The City Council unanimously approved an updated schedule for various city fees during the last meeting of 2025.
The fee for a short term rental license is now $250. This applies to the 2025-2026 fiscal year.
The council held a public hearing, but no members of the public spoke at the hearing.
Background
“The City charges fees for miscellaneous public services, use of City facilities and equipment rental and other activities,” wrote Finance Director Matt Baker in his staff report.
“User fees are assessed and collected for City services and programs provided by various departments. These are services that convey a benefit, grant a privilege, provide for review and enforcement of regulatory activities, enforce laws, or are a condition of development,” Baker wrote.
“Under State law, cities may charge fees to recoup the direct and indirect costs related to the provision of user services. Each year, the City reviews its fees to establish new fees, modify existing fees, and eliminate fees that are no longer required to ensure that City fees are in-line with the costs incurred to provide them,” Baker wrote.
One of the fees was for short term rental businesses.
According to Baker, the fee was based on the various costs to Avalon divided by the number of licenses and rounded down to $250.
“It will not apply to the banked units as the 24-hour hotline, the enforcement side, the monitoring doesn’t really apply to those. So it will it won’t apply to those but for the others it would,” Baker said.
During the meeting, Baker said, “Again, this fee is just really looking to recoup the costs to the city for the monitoring enforcement.”
“City Staff performed an analysis of the administrative costs associated with the regulation of the City’s short-term rentals, permits, and licenses as discussed at the September 2, 2025 City Council Meeting,” Baker wrote in the staff report.
“Based on this analysis, City Staff recommends establishing a new administrative fee of $250 to be assessed on all licensed short-term rental businesses (e.g. Grandfathered , Conditional Use Permits (CUP), and Transient Rental Licenses (TRL)) to directly recoup for the costs associated with the monitoring of short-term rentals and the enforcement of related transient rental ordinance requirements,” Baker wrote.
“Costs to be recouped through this new administrative fee include a portion of the City’s planning services contract, software costs for the monitoring of rental activity and 24 hour compliance hotline, as well as a portion of Finance, Code Enforcement, and Planning’s staff time directly spent on enforcement-related activities. This fee will be assessed with the annual business license in addition to the existing administrative fee of $41 and related business license tax of $12.50,” Baker wrote.
