13 minute read
A good summer for short-term rentals
Local Government Meetings
New Buffalo Times
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Democracy Requires Transparency
CITY OF NEW BUFFALO JOHN HUMPHREY, MAYOR CITY COUNCIL LOU O’DONNELL, IV. MARK ROBERTSON, JOHN HUMPHREY, ROGER LIJESKI, BRIAN FLANAGAN City Council meets on the 3rd Monday of each month at 6:30PM CITY OF NEW BUFFALO PLANNING COMMISSION MEETINGS to be determined NEW BUFFALO TOWNSHIP BOARD PETE RAHM, MICHELLE HEIT, JUDY H. ZABICKI, PATTY IAZZETTO, JACK ROGERS Board meets on the 3rd Monday of each month at 7PM NEW BUFFALO TOWNSHIP PLANNING COMMISSION Meets on the 1st Tuesday of each month at 6:30PM
NEW BUFFALO AREA SCHOOLS BOARD CHUCK HEIT, PRESIDENT HEATHER BLACK, VICE PRESIDENT JOHN HASKINS, TREASURER LISA WERNER, SECRETARY JOYCE LANTZ, TRUSTEE FRANK MARGRO, TRUSTEE PATRICIA NEWSTON, TRUSTEE CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP BOARD DAVID BUNTE, PAULA DUDIAK, LIZ RETTIG, RICHARD SULLIVAN, BILL MARSKE Chikaming Board meets on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 6:30PM CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP PLANNING COMMISSION Meets on the 1st Wednesday of each month at 6:30PM THREE OAKS THREE OAKS TOWNSHIP BOARD Meets on the 2nd Monday of each month at 7PM VILLAGE OF THREE OAKS BOARD Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of each month at 7PM GRAND BEACH Meets on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 7PM MARY ROBERTSON, CLERK DEBORAH LINDLEY, BLAKE O’HALLORAN, JAMES BRACEWELL, PETER DOERR, PAUL LEONARD, JR. MICHIANA VILLAGE OF MICHIANA COUNCIL Meets on the 2nd Friday of each month at 1PM It appears demand for short-term rentals in the Michigan City and New Buffalo areas remained strong during the summer despite recently imposed restrictions.
Figures on vacation home use this season from both sides of the IndianaMichigan border won’t be available for several months, officials said.
However, La Porte County Convention and Visitors Bureau Director Jack Arnett estimated the number of shortterm rentals to meet demand especially near Lake Michigan went up again like it has in each of the past several years.
“There’s no doubt it’s on the uptick. It has been for quite a while,” he said
Arnett said a good indicator of the current market is vacation homes being created in the upper floors of buildings on Franklin Street in downtown Michigan City.
He said some of that space has already been transformed into higher end lodging but more is on the way.
“There’s quite a bit of that,” he said.
Another sign of continued market growth is Michigan City having the third most beds in the state from vacation homes and other Airbnb rentals, he said.
New Buffalo Mayor John Humphrey said the number of vacation homes registered with the city went down noticeably after restrictions were adopted last year.
The number started going back up, though, and equal the previous amount of 150 registered owners, he said.
The restrictions in New Buffalo include no additional short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods.
Despite the cap, Humphrey said demand is still there judging by the number of new short-term rentals created recently in the city’s marina and commercial districts, where no limits were imposed.
“There’s just as many permits as there were. They’ve just relocated which was always the goal,” he said.
Humphrey also said a record was set this summer for attendance at the public beach while restaurant owners reported similar customer totals.
Those numbers might not be an accurate gauge for short-term rental demand since a majority of visitors come here to spend just a day or evening, he said.
Humphrey said it was important to point out the figures, though, because opponents of the vacation home restrictions feared they would send the wrong message and drive people away.
“I think there is demand for shortterm rentals here and you’ll continue to see that,” he said.
Short-term rental owners in Michigan City are also required now to register their properties with the city.
The action taken last year in both communities was in response to complaints about things like noise from large gatherings.
A registered short-term rental allows a city to quickly look up the name and contact information of the property owner to try and resolve complaints sooner.
The restrictions in New Buffalo were given birth for similar reasons.
Humphrey said gasoline igniting inside a can tossed into a swimming pool at a vacation home in July is an example of why the requirements were needed.
According to police, one of the guests was pouring gasoline from the can he found in the garage to help a struggling fire in a backyard pit when an ember ignited the inside of the container.
