After four months of wrangling over the issue, Mathews planners on Tuesday night voted to recommend to the board of supervisors that a provision in the zoning ordinance that allows short-term rentals to exceed the health department’s occupancy limit should be removed.
The vote was 4-3, with members Donald Morgan, Byron Rauch, and James Meade voting against. The board of supervisors will have its own public hearing on the matter at its October meeting.
Doug Wilton, who last month voted against removing the language allowing two additional people per dwelling beyond the two-per-bedroom limit allowed by the Virginia Department of Health, apologized for what he said was a mistake and voted this time to remove the language.
The decisive factor for Wilton appeared to be information shared by County Administrator Ramona Wilson, acting as planning and zoning director in the absence of an employee to fill the position, about Virginia’s status as a Dillon Rule state. The Dillon Rule, said Wilson, “is a legal principle that local governments have limited authority and can pass ordinances only in areas where the General Assembly has granted clear authority.”
“The state only gives us authority to make certain rules,” said Wilson. “We can be more restrictive, but never less restrictive.”
“We must follow state law,” said Wilton.
Meade had earlier moved to table the matter because he said the Dillon Rule had not come up before in the decision-making process, he was not familiar with the rule, and he wanted to seek legal counsel to help determine whether there were any exceptions to the rule. But commission chair Billy Cook argued that the matter had been pending for four months and that the commission had previously heard from the environmental health supervisor of the Mathews Health Department, who had explained the reasons for limiting the number of occupants permitted and had made it clear that the ordinance was in violation of health department regulations.
Request for CUP
After an earlier public hearing, the commission voted unanimously to support a request by local business owner Trudy Flippin that she be allowed to live in a residence at 15967 John Clayton Memorial Highway, located across the road from the VDOT shed, and operate her portable toilet business on the property from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week.
Flippin clarified that waste from the toilets is disposed of at an HRSD facility in Yorktown, but the units would be sanitized at the residential site.
No one from the public raised any objections to the proposal, and Rick Carson of Onemo, a neighbor of Flippin’s at her current residence, praised the way she manages the business.
“They do such a wonderful job,” he said. “Any questions of cleanliness or hazardous conditions are baseless. She keeps them clean, in a row, and looking nice.”
Public hearings canceled
Two public hearings originally scheduled for Tuesday night’s meeting were canceled by the applicants earlier in the day. Both hearings involved controversial requests for conditional use permits to establish solar farms in the county, one on a parcel on Buckley Hall Road at Hudgins and one on a parcel fronting partly on Route 14 and partly on Church Street in Mathews. No reason was provided to the public for the cancellations.