The village received more than a dozen emails opposing one element of the ordinance: A requirement for vacation rental owners to check for renters’ names on the national sex offender registry. If a property is within 2,500 feet of a school, school bus stop or park, it is a violation of Wellington’s code to rent to someone on the registry.
Many of the public’s comments indicated they believed the rules constituted an outright ban on sex offenders being allowed to stay at short-term rental properties.
But officials said that is not the case.
The ordinance doesn’t stop them from renting to someone on the registry, it just requires them to meet the distance requirements,” Village Manager Paul Schofield said.
Other commenters defended sex offenders, saying they, like others convicted of crimes, have served their sentence. Restrictions based on the sex offender registry are a form of further punishment, they said.
How does a city/village/whatever just arbitrarily make up “rules”? This is pure discrimination.
Sometime in the 1960s Dr Martin Luther King preached about a time when his 6 year old daughter asked him why she couldn’t go to the local amusement park called fun town. He tells about how he explained to his daughter about why she couldn’t go to fun town. If you listen you can hear the pain in his voice. He did all he could to explain to her the issues at hand. When he was done he reminded her that all white people weren’t bad and he did all he could to keep her from having the hate in her heart. He knew that the hate would eat her alive. He seen how important it was for her to not harbor that hate. We would do good to remember that very lesson. He was simply a father who tried to help his daughter though a time of confusion. Thats all any registrant is trying to do who just wants to live there life and be treated as an equal. Were not all that different from Dr. MLK. Its sad that its 50 year’s later and we still have wide spread discrimination. Its just being packaged diffent now and has a different label. But it’s the same hate we fight today. If you feel like this is a new fight. Go back and take a look at the civil rights movement. You will see. Were fighting a very old fight but its that smae old hate and fear. Dr. King fought hard and peacefuly and it came at a very high price. I beleive we will too one day be able to go to fun town or any other town as free men and women.
Don’t give up folks. Stay strong.
You take monetary benefit and political benefits out of the equation and people can logical.
Officials never like being put in their place by citizens. It goes to show how tyrannical our elected officials are.
All our good letters resulted in a benefit that we did not anticipate— an even-handed, non-hysterical tone taken by the Palm Beach Post, on the subject of people with past sex offenses.