BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following is in response to a letter from Oro-Medonte Deputy Mayor Ralph Hough regarding short-term rentals, published May 7.
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Short-term rentals (STRs) are the greatest threat our residential neighbourhoods have ever faced. They are prohibited. Since 2019, the Township of Oro-Medonte has allowed STR operators to rake in $13 million from their hotel-like businesses, while failing to protect or even acknowledge the safety of homeowners.
What is really going on? The mayor and council have told homeowners that STRs don’t belong in residential neighbourhoods and that STRs are incompatible with residential uses. But township staff have been quietly heading in the opposite direction. Although STRs are prohibited, staff have (not been successful in) enforcing the existing zoning bylaw.
As you read the four-year trail of evidence below, it is clear that township staff want to allow STR operators to continue to make millions and see that STRs are legalized.
- In 2018 and 2019, planning staff presented a total of three STR reports to council. Not one of those reports mentioned that STRs were prohibited.
- In June 2018, staff prepared an interim control bylaw (ICBL) that allowed the illegal commercial use of residential properties to continue. At the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) hearing we learned that the council was not properly advised. Council ended up passing an ambiguous bylaw that was erroneous because an ICBL cannot make an illegal use legal.
- In 2019, staff drafted an STR licensing bylaw that would have licensed illegal uses. Residents attended a public meeting that overflowed the council chambers and stopped the draft from becoming law. They wanted no part of feeling unsafe in their own homes and being a site supervisor for absentee millionaires who were operating hotels in their neighbourhoods.
- In the fall of 2019, homeowners engaged a retired planner and a lawyer to confirm that the existing bylaw prohibits STRs. Their suspicions were confirmed. STRs were illegal and had been since 1997.
- It would be another six months before staff publicly acknowledged that the retired planner’s opinion was correct. In July 2020 council amended the existing bylaw to make it iron-clad and declared that STRs were and always have been prohibited.
- The iron-clad amendment was appealed by some STR operators. This led to a year-and-a-half delay until the tribunal hearing was held in March 2022. Costly legal fees were incurred by the homeowners who faithfully stood beside council while the operators continued to carry on business, raking in millions of dollars using the staff-designed ICBL as cover.
- Twice in the month before the hearing, staff attempted to adjourn it. By then the township and residents had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing. The first adjournment request was stopped by the residents, and the second, by council.
- At the OLT hearing, staff under oath testified that they always knew that since 1997 STRs had been prohibited. Staff admitted that council and the public had not been properly informed. A key obligation of any profession is to immediately acknowledge and address material errors and omissions when they are made, not wait four years.
- On the last day of the hearing, after all other expert witnesses were unavailable, staff put forward an amendment through their legal counsel that effectively legalized all STRs and undercut the proceedings. This was done without the knowledge of council. The residents strenuously objected to this at the hearing, and stopped it.
- Homeowners who had been led to believe that an ‘iron-clad’ zoning bylaw was needed so that it could be enforced felt betrayed. How could staff reverse the direction of council and fundamentally change our zoning bylaw at the OLT without a public meeting?
- In May 2022 staff’s quest to legalize STRs continued, this time by including changes in a new draft Official Plan regarding actual bed and breakfasts. Gone is the required rezoning consultation with neighbours and the requirement that the owner had to be present. If adopted by council, this new bed and breakfast provision will open the door to legalizing short-term rentals throughout the township as a matter of right. Stay tuned. This one’s not over.
Given these facts, it is easy to understand why ratepayers are extremely concerned that staff want to legalize STRs. Staff are headed in the opposite direction than the unanimous course set by council. Homeowners have spent too much money and time. They have had to intervene too often only to be left unprotected and vulnerable for so long and with no hope of relief in sight. Residents are trying to protect the sanctity of their homes for all those that follow.
Rather than writing letters that chastise residents, council needs to see that staff follow their directions. With hundreds of STR commercial transactions a month, the time for council to act is long past due.
Council needs to direct staff to lay charges that seek injunctive relief so that disruptive STR operators can be shut down once and for all. Council has admitted that charging operators for some minor bylaw infringement will only be seen as a cost of doing business and therefore will not be a deterrent. STRs will continue to proliferate and homeowners will be left to suffer unless decisive action is taken.
If council fails to stand up and take control and protect all homeowners, then there is only one option. Change begins with your vote on Oct. 24, 2022. Vote for candidates that you trust and who will stand up to township staff and protect your neighbourhoods from the intrusion of short-term rentals.
Gene Stein
Oro-Medonte
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