AirBnB foes speak out

Little rest and ?relaxation at ?vacation-rental workshop Little rest and relaxation at vacation-rental workshop|

Sonoma County’s Planning Commission faced the multitudes last Monday night at the Veterans Building in Santa Rosa, and again found that public sentiment on the issue of vacation rentals is, on the whole, passionate and negative.

“It was a pretty impressive showing by a lot of residents of our community negatively impacted by some of the rentals,” said commission member Greg Carr, representing the First District that includes Sonoma Valley. “It’s kind of been brewing for a while,” he added; “I know that Supervisor Gorin’s office is hearing from a lot of people in the Valley.”

About 120 people showed up for what was called a “workshop,” though there may be a less polite, more accurate term for the hour of public comment that followed the commission’s presentation. Commission chair Paula Cook asked for a “room of civility,” yet several times had to remind the audience to raise their hands to show approval, not applaud.

Forty people took their three minutes of time at the microphone, over three-quarters of them calling for more regulation, more restriction, stricter enforcement and even the imposition of penalties on landlords who allow violations of neighborhood standards.

A chart of the 822 permitted vacation rentals in Sonoma County (there may be as many as three times more vacation rentals that have not been issued permits, according to county inventory) showed 41 percent of permits were issued in the Russian River area around Guerneville, and an almost equal percentage, around 40 percent, issued in the Sonoma Valley. While the former has a long history as a getaway for families and couples, the Valley’s popularity has been rising in recent years as a vacation destination, paralleling the growth of the wine tourism industry.

That may be part of the reason that Valley residents made a strong showing at the microphone Monday night, voicing their complaints about excessive parties, late night noise, strange cars taking up all the street parking, open fires and, most of all, too much alcohol.

“It’s like they opened a bar in the middle of our neighborhood,” said Wayne Mehl of the Diamond A subdivision on Sonoma Mountain, west of Arnold Drive.

Several other Diamond A residents also complained about the noise and drinking, as well as the danger that non-resident (and impaired) drivers pose to anyone using winding, two-lane Grove Street to get to the 50-year-old development.

Diamond A Neighborhood Association board member Tom Jones mentioned that almost all of the 200-plus properties at Diamond A are operated under Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions, but for some reason the county has allowed permits for seven vacation rentals in apparent violation of the CC&Rs. “I’ll offer to help set up the database,” he said, saying it would be a time-consuming but straightforward effort to catalog all the parcel numbers that fall within CC&Rs.

The sense of community and neighborhood was often referred to as the greatest casualty in the rise of vacation rentals. Mickey Cooke, who lived on property nearby for some 60 years, bemoaned that the area was no longer a place for families. “There used to be children up here,” she said. Others told stories of living in a home for 30 years or more and suddenly finding the neighborhood unfamiliar, surrounded on all sides by transitory strangers, and besieged by a party atmosphere year-round.

Debbie Nitasaka of Glen Ellen, a member of the 17-year-old Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group, submitted evidence that converting residences into vacation rentals damages long-term property values and depletes the rental market – a potentially disastrous effect in Sonoma County, with its 1.5 percent vacancy rate. The group primarily advocates for affordable housing.

Several on hand sought to make a distinction between the traditional bed-and-breakfast – a room in a house where the owner also lives, whether or not breakfast is included – and short-term rentals marketed primarily through two web services, AirBnB.com and VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner).

Jennifer Burke, the county’s deputy director of planning, later clarified the distinction. “Vacation rentals are defined separately from BnBs as whole house transient rentals, where the property owner is not in residence,” she told the Index-Tribune. “One of the many policy options is to provide greater flexibility for the BnBs and limit vacation rentals in the R1 zones.” The county code defines R1 zones as having single-family homes in low-density residential areas.

All in all, it was a by-now familiar litany of complaints. But at least residents can have some assurance their objections are not falling on deaf ears: the point of the meeting, after all, was to incorporate public opinion into a year-long process to come up with recommended policies and regulations to be imposed by the county’s Permit and Resource Management Department, PRMD.

Prior to the public comment period, Jane Riley of PRMD walked the assembly through a 20-page PowerPoint, including a 4-page grid of proposals to address four key objectives of the study:

• Avoid overconcentration and commercialization of neighborhoods;

• Provide better neighborhood compatibility;

• Preserve housing stock; and

• Level the playing field, so the same set of rules apply to all

Three to seven proposals were listed for each objective, with pros and cons. For instance, on the “better neighborhood” concern, one suggestion was to limit the number of vehicles per licensed vacation rental to two.

Pros of this solution: It would limit revelry – a major area of concern, if not anger – and reduce parking problems. Cons were that it would be difficult to enforce, and the county can’t limit parking on public streets.

Bruce Hall of Kenwood tackled that objection head-on. “Why not have residential parking permits?” he asked, since they are used in many cities such as San Francisco. Hall also questioned some of the “givens” in the permit application process, such as that a bedroom means two person occupancy. “That’s a hotel, not a house,” he pointed out.

Several other speakers urged more proactive engagement by the county at tracking down scofflaw vacation rental landlords, issuing more citations, and imposing more penalties.

That’s where it gets tricky, according to county officials. “Just philosophically over the years, the county has been reluctant to be a policeman on the land use issue,” said Carr, himself a former division manager in the county planning department now known as PRMD.

“Should we have people out and about in the county policing violations?” he asked rhetorically. “The position we always come back to is, if people have a problem let them complain, and the county will respond to the complaint and try to bring violators into compliance.”

That argument for compliance falls short of criminal prosecution, Carr said. “You can’t go out and put a person in jail for violating a permit.”

Tennis Wick, the current department head of PRMD, told the Index-Tribune that his department was fully engaged with the issue. “I will say that code enforcement is keeping up with the complaints, and responding to them in a timely manner. That’s what I told them I expect them to do, and so far that’s what I’ve seen them do.”

He acknowledged that the community’s concern on vacation rentals may not have yet peaked, and said that nearly all members of the field staff are trained to investigate complaints when they are received. “We’ve got between 3,500 and 4,000 complaints annually, so nobody’s sitting around!”

“It’s clear to me that we really need to focus on the enforcement of existing rules,” Supervisor Susan Gorin said when she received a summary of the workshop. “I intend to focus my effort on identifying clear requirements and enforcement procedures, and look at mechanisms to potentially roll back or end the vacation rental permits through attrition.” She went on to suggest a possible moratorium on new permits, though that would take four out of the five Supervisors to agree.

The workshop was one stage in a process that the Board of Supervisors assigned to the Planning Commission in November, to review the current policies (from 2010) and make recommendations to further control the explosion of vacation rentals in Sonoma County. Several community forums have already been held, and website comments will be accepted though June 30 at www.Sonoma-county.org/Vacation Rentals.

Once all the results from the public hearings, website survey, and agency research are tabulated, the PRMD will present a final set of recommendations to the Planning Commission in August. The issue should then be presented to the Board of Supervisors sometime in Fall 2015 – which is the earliest anyone can expect any official action, or reaction, to the vacation rental tumult gripping the wine country.

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