The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners — Warren Brown, Ronnie Maez and Alvin Schaaf — convened a work session on Tuesday morning at 8:30am. That’s nothing unusual; the Archuleta BOCC conevenes a work session most every Tuesday morning.
The majority of the meeting was taken up by a lengthy presentation by Jason Cox and Eric Hittle, the co-managers of the Broadband Services Management Office, a quasi-governmental office funded entirely (as far as I can tell) by taxpayer contributions. I hope to write about that presentation in a future editorial, because I found one particular aspect of the presentation to be somewhat amusing.
But since we’re currently discussing the preservation and creation of workforce housing, in a community where almost every local resident acknowledges a serious shortage of the same, I’d like to share some comments from the County’s interim Development Director, Pamela Flowers, also delivered at the Tuesday meeting.
Last month, the BOCC approved some changes to the County’s official Land Use Regulations (LURs), specifically addressing STRs — Short-Term Rentals, also known as vacation rentals. The appointed, volunteer County Planning Commission had recommended the update, and had advised the BOCC to immediately place a 5% cap on the number of STRs allowed in any subdivision. The Planning Commission suggested that existing STRs be allowed to operate, even if the cap was exceeded, so long as they remained under the original ownership. (The County controls land uses outside the boundaries of the Town of Pagosa Springs, although many subdivisions also have covenants that control land uses. Typically, when the County rules and the homeowner association rules conflict, the ‘most restrictive’ limitations are assumed to predominate.)
During the LUR discussions, Development Director Flowers had put forth reasonable arguments for including the 5% cap… but in the end, the BOCC rejected that particular recommendation and amended the Land Use Regulations without placing any cap on STRs.
One might think that was the end of the discussion.
Apparently not.
On Tuesday, Pamela Flowers presented the three commissioners with some additional information they didn’t have last month when making their decision about the 5% cap proposal.
Here’s Ms. Flowers, delivering the new information to the BOCC:
“When we had our meetings prior, and the voting occurred on the language that [the Planning Commission] proposed, one of the messages I got from you — which is an extremely reasonable point — was that you’d like some data to support your decision. And that makes good sense to me, so we started working on ways to collect data and present that to you, so you can have it for consideration as we continue these conversations about Short-Term Rental policies.
“So starting today, I’m just going to give you a very small briefing. Just want to give you some little tidbits of information, as we go forward over the next few weeks and months, so that we have a good, foundational understanding of the impacts of Short-Term Rentals and the impacts of potential changes to those programs.
“So today, we’re going to talk about vacation rental ownership, and who owns those Short-Term Rentals in our county, and what that might mean to us.”
Ms. Flowers put up a pie chart on the Zoom screen in the meeting room.
“This is just one slide. Very simple. This is who owns the vacation rentals in our county.”
As we see from Ms. Flower’s very simple slide, the vacation rental industry in Archuleta County is dominated by folks who do not live in Archuleta County. Less than a quarter of the permitted units are owned by local residents.
The state with the largest representation is Texas, with 207 vacation rental owners — easily outnumbering our 146 local owners. (NOTE: This chart does not include the STRs located within the Town limits; those STRs are separately permitted by the municipal government.)
Ms. Flowers:
“So, there’s a lot of things that this data can tell us. There’s a lot of take-aways from this.
“First, if you consider that only 146 residents of our county own Short-Term Rentals, that means the vast majority of our residents do not own Short-Term Rentals. Rather, they are the neighbors of those Short-Term Rentals.
“There are 561 people who own a home here as a Short-Term Rental, but who don’t live here — and don’t live in it — so those are either second homes or investment homes.
“I would propose that a second home or an investment home is really a luxury. It’s not a necessity in life. It’s a great thing if you can do it, but it certainly shouldn’t be our priority — in governance — to set policy that helps people have second homes. I think the priority should be to set policy that helps people have their first home.
“We can also see from these numbers that about 66 — this is a pretty good guess — there are about 66 of these that are ‘owner occupied’. That means that only 66 of these folks are using the vacation rental program to help them pay for their primary home. And that should be treated differently from the folks who have a second home, in my opinion.
“Almost 77% of the STR owners live outside Archuleta County, so they don’t spend their STR profits here. Sure, they pay property taxes and lodging taxes, they even pay cleaning staff, maintenance staff to maintain their home, but the profit they make on those vacation rentals is really travel dollars — a portion of the travel dollars to this county — that gets spend someplace else. If I live in Texas and I have a rental in Archuleta County, and I collect profits from my Short-Term Rental, I spend that money in my [local] grocery store, my restaurants…
“Additionally, these owners don’t have to live with the negative impacts of noise and parking and traffic on the roads in their neighborhood, because they don’t live in that neighborhood. They live in Texas.
“And it’s also very important to remember that these folks don’t vote here. They’re not the people who have given [the County] a mandate to protect them and take care of them…”