PROVINCETOWN — All four Outer Cape towns have at least one item in common on their town meeting warrants this spring: a vote on whether to accept the state’s new “seasonal communities” designation.
The designation was created for towns where a significant number of houses are used as vacation properties rather than year-round residences. It was written by Cape and Islands state Sen. Julian Cyr and included in the state’s $5.1-billion Affordable Homes Act, which Gov. Maura Healey signed into law last August.
The designation allows towns to pursue a number of policies to encourage year-round housing. Most of them had previously been requested by Cape and Islands towns, one by one, as home-rule petitions, Cyr told the Independent.
“Provincetown sent a home-rule petition asking for year-round deed restrictions in perpetuity,” said Cyr. “Truro came to the legislature to ask for a year-round housing trust. Edgartown and Nantucket came to us about the challenges they have in providing housing for their municipal workers.”
Most of the policies in the designation are optional, but it does require towns to adopt bylaws that allow for undersized lots if they are used for year-round housing only and to permit tiny homes for the same purpose.
The designation allows towns to fund housing specifically for town employees and for artists and writers if they choose, Cyr said. It also allows towns to raise their residential tax exemption (RTE) amount from the current maximum of 35 percent of the assessed value of the average residential property in town to 50 percent.
There is no funding currently attached to the designation, but Cyr said he is working to get a local-option real estate transfer fee passed at the state level.
Negative on a Positive
Whether to vote for the seasonal community designation became the subject of an extended conversation at Provincetown’s town meeting forum on March 26, with Provincetown Part-Time Resident Taxpayers’ Association President Pat Miller raising concerns about how the designation would be implemented.
Town Manager Alex Morse asked Miller if her objections were related to the RTE.
“This is a positive designation, so I’m curious what the specific concern is,” Morse said. “Is it the expansion of the residential tax exemption?”
“It’s not that anybody is for or against any of this,” Miller replied. “The problem is that it’s not clear at the moment because the regulations haven’t been written.”
The previous day, at the Truro Select Board meeting, Truro Part-Time Resident Taxpayers’ Association vice president Regan McCarthy had made a similar argument during the public comment period: “There’s no doubt that Truro is a seasonal community, nor is there any doubt that this designation could bring significant benefits to Truro,” McCarthy said. “At the same time, communities are being asked to accept this designation on the Cape and in the Berkshires when the actual regulations, conditions, and impacts of this designation are still in development and largely unknown.”
Barbara Carboni had said much the same thing the day before that at Wellfleet’s March 24 select board meeting.
“There are a couple of terms that are not defined yet,” said Carboni, a member of the board, “and I would not favor adopting this until we know what the regulatory definitions are. For example, the town will have to adopt a bylaw to permit undersized lots to be used for the creation of attainable year-round housing, and the term ‘undersized lots’ isn’t defined.”
Tom McNamara, president of the Eastham Part-Time Resident Taxpayers Association, highlighted the change in the RTE when he spoke at the Eastham Select Board meeting on March 24.
“Select boards throughout the Cape are eyeing the 50-percent RTE level offered by accepting the seasonal communities designation,” McNamara said, which “will only further exasperate” people affected by it.
Towns Make the Bylaws
Morse and Provincetown Select Board member Leslie Sandberg told Miller that the regulations the state still needs to write are minor and did not worry them. Morse added that any new zoning bylaws would still have to be written by planning boards and approved by town meeting voters, and Sandberg said that both Cyr and state Rep. Hadley Luddy are advising the state through the new Seasonal Communities Advisory Council.
Cyr told the Independent that, in fact, the undersized lots provision was based on a bylaw that Carboni helped write in Truro, where she is the town’s land-use planner.
“Towns are going to be able to craft bylaws that fit,” Cyr said. “The undersized lots bylaw — Truro already passed this last year at town meeting, as has the town of Dennis. This is not a controversial policy.
“Tiny homes, which on Cape Cod we should really call cottages, would also have to exist under a town bylaw and would still have to comply with water and wastewater restrictions, which on Cape Cod are pretty extensive,” Cyr continued. “If you’re serious about housing, you should be enthusiastic for this.
“Tiny homes are not mobile homes,” he added.
The main reason the state has any regulations to write, Cyr said, is that putting the entire program into last year’s law would have made it inflexible.
“When you have the details in statute, like Provincetown’s Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust, if the town wants to change a few things it means going through a whole process with the legislature,” Cyr said.
“This is a more nimble, responsive strategy so these tools can still work well in the future,” Cyr said. “There are no surprises in the regulations.”
Upcoming Votes
The nine outermost towns on Cape Cod are automatically eligible to be “seasonal communities” because more than 35 percent of the houses in them are used as vacation homes. A tenth town, Yarmouth, is applying to the state to be included, and Nantucket and all six towns on Martha’s Vineyard also qualify.
All of them will have to vote on whether to accept the state’s new designation.
Truro’s board had been set to recommend its warrant articles on March 25, but as that meeting approached the four-hour mark, it decided to move those votes to April 2, which is after this edition of the Independent goes to press.
In Wellfleet, the select board split on whether to put the article on seasonal communities before voters, with chair John Wolf and members Mike DeVasto and Ryan Curley endorsing the measure and members Carboni and Sheila Lyons voting against it. It will be on Wellfleet’s warrant on April 28.
The select boards in Eastham and Provincetown were each unanimous in voting to place the measure on their town meeting warrants.
Reporters Tyler Jager, Parker Mumford, and Aden Choate contributed reporting.