After hitting the water, the can kept burning and firefighters came out to put out the flames, police said.
Rising short-term rental numbers in both communities were gradual before exploding when the pandemic hit in March of 2020.
Arnett said people felt they were more protected against COVID-19 in a vacation home than a hotel with rooms on multiple floors.
If anything, Arnett said he believes short-term rental demand at the very least has kept pace with the spike of the two previous summers.
Rentals for less than 30 days are not allowed in Long Beach and Beverly Shores. Short rental owners in Michiana Shores must have a permit and be granted a zoning variance to operate.
BY STAN MADDUX
Making movies is all about compromise, negotiation, and sacrifice, but the process helps you distill what’s really important to you, and once you have identified what those these things are for any particular sequence, you hold onto them and don’t let them go. — Miguel Sapochnik
The emergence of economic constraints during the pandemic and how supply considerations have returned to center stage
BY MARK ANDERSON
The annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming symposium of prominent central bankers marked its 45th year Aug. 25-27. It involved exploring “the emergence of economic constraints during the pandemic and how the big players in finance.” He added: “The inflation that he caused created a crisis for the Savings & Loans (S & Ls), which had home loans at 6% and paid their depositors 3%. That was killing them when the real interest rates supply considerations have returned to center stage,” a press released noted.
Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the nominally publicized event is the world’s largest gathering of central bankers. There were 127 attendees from the U.S., the UK, Europe and elsewhere. Notable speakers included Agustín Carstens, who manages the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS)—the rather obscure “central bank of the central banks.” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was also among the 19 presenters.
Powell talked about former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s actions in the early 1980s to “tame the high inflation” coming out of the 1970s, a period being compared to the current inflationary trends.
“The successful Volcker disinflation in the early 1980s,” Powell told his fellow bankers in Wyoming, “followed multiple failed attempts to lower inflation over the previous 15 years. A lengthy period of very restrictive monetary policy was ultimately needed to stem the high inflation and start the process of getting inflation down to the low and stable levels that were the norm until the spring of last year. Our goal is to avoid that outcome by acting with resolve now.”
However, retired Heritage College (Washington state) macroeconomics instructor Dick Eastman took strong issue with Powell’s remarks.
“As Fed chairman in the 1980s, Volcker tamed the inflation he himself caused earlier when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s open-market operations. There, he started the late1970s Carter-era inflation to deregulate banking and profitably undermine the savings and loan industry for climbed to double digits. S & Ls, in this crisis, turned to Congress [and obtained] junk bonds with a higher return, which was suicidal but kept them alive a little longer. Congress deregulated banking and enabled the giants to gobble up the small banks. Yet Powell portrays it as Volcker heroically stepping in.”
As for “the need for restrictive monetary policy” pushed by Powell, “Social Credit Economics” (socred.org) author Dr. Oliver Heydorn noted in a recent article that the whole idea of tightening credit by raising interest rates to “fight inflation,” an almost religious belief among bankers and economists, is flawed, since, in “cost-push” inflation—which, contrary to popular belief, is the most common form of price inflation, instead of “printing too much money that’s chasing too few goods”—higher production costs are typically pushed to the end consumer. Thus, the increased cost of credit for producers and retailers, brought on by interest rate hikes, is simply another cost of doing business that morphs into higher purchase prices.
Amid the often-intense disunity in our society, it’d be especially helpful to come together and cure our economic infirmities. If the economy could actually use more money in circulation (and if more money is not a major cause of price inflation) then perhaps it’s only a matter of the government constitutionally printing U.S. notes interest-free, like Abe Lincoln did during the waning days of the Civil War and the American colonists did before the Revolution—instead of perpetually borrowing at interest from the private banking system.
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‘If These Walls Could Talk’ workshop to take place at Heritage Hall
“If These Walls Could Talk: Researching Your Old House” will take place from 4 to 6 p.m. at Heritage Hall, 8 E. Linden Street, in Three Oaks Saturday, Sept. 17.
