BOSTON — A piece of quintessential Cape Cod will be restored this summer, as a local lobsterman resumes a nearly century-old family tradition of selling from his home after being caught in small-town bureaucracy last year.

The Yarmouth Zoning Board of Appeals has approved a special permit for resident Jon Tolley to reopen his shop at his home this summer. A year ago, the board forced him to operate elsewhere despite a decades-long record of no complaints from his neighbors.

“I am glad that everything finally went that way, except it has cost me quite a bit of money to (fight) this,” Tolley told the Boston Herald recently, after the ZBA approval. He said he will have to wait about 20 days to secure the permit in hand.

Resident Cheryl Ball, founder of “Cape Cod Concerned Citizens,” an advocacy group that fights for regulations that maintain the region’s culture, said she applauds Yarmouth for “making the right decision.”

“Jon Tolley doesn’t just sell lobsters,” Ball told the Herald. “He preserves a piece of Cape Cod’s identity. We should celebrate the traditions and hardworking people that make this place special, not regulate them out of existence.”

The controversy that blindsided the fisherman and his neighbors in the mid-Cape town began in late August 2024 when Tolley received a violation notice that startled him.

Zoning bylaws banned retail lobster sales in a residential district, the notice stated.

The fight began when an unnamed West Yarmouth resident complained about a business sign Tolley put on Route 28, the town’s main corridor, according to town officials. The lobsterman says the complaint came from a Yarmouth police officer.

Tolley said the battle for a special permit cost him about $8,500 in legal fees, an amount he estimated would have been more than triple that if the Institute for Justice, a national public interest law firm, didn’t represent him pro bono.

His lawyers demanded that the ZBA provide evidence that Tolley’s “home-based lobster sales were problematic or disruptive” and argued that a potential shutdown of the business would’ve been “contrary to both state law and the town’s own ordinances.”

Tolley, in his late 60s, has caught lobsters out of Sesuit Harbor in Dennis and sold the fresh crustaceans from his home in West Yarmouth for nearly his entire life. As a youngster, he helped his father, Fred, run the family business on the same property before he took over operations in 1975.

The ZBA had previously shot down Tolley’s two appeals for a variance, which would have let him continue selling the locally harvested lobster from where his father opened up shop in 1957

Amid the controversy, Tolley found a private vacant lot along Route 28 to sell his lobsters, from where he said he found reasonable success last year, while the Planning Board drafted an amendment to the zoning bylaw.

Residents at a Town Meeting last fall eagerly supported the amendment, which allows fishermen to sell their legally caught live lobsters at their homes via a ZBA-issued special permit.

“The whole bylaw was basically just for me,” Tolley said on Saturday. “There’s no other lobsterman in town, except for me, and when I retire, obviously, there will be no one in town.”

One ZBA member, Anthony Panebianco, opposed granting Tolley the special permit. He argued that Tolley’s business in a residential neighborhood didn’t meet the criteria for a bylaw meant to “promote the health and wellness of our community.”

“A commercial space that has 20 cars at one time, or 20 people at one time,” Panebianco said, “you can find a commercial space for that, that’s not in a residential zone.”

ZBA Chairman Sean Igoe, though, called Tolley’s business “unique.”

“This really isn’t like your normal retail business,” he said. “I am not aware of anybody calling the police, any real complaints, and I do know that Mr. Tolley has been operating there for a number of years.”

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