In various ways — including by speaking up at town board meetings, by signing letters to the editor, and by signing petitions — at this point more than 70 Wilmington residents have called for improved short-term rental (STR) regulations in our town.

This number merely represents a fraction of the community members who feel similarly.

In the fall of 2021, 473 voters elected two new people to our town board. There were four names on the ballot and three active candidates on Election Day. 319 Wilmington residents voted for Tim Follos to serve on our town board. This indicates that there are many in our community who share his views about important local issues, including the hot topic of the decade: STRs.

Unfortunately, a commentary titled “Supporters for growth in Wilmington” (published in the Lake Placid News on July 14) repeatedly dismisses those in favor of improved STR regulations as a “small group.”

Is 70 people a small group?

Sixty-seven percent of those who cast ballots last fall voted for a candidate who made reining in whole-home STRs a focal point of his campaign. Even if only half of those voters agree with that candidate’s stance on STRs, is 160 people a small group?

“It is also interesting that this small group was very quiet when Wilmington started their Short-Term Rental Board and the town of Wilmington asked for volunteers,” the Supporters for Growth write. “About a handful of locals volunteered for this. Where were your voices then?”

As has been stated by others previously, when this committee was formed and these regulations were drafted, few could foresee the extent or speed of the STR explosion throughout Wilmington.

According to AirDNA, the number of vacation rentals in Wilmington, a community with around 600 homes, exploded from 100 in early 2019 to more than 160 today. Roughly 130 of these STRs are “whole-home” rentals.

It is without doubt that participation in the previous STR committee was lackluster for a variety of reasons. But no matter what happened years ago, at this point people in Wilmington see what is happening, they are concerned, and they are rightfully speaking up.

The Supporters should respect their neighbors’ voices rather than disparaging them.

It is also disappointing that the Supporters mischaracterize those asking for updated vacation rental regulations as being against growth. The 33 people who signed the original letter that inspired “Supporters for growth” (a letter titled “Wilmington deserves better,” published in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise on July 2) are a diverse group of people with diverse opinions about topics of public interest. They did not collectively express any opinion about growth in Wilmington.

“Wilmington deserves better” asked Wilmington’s town board to recognize the significant contribution the regional STR explosion has made to the severe regional housing shortage and to finally vote to treat STRs as what they are: businesses.

It is worth pointing out that a prominent STR operation in Wilmington is “Adirondack Vacations, LLC,” and one of the operators of that limited liability company, Aseem Mathur, recently submitted an article to this newspaper stating that “He and his wife own a short-term vacation rental business in Wilmington.” A limited liability company is a business.

But there are people in Wilmington who seem determined to turn a blind eye to this reality.

We now ask our town board to heed the many community members who have asked their elected officials to modernize Wilmington’s vacation rental law.

Before Wilmington starts issuing two-year STR permits, our meak and outdated local law is cemented into place, and another two years of displacement and division are guaranteed, we ask our town board to take the following steps at its next meeting:

¯ Please vote to treat STRs like the businesses they clearly are.

¯ Please vote to require STR businesses in areas zoned primarily for residential use to obtain a “use variance” or “a special use permit” from our Planning Board.

¯ Please vote to raise the fees levied on whole-home STR businesses (currently levied at an annual rate of $150 $25 per bedroom), in order to ease the property tax burden borne by everyday residential taxpayers who are not operating hotel-like businesses.

¯ Please vote to limit the total number of STR licenses Wilmington issues annually.

¯ Please take immediate action to protect certain parts of Wilmington from continued STR proliferation.

¯ Please vote to pause the looming issuance of long-term STR licenses until Wilmington’s STR ordinance is modernized.

¯ Before locking an outdated local law into place for at least two years, please vote to immediately create a balanced committee — composed of people who are operating formerly residential properties as businesses and a diverse group of residents who do not own and operate hotel-like businesses — to ensure that Wilmington’s ideas, questions, concerns, and solutions are heard loud and clear.

In conclusion, we join with those who have publicly called for attendance at town meetings. Meetings of Wilmington’s Planning-Zoning Board are held on the first Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. at the community center. Regular town board meetings are held on the second Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. Town board “work session”

meetings are generally held on the last Wednesday of the month, at 4 p.m.

Important decisions will be made in the next several months — decisions that will affect our families for years to come. There is often a busy agenda at these meetings and there is usually time for public comments and questions. People who began regularly attending recently say it has been eye-opening. If you want to see what really happens at these meetings — rather than relying on secondhand news, social media, or scattered newspaper reports — please attend, observe, and listen.

We need more people to see what is happening.

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This guest commentary was co-signed by Wilmington residents Christina Anderson, Bob Cressey, Nancy Cressey, Max Eaton, John Gates, Sue Ellen Gettens, Gary Grady, Brigette Levitt, Keith Lyon, Megan Lyon, Jessica Mulvey, Wyatt Peck, Helen Read, Renate Schneider, Linda Shuster, Chelsea Walker, Joe Wichtowski, Theresa Wichtowski, Kimberly Winch, Edward Winch, Pamela Winch, Patricia Winch, Randy Winch, Bill Wonderlin and Noelle Wood.