Every house has a story to tell. In this workshop, Robert Myers, education director for the Historical Society of Michigan, will guide you on how you can: uncover the history of houses, including who built them and when; identify their architectural styles; and discover stories of the people who have lived there before. Co-hosted by The Region of Three Oaks Museum, admission is free thanks to a grant from the Upton Foundation. Walk-ins are welcome; however, registration is encouraged as space is limited. Register by email at myers@hsmichigan.org or call the Historical Society of Michigan at 517-324-1828. — STAFF REPORTS
Grand Beach Village Council approves easement regarding New Buffalo Township’s maintenance of Marquette Greenway
BY FRANCESCA SAGALA
Members of the Grand Beach Village Council approved the village deeding a permanent easement to New Buffalo Township for the Marquette Greenway, a proposed 60-mile nonmotorized trail from Chicago to New Buffalo, at a special Wednesday, Aug. 31, meeting.
At their last meeting, councilmembers approved construction of the Marquette Greenway moving forward on village right of way on Grand Beach Road and that it will be determined later whether there be a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or easement with regards to New Buffalo Township taking over the maintenance of the trail.
Village attorney Sara Senica will write the easement with the township attorney before it’s submitted to both the council and township board for approval.
She said the village could look at an MOU as a “maintenance agreement where the township says it’s going to come in and build this pathway and they’re going to maintain it.”
Senica added that while the upside to an MOU is the village gets to keep the land, the downside is the village is liable for it.
While she said she has “no doubt” that the current township board will follow through on maintenance, she said that different leadership eight or 20 years down the road may not see maintaining it as a top priority.
“So, you’re hiring the township essentially to come in and take care of it but you’re not paying them anything, they’re doing it out of township funds but if you get a board in the future that says, ‘Why are we spending township money on this pathway - they own it, the village owns it, why are we maintaining it?’ They could say, ‘We’re not going to spend funds on village land anymore’, and you’d be stuck with it,” Senica said.
Senica said that she believes that a future township may be able to pull out of the MOU agreement if it doesn’t “have an insurable interest in the property” and that, even if the agreement were to go on forever, a future township board may still not take care of it “at the level” the village believes it should. She said that the village would then be “stuck” taking care of it and would be liable if someone gets hurt because it’s their property and “all you have with the township is a maintenance agreement.” “The benefit of an easement is that they have an insurable interest, so you would give them an easement for a certain amount of property, they’d be able to come in and build to the specs and then they’d have to take care of it and they’d have an insurable interest in the easement because it is a more permanent interest…You’d still own the land, but they’d insure it,” Senica said.
She said the easement would have provisions in it that would require the township to maintain it and it would require them to insure it under their township insurance policy, “so you are free of that liability.”
Councilmember Paul Leonard said that the village will benefit from the pathway because it will get cyclists, as well as resident pedestrians who are walking up and down Grand Beach from the arches to the railroad tracks, “out of harm’s way.”
“We get a bike path, it doesn’t cost us a dime to do it and with an easement, we shift the liability to New
Buffalo Township, and we get the benefit of their insurance coverage that they’re paying for,” he said. Councilmembers approved the payment of $60,000 to the Farewell family in exchange for a perpetual easement of 14 feet that will overly the existing waterline in the Wildwood/Ely Water Loop. At their last meeting, Councilmembers had accepted the lowest bid of councilmembers $69,410 from Merritt Engineering and Paul Oselka approved construction of the Marquette Greenway moving forward on village right of way on Grand from Pay Jay Construction, Inc., with regards to the water line relocation, although no contract has been signed yet. Joe Farewell said that other costs may incur from a Beach Road and that relocation from moving a telephone pole and several it will be determined trees. Costs may also increase over time due to later whether there inflation, as work can’t be completed until the supplies be a Memorandum arrive approximately 44 weeks from now. of Understanding In a letter addressed to Leonard, clerk Mary (MOU) or easement Robertson and superintendent Bob Dabbs, he stated with regards to New that, overall, the family believes the “cost would be
Buffalo Township closer to $75,000.” taking over the Farewell said the approximately 14-foot easement maintenance of the trail. would be “from the right of way to right of way” on Wildwood and Ely. The village would have authority to go on the property to replace, fix or maintain the line, which would all be in the easement agreement. Councilmembers approved Donkersloot and Sons using the Lake Avenue access point as a staging area for materials for the Carter Eckert Revetment Repair Project (which is slated to last through Thanksgiving) as opposed to Robin Lane access point, which they previously authorized. Saying that she’ll have more details at the village’s next meeting, Senica said that she was just informed that the Michigan Municipal League is going to file an amicus brief in the villages of Grand Beach and Michiana’s lawsuit against New Buffalo Township with regards to the township’s Public Safety Special Assessment District.
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