The county has been working against the clock to approve short-term rental regulations before its current two-year moratorium on new licenses expires in May. Now it will have to invoke a special procedure to get them approved on time.
The proposed rules would place a cap on S.T.R.s, but a failure to enact them before a May 23 deadline could result in a rush of new applications that would have to be processed under the old rules.
To avoid that outcome, which could cause a bureaucratic and political headache, the county had hoped to get the rules on the March agenda of the California Coastal Commission, which must approve them before they can take effect.
But the commission won’t hear the proposed rules until its April meeting, the county announced on Monday.
“Due to the complexity of the issue and the volume of public comment to review, coastal commission staff was unable to complete their recommendation in time for the March hearing,” the announcement said.
If the commission requires changes before approving the new rules, the county won’t have time to get them on the books if it operates under its usual procedures. Instead, it will have to pass them as an “urgency ordinance,” eliminating the ordinary 30-day waiting period before they take effect, according to Sarah Jones, the executive director of the Marin County Community Development Agency.
“We are working to avoid a situation of the moratorium expiring without having new regulations in effect,” she told the Light.
Ms. Jones is confident the county will meet the deadline. It has been regularly communicating with commission staff while drafting the regulations, so she doesn’t expect the commissioners to ask for major alterations. “We’re not veering off into a whole new policy direction,” she said. “We had their priorities and their purpose in mind as part of this whole effort.”
The commission is charged with both protecting coastal resources and supporting public access to the coast. Days before the supervisors voted on the ordinance in January, a commission staffer sent them an email stating that sharp cuts in S.T.R. levels would be unlikely to receive the commission’s blessing. With that warning in mind, supervisors rejected the sharp caps that were recommended by the Planning Commission and endorsed by West Marin’s affordable housing advocates. The approved rules would allow up to half the homes in Dillon Beach and Seadrift to operate as Airbnbs but set lower limits for other villages.
The caps would be phased in and vary by community. In places outside Dillon Beach and Seadrift, the number of S.T.R.s would decrease by about 13 percent. But if all potential licenses in those two villages are claimed, roughly 16 percent of West Marin’s housing would be allowed to operate as Airbnbs—about the same proportion as now.
The county held a series of contentious community meetings and public hearings over the past two years. Advocates of tighter limits argued that S.T.R.s were shrinking the supply of workforce housing, driving out long-term residents and fraying the community fabric. Opponents of tight restrictions said they depend on S.T.R.s to cover their mortgages and maintenance costs. Many were second-home owners who said they would be unlikely to rent their homes year-round if they could not rent them as Airbnbs.
People on both sides complained that the county lacked sufficient data on S.T.R.s. The new rules would require staff to collect statistics on S.T.R. operations and conversions over the next two years and consider whether to modify them.