The Village of Suttons Bay will hold a special meeting of the village council this afternoon at 1pm to discuss potential changes to the village’s short-term rental ordinance. Specifically, council members will review a new short-term rental report prepared by Beckett & Raeder, an Ann Arbor-based landscape architecture, planning, engineering, and environmental services firm. Based on Beckett & Raeder’s report, the council could decide to limit short-term rentals in the Village of Suttons Bay more strictly than current regulations require.

As the Beckett & Raeder report notes, the Village of Suttons Bay is in the process of evaluating its short-term rental ordinance “to determine if the existing regulatory framework is aligned with the community’s goals for the management of short-term rentals in the village.” To aid the village council in future decision-making on the matter, Beckett & Raeder researched short-term rental regulations in communities around Leelanau County and throughout the state. The firm then then used those examples to shape recommendations “for establishing a cap on the number of short-term rentals (STRs)” in the Village of Suttons Bay, as well as “distribution process for STR licenses, application procedures, and additional considerations for a short-term rental ordinance.”

Per the report, the Village of Suttons Bay currently has 61 operating STRs, which represents 13 percent o the community’s total housing stock. Beckett & Raeder suggests that this number “exceeds the community’s capacity for STRs,” and that the village should adopt stricter regulations on STRs to bring itself into closer alignment with its own master plan. Of Leelanau County communities that have STR caps, the average limit is 6.4 percent of the housing stock/

Based on this information, Beckett & Raeder recommends that the Village of Suttons Bay cap its total number of STRs at 25 (or 5.5 percent of the dwelling units in the village), which would require eliminating 36 currently active STR licenses. The report also recommends that the village adopt rules for the distribution of licenses, which would allocate the 25 licenses as evenly as possible across different sections of the community.

The Suttons Bay village council will discuss these recommendations and other elements of the Beckett & Raeder report at today’s meeting, which starts at 1pm at 420 Front Street in the council meeting room. If the council decides to amend its STR ordinance and adopt the recommendations provided in the report, Beckett & Raeder has also provided a potential license distribution protocol for implementation, which would create a lottery system for property owners wishing to obtain licenses. That process would then occur annually going forward, with the validity period for STRs shifting from the current ordinance structure of three years to a reduced one-year period.

The full Beckett & Raeder report can be viewed here, while the agenda for today’s meeting is here.