Short-term rentals were finally allowed to resume on Monday as Covid-19 case numbers in Marin trend downward, though public health officials this week urged operators to prioritize providing shelter to wildfire evacuees. On the coast, some lodgings kept their doors shut under threat of the Woodward Fire.
“Evacuees are the priority,” Angela Nicholson, the county’s assistant administrator said on Monday. Despite the crisis, she explained, “We decided not to change course because first, our [infection] numbers are down, and second, because these businesses are struggling to survive and we didn’t want to change course on that. Many of them are booked for people who need to evacuate.”
Hotels, motels and short-term rentals have been closed to tourism since March, only allowed to serve first responders, essential workers, those quarantining due to Covid-19 and those experiencing homelessness. They were set to re-open on June 29, but that decision was rolled back after a spike in cases. After Marin met a target last Friday of having fewer than 200 cases per 100,000 residents over a two-week period, vacation rentals were reopened.
“The demand for rooms regionally is high for people who have lost homes or are evacuating their homes based on fire. Leisure travelers should be granted lower priority when availability is limited,” county guidance stated.
The rate of disease transmission in Marin is dropping. This week, the average percent of positive tests in Marin over the past seven days was 3 percent, a dramatic reduction from a high of 16.4 percent on June 29.
Marin, along with more than 30 other counties in California, remains on a state monitoring list, though that may soon change. Marin is already meeting most of the state’s requirements, including having adequate testing, hospital capacity, and a percent positivity rate below 8 percent. There’s one last threshold to meet: having fewer than 100 cases per 100,000 residents over a two-week period. This week, the county was averaging 110 positive cases per 100,000 residents over two weeks.
By opening short-term rentals, Marin has enacted what is allowable as long as it remains on the monitoring list. Yet California is still prohibiting all counties from resuming indoor dining, indoor movie theaters and museums, and from operating bars, whether indoors or outdoors.
Evacuations caused by wildfires pose new possibilities for disease transmission in California, Dr. Matt Willis, Marin’s public health officer, emphasized to Marin supervisors on Tuesday.
“We are making progress, but I’m always hesitant to be too celebratory at this point because I think we are in a vulnerable place and we could easily lose those gains we’ve achieved,” he said. “One of the threats that we need to be aware of is with the wildfires and evacuations. The virus moves regionally: Marin is part of a larger human ecosystem, especially within the Bay Area. Santa Cruz evacuated one quarter of their entire population, so there’s a lot of disruption in people across the Bay Area right now leading to unfortunate new forms of mixing, and we need to see what that means in terms of transmission.”
Dr. Willis said short-term rentals and camping were better options than evacuation centers, and he encouraged short-term rental operators to join the Airbnb program designed to facilitate the hosting of fire evacuees.
Although short-term rentals may now provide some much-needed refuge, they have posed a particular enforcement challenge in Marin. Although the county did not issue any fines, it received a significant number of complaints: Between mid-July and mid-August, 52 complaints out of a total 338 made over shelter order violations concerned short-term rentals. Of those 52, 47 were in unincorporated Marin.
While cities and towns will likely continue with their own enforcement moving forward, Ms. Nicholson said a task force with representatives from the environmental health and the code enforcement departments and sheriff’s deputies will continue to enforce short-term rental rules in the unincorporated areas. In particular, renters must belong to a single household, and no parties, events or outside visitors are allowed.
After months of waiting to reopen and revive local tourism, the Woodward Fire changed the plans of some local operators.
John Elliott, the general manager of the Tomales Bay Resort in Inverness, said on Monday that the evacuation warning had led guests who had planned to arrive Monday to cancel plans. “We just let people know the situation and let them decide, not wanting to leave anyone in the lurch,” he said.
Many of the resort’s 150 reservations on the calendar were postponed until further notice, Mr. Elliott said. Over the past several months, the business received a federal loan to stay afloat and has provided rooms to essential workers and several homeless people. Mr. Elliott said he submitted a site-specific plan, and has hopes the resort will be able to bring in some income from the last remaining warm months.
Other local operators had no plans to resume operations right away, even before the wildfire broke out. Barbara Mitchell, who owns Highway One Properties in Stinson Beach with her sisters, said that out of the 60 properties they manage, a third are occupied by the owners, a third the owners opted not to rent given the pandemic, and the remaining third have been rented for 30 days or more—which the county has allowed.
“A lot of homeowners of our vacation rental homes are either in their homes themselves or have decided not to rent through the end of 2020, because of the pandemic and the uncertainties over whether they themselves might need the house for a variety of reasons—for fires, for sheltering,” she said.