Cape committee calls for cap on home rentals

CAPE ELIZABETH — There may soon be fewer weddings in Cape Elizabeth.

The town’s ordinance committee Friday morning ended four months of debate on the issue of so-called short-term homes rentals by calling for a 12-person cap on the number of people allowed to stay in a single-family residence offered for rent on the open market. The limit, which applies only to homes on lots of less than 30,000 square feet (0.69 acres), also restricts the number of visitors to half the number of renters, for a maximum of 18 people who can be present at the rented home at any one time.

That, town officials admit, would effectively end the practice of renting out to wedding parties the cottages in Cape Elizabeth’s more crowded shorefront communities.

“You can still have a wedding, it will just have to be a pretty intimate one,” said Town Planner Maureen O’Meara, after the meeting.

Although more than 35 homes in Cape have been offered for rent, primarily on the website homeaway.com – at rates from $1,000 to $11,000 per week – the complaints that flooded the town office this past summer focused on a home at 5 Sea Barn Road. Town officials say that home is rented virtually every weekend, sometimes for weddings large enough to require busing guests into the congested neighborhood, for lack of on-street parking.

The new zoning rules will be taken up at the Feb. 13 Town Council meeting, at which time they will be immediately referred to the Planning Board for review, according to Town Manager Michael McGovern. It could be June before the ordinance arrives back on the council table and August before it’s adopted, to take affect 30 days later.

However, Councilor David Sherman warned homeowners against going bonkers by booking as many large groups as they can before the size-limit hits.

“That’s probably going to cause the council and the Planning Board to go the other way,” he said, intimating the next step could be to declare home rentals to be bed-and-breakfast operations subject to businesses regulation.

While most of the renters present at Friday’s meeting appear resigned to the new rules, some Cape residents appear ready to stage a fight at the public hearings to come, before both the Planning Board and the council.

Lawson Road resident Frank Luongo said regulating home rentals as a cottage industry only serves to legitimize what has until now been a freewheeling, almost fly-by-night industry. That, he said, will lead to its growth and alter the character of Cape Elizabeth, until it looks more like Old Orchard Beach or Saco – the only other towns in Maine that O’Meara found to have short-term rental ordinances.

“You talking about getting closer to where you need to be on this,” Luongo told committee chairman James Walsh, “but what you’re getting closer to is opening the whole town of Cape Elizabeth to becoming a rental community, and I don’t think that’s where we need to be.”