Pay The People On-Island

To the editor: On November 4th, Town Meeting returns, once again, to short-term rentals (STRs). Because the town and its voters could not enact effective ways to control the frat houses on Union Street, we get to participate in another engaging round of civic chest beating and fear mongering. Mr. Borgeson sees the Judge that forced this reckoning as leading “a legal assault on our democratic process.” Instead, I think the Judge has assaulted our cowardice and greed. As much as the town fathers and everyone with a hammer wants the STR problem to go away, he won’t let it.

Imagine if, instead of debating the islanders' god-granted right to rent their basements, we were debating the right to harvest scallops. Scallopers need to be licensed. They have limits on how much they can harvest. They have limits to the season. And, these days, they have plenty of scallops. What the proponents of Article 1 propose is that we do away with all of those limits and just let God and the Free Market decide. Nantucket has the last, wild, successful bay scallop fishery. Without limits, the fishery would be as still as the ones in Cape Cod Bay or Hyannis Harbor.

I want everyone at Town Meeting to make money. I want the off-island investors in Darien, Boston, and New York to lose money. Any regulation that doesn’t keep money on the island hurts the people in Town Meeting. That is my concern.

According to AirRoi, a company that studies AirBnB, the short-term rental business on Nantucket has dropped 5 percent since last year., the short-term rental business on Nantucket has dropped 5 percent since last year. The ten highest-earning hosts on Nantucket collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent—two collected over a million. None of those people can vote in Town Meeting.

The summer population has outgrown the island’s ability to support it. Our infrastructure, from police and fire to water, sewer, electricity, trash, ferries, and cellular, has buckled. Guess who has to pay for that? Look around Town Meeting. Further, I would suggest that the future “keys to local business” don’t come from weekend rentals, but the true winners of the American Golden Age will be buying ten to thirty-million-dollar properties. They will be the investors in the Nantucket Experience, not the DU frat coming for a long weekend.

Mr. Borgeson, the supporters of both articles, and I all want the same thing—everyone at Town Meeting getting paid. We disagree on how to do that. Nantucket has, by last check, 1,758 rental properties (of which 566 are on Airbnb). How many more can we afford? How many are owned by the people in the auditorium? How long do you want to wait on Old South or Surfside? How much more will you want to pay for electric, water, and taxes? How many more investors do we want to compete with Granny on Gold Star?

So, use this town meeting to keep more money on the island. I am sure that Article Two could use some good-faith amendments, but it goes a long way to keeping more of the money on the island and in the room.

Robert Barsanti