districts. That ruling was not appealed by the Town. Who knows what the Land Court will do in Ward 2, but, as of right now, those properties where the principal use of the dwelling is STR like the one in Monomoy, are illegal under the Land Court’s ruling in Ward 1. It seems that Article 69 seeks to protect and manage these commercial operations in neighborhoods. Sounds like a rental park to us.

Nantucket voters have rejected articles like 69 and 66 on five different occasions in the last four years! The best way forward is for those who voted for Article 2 last year to try to get friends to come to Town Meeting in early May and vote for the McClure and Wright articles (67 and 68), both of which set forth liberal rules for renting on an accessory use basis. The Land Court has suggested that rentals are legal, and articles 67 and 68 lay out clear and concise accessory use rules which, unlike article 69, protect the right to rent and neighborhoods. Even the Planning Board, which again voted to ignore voters and support the Baltzer, unrestricted STR article (66), commented that the McClure zoning article (67) was a good alternative to full legalization of STRs.

The proponents of articles 66 and 69 will be out there stoking fear by saying “we can’t let the court decide” or “there will be no rentals” without the passage of their articles. Don’t buy it. The voters who gave article 2 a 55 percent majority last year voted for the right to rent and will do so again!

Articles 66 and 69 are about moving backwards. On the other hand, passage of articles 67 and 68 will end this debate, improve the housing shortage, preserve the environment and infrastructure; and, most importantly, protect the community.

Peter McCausland