At the Tisbury special town meeting Sept. 30, voters will decide on new licensing fees for dogs and dog kennels, including a proposed new bylaw detailing how a kennel is defined.

State law requires dog kennels to be licensed, but puts the regulatory authority in the hands of local officials, town counsel David Doneski told the Tisbury select board this week.

“Most communities do have some form of dog and or animal control bylaw,” Mr. Doneski said at Tuesday’s select board meeting.

Town clerk Hillary Conklin told the select board last week that Tisbury has had a longstanding problem with unlicensed kennels.

“Even before I became town clerk, this was an issue where people were having a large number of dogs, and they weren’t getting to the [zoning board of appeals] to get the special permit to then get the kennel license,” Ms. Conklin said.

“We’ve had…one person probably skirting [the state law] for 20-plus years,” she said.

But without a bylaw defining what qualifies as a kennel, Ms. Conklin said, the state requirement has been impossible to enforce.

“We thought that it was really time to get something in the books,” she said. “We need the words.”

The proposed Tisbury bylaw calls for a kennel license when owners have more than four dogs on the premises or run a breeding operation.

To obtain a license, kennel owners would be required to obtain a special permit from the Tisbury zoning board of appeals and then have their kenneling facilities inspected by the town animal control officer.

The proposed kennel licensing fee would be $75 a year for five to 10 dogs and $150 for 11 or more dogs, with no specified limit to the number of dogs allowed.

Operators would be required to tag each dog with their kennel license numbers for when the pets are at large, and to make ownership records available to town officials.

Fines for violating the kennel bylaw would begin at $50 a day for a first offense, rising to $100 for a second, $300 for a third and $500 a day for a fourth or subsequent offense.

A separate article asks Tisbury voters to raise license fees for individual dogs. In a proposed amendment to the existing dog-license bylaw, spayed and neutered dogs would cost $10 to license, up from the current $6, and licenses for unaltered dogs would go from $10 to $15.

The town finance and advisory committee has unanimously recommended both articles.

The select board officially closed the warrant Tuesday and it was expected to be posted on the town website and in Island newspapers in the week to come.

Among other business Tuesday, the select board appointed Tisbury fire chief Patrick Rolston to a vacant seat on the water commission left by the recent departure of Elmer Silva, who was elected in May to a three-year term.

Mr. Doneski said that as an appointee, Mr. Rolston will serve until the annual town meeting and election next spring, when voters decide who will complete Mr. Silva’s term.

The select board also named Connie Alexander to the Community Preservation Act committee, a nine-member group appointed to determine how the town spends a portion of its property taxes that come with a state match for projects related to open space, historic preservation, recreational opportunities and affordable housing.