City staff townhall meeting discusses impacts of vacation rentals
Second of two parts.
On Aug. 22, Avalon city staff led the discussion about short term rentals at a town hall meeting that was held both in-person and on Zoom and Facebook.
This is the second installment of that story.
Meeting
As the Islander left off in last week’s issue, Steve Johnson joined the meeting not quite half way through the video of the discussion. Among his suggestions were installing remote controls on door locks.
He said the focus should be putting rules in place and suggested the city should teach owners how to manage well.
Johnson said that 95 or 98 percent of their guests were wonderful people.
City Manager David Maistros said the moratorium on issuing short term rental licenses does not prohibit existing short term rentals from operating.
One woman said rentals have to become more affordable. She suggested imposing fines on property owners who don’t follow the rules. She also argued that Avalon did not have a housing shortage as much as a housing availability issue. She said she agreed that someone who paid to buy a house in Avalon would probably need to rent it out to recover their costs. She said there might be funds to lease some of those properties and rent them to families. She suggested employers could lease homes for employees.
Jim Luttjohann, of Love Catalina Island, said he believed that the rates short term rentals were charging “make them not much of a competitor to the hotels.”
He said their rates were significantly higher than hotel rates. “If you can put six, eight, 10 people in there, then maybe it comes back into a cost per person that’s more on par, but for the most part, the STRs are getting a higher nightly rate than our hotels are,” Luttjohann said.
Responding to another comment from the public, Maistros said he didn’t know if anyone was making a significant claim that crimes were being committed by short term renters. According to Maistros, it would be difficult to data on that question. “But we could certainly see what the Sheriff’s Department has,” Maistros said.
Kate Rodden returned to the podium. She said the hotels put a lot of money into marking. She said hotels have large staffs of employees who sometimes work two or three jobs.
“We’ve been categorized as a condo hotel, so as a community, I’m hit financially because somebody who would want to buy my home can’t get the financing and this happened simply because we went above 50% and also Hamilton Cove is advertised on Hotels.com,” she said.
“People think it’s a hotel or Planning Commission refers to it as a hotel,” she said.
“That’s one issue. The second issue is I think we need to look at is occupancy,” she said.
“The ratio of people per bedroom. So, in Hamilton Cove, we a one bedroom, we can have four people,” she said.
“There’s a single-family home in Hamilton Cove that was built that has just become a duplex,” she said.
She said the duplex was issued a permit.
“It allows 32 people in one property. That property sits up top, so anything you hear comes down to where most of the condominiums are,” she said.
“So I think we should look at occupancy for two reasons,” she said.
“Number one, if you limit the amount of people that can stay in a unit, what that will force them to do is maybe rent another unit which could bring in more TOT but it would lesson the amount of people in one home, or one unit,” she said. (TOT stands for transient occupancy tax.)
“I also think again, getting back to the process of who do we call when there’s a problem? And how is that tracked? If the Sheriff’s come out, I want to make sure that it’s reported back to the city,” she said.
She said she was told that the deputies on Avalon do not give the city the address unless the city asks for it.
She said there was no central place for complaints about short term rental units.
“That should be happening and we should keep that data for two years because if that owner comes and purchases another property, that should come up on their application [that] there have been issues on those other units and they should not be awarded another” permit for a short term rental, she said.
“I think people are confused because they paid $3,200 and they think the permit is automatic,” she said.
“We need to do a better job of communicating and not promising permits to people and they need to understand that there are Municipal Codes, laws, that are attached to those permits.
“So I think better enforcement is an issue, and I think if we could limit occupancy, that would also help our hotels,” she said.
“I think we need to get around our hotels and support our hotels because they spend a lot of money add they employ a lot of people,” she said.
“We’re a property management company that doesn’t necessarily have the same amount of staff dedicated to managing hundreds of properties on the island,” she said.
Maistros said many hotels had homes for their larger groups of guests that are essentially operating as short term rentals.
No one else was online.
Maistros asked anyone in the Council Chambers if they had any questions.
Steven Johnson raised his had again online.
He said there should be better communications from the ownership side and the city’s side. “It would be helpful if there was a task force that even I could report if I had an issue and felt like I needed some help that I wasn’t comfortable with my on-site property manager handling and not have to get penalized for that call,” he said.
“I think it’d be great just to be able to be proactive,” Johnson said.
He said in Riverside they had a 24/seven hotline.
Johnson said he understood that it would probably be harder for Avalon, which has a more limited budget.
He asked if there was way for a new owner to have a period where they could rent a unit and take over reservations, but they have to reapply and go back to the Planning Commission.
Johnson said he didn’t think there’s been any thought given to what happens when a transient rental gets sold.
He said there was not a lot of property available now.
He said that whoever buys a property is likely going to rent it as a short term rental.
“We have reservations already into 2024,” he said.
“During the summer we are very, very busy and think it’s just good to look at how that transfer could happen,” he said.
Maistros said that current Avalon regulations address transfer of ownership of existing short term rentals.
He also said the city has considered what impact a cap on short term rentals would have.
He said if you put a cap on transient rentals, you’re going to have a waiting list.
“We already have one waiting list for full-sized vehicles and we’re going to have another waiting list for short term rentals with this,” he said.
Maistros said that if the council decided to do that or if staff recommended caps on transient rentals, there would be common sense regulations on how to govern that.
Johnson said he understood how it works for a conditional use permit, but he was under the impression that licenses for short term rentals don’t transfer at all. (He was apparently referring to the fact that Avalon has changed from issuing permits for short term rentals to issuing licenses. The difference is that CUPs run with the land, even when the land changes hands. Licenses do not run with the land.)
Maistros said the business license cannot transfer. “The CUP can transfer once,” Maistros said. “And the second time it does not, correct.”
Johnson said it was his understanding that a Transient Rental License doesn’t transfer at all and that a new owner would have to apply for one.
According to Maistros, one of the problems with putting numbers on short term rentals is that some of those are duplicates. According to Maistros, the city has had transfers and the city has had the new owner come in and get a new business license.
He said the trouble is that the business license gets issued in that person’s name and it’s not necessarily any short term rental coming on the books, it’s just a transfer of an existing one.
“So, it has happened but I don’t know if we’re seeing a lot of those transfers at this point,” Maistros said.
According to Maistros, city staff would try to open the townhall meeting process as much as possible. They would try weekend meetings if 6 p.m. meetings on weekdays didn’t work.
He also said they would try to find a Saturday morning that staff could do from 10 a.m. to noon.
The second transient rental town hall meeting was held at 6 p.m., Wednesday, Aug. 30, in the council Chambers and on Zoom.
The subject: financial impacts and sustainability. Due to the Islander’s production schedule, and limitations on physical space, the story about that town hall meeting is expected to be reported in the Sept. 8 issue.
