Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The North Salem Planning Board held a work session on February 19, 2025 (convening at 7:30 PM per the agenda) to review proposed short‑term rental regulations, receive an update from a meeting with the Fire Commissioner, and coordinate logistics for an upcoming site visit. The discussion focused on a draft prepared by planner Will, with legal guidance from attorney Lisa. No public comments were heard, as this was a working session of the board.
The board conducted a line‑by‑line review of Will’s draft memorandum. Key points of discussion and tentative decisions included:
Chair Cynthia reported on a meeting with at least five fire commissioners and several fire‑department personnel. Topics covered:
Members agreed to meet at Town Hall at 4:50 PM on the designated date and carpool to the property. The Conservation Advisory Council (CAC) will be notified.
The meeting adjourned by motion after approximately two hours of discussion.
All right. I'm calling the February 19th work session to order. The bulk of the evening will be spent discussing proposed short-term rental legislation. Since our last discussion, we have a draft from our planner, and we have some legal documents from our attorney who's attempted to find out a couple of points about whether or not there could be restrictions for owner-occupied at what times. Should we could we say that the owner must occupy one or part of the dwelling for certain part of time? So with that, I think probably the best thing to do is to start with Will's memo and go through it line by line. And when we get to some of the uh sections, we're going to talk about ownership. We'll have Lisa weigh in and guide us accordingly on that. Um since we received these memos, I did um put together some of my comments, which you all have and were able to look at. And for Lisa's sake, I reminded everybody that in North Salem a lot of the properties have accessory apartments, and some have more than one accessory apartment. So as we're talking about short-term rentals, we may be talking about the main house on the property, um, an accessory apartment on the property, um, or one or two accessory apartments on the property, um, or an accessory that could be in a separate building or within the house. We do have a requirement through the Board of Appeals issuance of a special permit for accessory apartments. Um our code says that the owner must occupy one of the units. So there may be a few uh apartments or cottages in town that predate zoning, but for the most part, I think everyone would fall under the caveat that the owner must occupy at least one of the units, and that was a condition of them getting um a special permit for having a second unit. So having said that, let's start with um Will's memorandum. The first section suggests what zoning districts we should consider allowing short-term rentals, um, and basically it follows the um bed and breakfast um conditional use of the planning board. So we have um four major, no, excuse me, five major residential districts. The R1, the R2, the R4, the R1 half, and the R1 quarter, and we are suggesting that we allow it in all of them. Although thinking out loud, they're probably I'm not sure if there's any, yeah, there is a situation in the R1 quarter. There is one home, I suppose that would not want to be left out. Um but when it comes to the commercial districts, I don't believe we allowed uh bed and breakfast in either the NB or the GB district. So I'm not sure we want to do that, but we do have a lot of homes in the PO district, so we might want to consider adding the PO district. So what is everyone's thought on that? Putting in the five residential PO, but not the two commercial NBGB or RO, which isn't even on the list. Yeah, I think I I generally agree. I'm trying to envision where you know how an NB or GB district building would even have a it just doesn't make sense to me that we would have short-term rentals. Well, in the GB district, uh, for instance, in Croton Falls, you do have one, two, three, four, about five single-family homes. Um they you know where the uh park that's not a park is right uh south of that. There are two homes along Lumber Street, and where the rail yard art studio is to the right of that, um east of that is a string of three homes. They're all in the GB district. And and cross street. Uh that's multi-family. That's multi-family. Okay. Yeah. The other homes, the other buildings are multi-family. In the NB district, we are over with