Empire will be continuing the great short-term rental debate at its regular meeting Tuesday after continued sparring over the topic at the workshop meeting Thursday.
The village will make a motion at the regular meeting on whether to continue moving forward with a short-term registration or regulation ordinance that would be motioned to seek an attorney’s opinion from Mika Meyers Law Firm based out of Grand Rapids, if passed.
Over the past month, Empire’s short-term rental committee of March Dye, Meg Walton, Carrie Ford, and Bob Chase tried to come to an agreement on an ordinance, and general data about short-term rentals in Empire.
It seemed there was a little headway but not much.
“I think that there is no sense in having this committee go forward anymore because we are not going to reach an agreement on the ordinance. I think it’s going to have to come down to the council deciding on where to go from this,” Dye said.
According to numbers shared at the meeting, 52 of 373 housing units (14%) in the Village of Empire are used for short-term rentals.
“(Empire residents) don’t want us to kick the can down the road one more time and say, ‘let’s just try a registration,’ because that’s the least divisive. No, the least divisive is for us to take a stand and to say, this is where we’re going to be, and this is the fair way to do it. And the only way to get that perspective is to get a legal opinion on this,” Walton said.
Despite disagreements within the committee, two-drafts of a regulation ordinance and a registration ordinance were submitted to the board for review Thursday. The board was originally tasked in November 2023 to craft a registration ordinance. But questions of how the committee was formed and whether it was truly a motion for a registration and not a regulation continue to be up for debate since that fateful fall meeting. All because of a comma.
“The little joke is it took how many months to discover that there was a problem with a comma,” Trustee Maggie Bacon said.
It’s clear that there has been a split for some time now on the committee with Dye and Walton on one side versus Ford and Chase in terms of how to proceed further with an ordinance of registration or regulation.
“We are neighbors first. And no matter how Empire changes or adapts to new realities, I hope that we never lose sight of the fact that we are neighbors first,” Bacon said. “I think (Dye) is correct. Our job now is to look at an overall landscape. And this means that as elected officials, we must step back from whatever our personal opinions are and demonstrate to our public that ... we hear you. So principles of good government insist that when we do something like this (short-term rentals), we must concentrate on the problem.”
