The City Council will consider a recommendation from staff to enter into Professional Services Agreement with a company that would help bring the short-term rental market in Park City into compliance. The item is on the consent agenda for Tuesday’s Special Council meeting. The meeting starts at 2 PM in closed session, a budget work sessions tarts at 5:30 and the regular meeting starts at 6 PM. Carolyn Murray has this:
The consultants, Host Compliance, LLC provides Short Term Rental Inventory compliance and analytic services. Assistant City Manager, Matt Diaz said the City, the Chamber of Commerce and Summit County have agreed to a three-way collaborative contract that won’t exceed 60,000-dollars.
“During the 2016 legislative session, it was a very dramatic ending. All sorts of lobbying was done by the city and the county and the chamber to try to preserve city’s and town’s abilities to control our land use. And one of the things in particular, was the ability to control nightly rentals are allowed and where they’re not allowed in our community. And the legislature the year before had kind of deregulated the taxi industry and the for-hire industry and they were about to do the same thing here. And we were able to preserve that ability.”
Diaz thinks there are a lot of unlicensed nightly rental businesses in Summit County.
“Right now, we have roughly 2000 nightly rentals that are licensed in our community. But we think there could be anywhere between four to six thousand actual properties rented out there. So, there’s a lot of unlicensed, shadow economy going on. A lot of different reasons…public safety, equity with the lodging industry to do this and we’re excited about it.”
Local Government is limited in their ability to enforce nightly rentals.
“Unfortunately, because of the legislation, we can’t use the act of advertising to issue a citation even to someone that you would find two, three, four, five, seven times. But we were able to determine from other communities that by the time someone gets a second or third letter saying hey did you know, we have these regulations in place and you need to get a license for it. That they’re able to get 80 to 85 percent of those properties that weren’t licensed, into the licensing stream. They’re showing great compliance in areas like Tahoe, San Francisco and even New York City."
The discussion on nightly rental compliance is one of five items on the Consent Agenda and will be discussed in the regular meeting which starts at 6 pm on Tuesday.