Grover Beach city leaders are taking steps to regulate short-term rentals.
Homeowners who are frustrated with rentals and those who rent out their homes on sites like AirBnB spoke at a meeting Monday.
It’s an issue that impacts dozens of neighbors across Grover Beach as more people are using technology to list their homes online for short-term rentals.
“I for the life of me never thought that one day I’d wake up living in the middle of a hotel district,” said Tony Cerino, a Grover Beach resident.
“Yesterday we had visitors from Germany and two Chinese couples and an Estonian couple are coming later this week,” said Steven Otto, who uses his home as a short-term vacation rental.
On Monday the Grover Beach City Council took input from community members as they look to create an ordinance regulating these short-term rentals.
The regulations would differentiate from rentals that are owner occupied versus non-occupied and putting a cap on the number of permits allowed – 60 rentals in non-coastal areas and 40 in coastal zones.
The ordinance would also potentially create a first come first serve basis that grandfathers in homeowners who have been running AirBnBs out of their homes for several years, a cause for concern for some who own short-term rentals.
“I’d like you to consider people who are running SDRs in Pismo and Oceano as part of that group – people who have proven they can run SDRs,” said short-term rental owner, John Shapiro.
The city plans to use the fees created by the permits for a 24 hour hotline service where community members could call and send photo evidence and videos of their complaints about neighbors short-terms rentals, and then create citations; that’s good news for people like Tony Cerino who says he’s had trouble making reports about his neighbors short-term rental.
“I deal with a house where there are more people in that one house than in the other seven houses combined – I’m woke all the time.. this has gotta stop,” Cerino said.
Things to still determine for council members will be how will the first come first serve process go and what if someone does both owner occupied and non occupied rentals.
They did vote for a total number of renters of two per bedroom up to 10 renters and having homeowners who do the rentals pay a business fee for running this type of business out of their home.
The council will now have a second reading on the ordinance at their meeting on June 17th.
If the ordinance does pass, it still has to go through the Coastal Commission. The city does stand to make money from this potential ordinance as it would require these rentals to start paying transient occupancy taxes (TOT) that could go into effect September or October.
