This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter on Oct. 3.
Five months after Stowe voters roundly upheld a narrowly adopted ordinance governing short-term rental properties that includes a registry of all those properties, the town has hired a tech company to do the heavy lifting.
After months of searching and fielding comments from the community over privacy concerns, the selectboard last week awarded Deckard Technologies a contract to run the town’s registry. The registry officially goes into effect next spring, but the town hopes to get the new portal open by the end of the year to ease people into it and work out any bugs.
Deckard came in with the lowest bid out of three software companies, and town manager Charles Safford said town staff felt the California-based company, which was founded in 2018, had a good interface and came with good references from similar towns.
The town will pay Deckard up to $43,000 for its first year, and $38,000 after that. Safford said the town had not budgeted for the expense but said it can offset that cost with fees, a topic for a future board discussion.
The selectboard last winter narrowly adopted a compulsory short-term rental ordinance just before Town Meeting Day, but residents opposed to a mandatory registry who preferred a more voluntary form of data collection swiftly forced a referendum on the issue.
That referendum was overruled in a widely attended town meeting on May 1, putting the issue to rest and the town on a path toward implementing the registry.
Deckard uses its platform to perform analytics on short-term rental data on “all identifiable properties” in town, based on publicly available data from the town.
In previous discussions about this, the primary concerns with the rental registry related to personal information that people would prefer not to be made public.
Board member Paco Aumand said there is a difference between what the town can gather and release for information and what a private company might do with it.
“Policy and contractual language are two different things,” Aumand said. “If we’re not putting in the contract statements that hold the contractor’s feet to the fire relative to what it is we want, then we can’t make proper policy.”
Town lawyer David Rugh said that, if the town were to receive a public records request for information gathered for the registry, the company could always simply redact information “as being private information that is not subject to disclosure.”
He acknowledged, however, that doesn’t mean such redactions couldn’t be appealed and arguments made against it.
“I’m happy to include whatever language the board thinks is necessary to strike the balance between these concerns, because they’re valid concerns,” Rugh said.
Dave Brown of Deckard said the only information the company collects is what the town asks it to collect, and “as far as phone numbers, they’re only accessible by your staff.”
That includes, importantly, the fire department, which provided a major push behind the effort to get the short-term rental ordinance and registry approved, both ahead of town meeting in March and at an even more widely attended revote later in the spring.
“You give access to whoever, police, fire, etcetera,” Brown said. “They’ll have to log into the system, and you will have an audit trail of who went in.”
Carlson and board member Jo Sabel Courtney sought reassurances it wouldn’t be difficult for people to register — a key concern people expressed after the vote to enact the registry. Carlson, in particular, noted some property managers may have dozens of short-term units to register.
“One of the things we heard, very concerned, was that there was going to be a lot of work on that front,” Carlson said.
Brown said once a person puts their contact information in, they can just attach properties to that.
“The whole goal is to just make this as easy and painless as possible,” he said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Rental registry firm hired by Stowe after contentious town debate.