While the Town of Pagosa Springs faces a lawsuit challenging the right of the voters to create a new fee on the operation of STRs — Short-Term Rentals, vacation rentals — the leadership of Archuleta County is considering four proposals for better controlling the impacts of STRs out in the unincorporated county.
One of the possible changes includes a fee very similar to the one now being challenged by the Town lawsuit, and that fee was discussed in public meetings on Friday and Saturday.
The large exhibit hall in the CSU Extension Building, at the Archuleta County Fairgrounds was perhaps one-quarter full of STR owners, sitting in chairs facing a projection screen and representatives of the County Planning Department, including Development Director Pam Flowers and Planner Brandon Wolff.
The meeting, on Friday, June 24, had been advertised in the local newspaper and had been announced in the Daily Post, and was open to the general public.
The general public did not show up, however. But a sizable number of local and out-of-town STR owners were in attendance, along with a handful of realtors and property managers.
You can view the presentation, here.
A once or twice during the contentious discussion, an audience member would ask for a show of hands.
For example. “How many of us would be willing to switch our properties from ‘Short-Term Rentals’ to to ‘Long-Term Rentals?” This question elicited not a single raised hand. Apparently, all the STR owners in the room — if faced with losing their vacation rental licenses — would prefer to leave their properties vacant, rather than make it available to the local workforce.
When an audience member asked for different show of hands — “How many people in the audience are not realtors, or STR owners, or STR managers?” — only about six people raised their hands.
So, not exactly a group representative of the voting public.
Ms. Flowers had just finished sharing a Powerpoint slide show, illustrating the four possible approaches the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners might take this summer to place some controls — finally — on the until-now-unfettered growth of the vacation rental industry within the unincorporated county.
Judging by the interaction between Ms. Flowers and the audience, I would say that the STR owners and realtors were generally unhappy with the proposals, and they made their feelings known.
Ms. Flowers was also not in the best mood, facing a roomful of outspoken critics.
The proposed new limitations and regulations, illustrated in the slide show, were not fully fleshed out or detailed, but were generally similar — I would say — to the limits and regulations that have already been put in place by the Town Council within the town boundaries. The Town’s limits and regulations and fees were instituted mainly over the past two years.
The BOCC is playing catch-up, you might say.
Ms. Flowers had delivered this same Powerpoint presentation to the Board of County Commissioners earlier this month, and also to the County Planning Commission, and had fielded questions from those officials.
So the presentation on Friday marked the third time I’d heard it, attending as a reporter. I assume most of the people at the Extension Building presentation were hearing the ideas for the first time, and they naturally had a lot of perceptive questions.
Many of the questions concerned ‘data’. Did the County Planning Department have any data to justify these proposed changes? Do we have data indicating how these proposed regulations and fees will affect the Pagosa Springs economy?
The short answer is, of course, ‘No’. Our local governments very rarely have ‘data’ to suggest how their regulations or fees will affect the Pagosa Springs economy, and whenever they do have ‘data’, it’s so often wide of the mark.
Nor did the business people sitting in the audience have any ‘data’. I suppose they could have brought their own data with them? But that didn’t happen.
Fortunately — or maybe, unfortunately — most government regulations and fees have very little effect on our economy. The Pagosa Springs economy is like a herd of elephants charging through the neighborhoods… and government regulation tends to be like a small, well-meaning monkey, waving its arms. “No… no… no… go this way!”
For example. A new, 4.9% Lodgers Tax was approved by the Town voters in 2006. Such a tax could have had a negative effect on tourism, but the net result has been a thriving and constantly expanding lodging industry.
With that in mind, the Archuleta BOCC had instructed Ms. Flowers and her staff to develop suggested regulations that could address three key priorities:
1. To maintain, as best we can, the current level of tourism in Archuleta County, and if possible, to further increase tourism.
2. To improve the quality of life in our residential neighborhoods — that is, the friendly, the small town character that many full-time residents have appreciated, prior to the arrival of the STRs.
3. To take positive steps to address the serious housing crisis in Archuleta County — a situation where visiting tourists can easily find pleasant accommodations, but where working families and individuals are being evicted, and are unable to find affordable housing in our community.
We can see in this list of priorities, an obvious conflict between maintaining the status quo (regarding tourism) and making potentially big changes to the status quo (improving the quality of life for local residents.)
The decision might be much more difficult, if the STR owners were themselves integral members of the local community. If they were ‘us’. But as the planning staff explained on Friday, about 89% of the STRs within the county are owned by people (or corporations) that do not reside in Pagosa Springs.
Following the slide show, Ms. Flowers fielded questions from the audience, submitted on 3×5 index cards, concerning the four proposed approaches that the BOCC will be considering. She then invited the STR owners and realtors to make general comments. I noticed that most of the speakers, when making their comments, turned to face, not the planning staff, but their colleagues in the audience.
Many of the comments concerned the need to ‘slow down’ the process at hand, and more fully consider the impacts of the proposed regulations and fees. Better ‘data’ ought to be developed and studied. Better options — better than the current options — should be considered.
These are, of course, reasonable requests… were it not for the fact that the past decisions by the BOCC, to allow STRs to run rampant in our neighborhoods, were made without any ‘data’ whatsoever.
And were it not for the fact that the STR owners have not proposed any alternative solutions that can address the three key BOCC priorities.
Our neighborhoods and our housing market have been seriously altered by the lack of BOCC actions over the past 15 years.
Time for our leaders to lead? At long last?