For almost three hours Wednesday night, Summit County councilors heard from their constituents about temporarily halting nightly rental licensing.
The public hearing was supposed to focus on whether or not the county should impose a moratorium to give the council time to come up with new regulations for properties listed on sites like Airbnb. But the comments frequently discussed the impacts of nightly rentals themselves, both for neighbors who deal with the parties and parking issues, and real estate professionals who say nightly rentals play a critical role in the local economy.
The president of the Park City Area Lodging Association, Dan Bullert, said his organization objected to, among other things, the timing of the proposed moratorium. It would have ended less than two weeks before the mid-January deadline to renew the business license required for a nightly rental.
Bullert said that could force condominium hotels — buildings in which units are technically condos but often used as hotel rooms — to take some of the units off the market, potentially threatening the business itself.
“If condo hotels were to suffer any inventory losses, I can't express it enough, the outcome would be catastrophic," Bullert said. "As stated, the consequences of the moratorium are far-reaching: deterring real estate sales, individual owners suffering earning loss, businesses in the form of management companies suffering those earning losses. There are also concerns with employment reductions and underground non-compliance rentals.”
Jamie Johnson, CEO of the Park City Board of Realtors, said nearly 2/3 of the houses currently under contract to be sold in Summit County are in areas that allow nightly rentals. She said the moratorium would take away that right from the future property owners.
Louise Kingston said she’s in that exact situation, but as a seller. Kingston said she was hoping to sell her property and move into another home with her family.
“I will be losing my contract, probably, this Friday is my earnest money deadline," Kingston said. "If, in the event this moratorium is passed, my buyer’s pulling out. So that's going to have a huge ramification for my next step.”
About 125 people attended the hearing, 1/3 of those in-person in Coalville and the rest joining online. The vast majority of commenters opposed the moratorium and said they were involved in the real estate industry in some way. Some identified themselves as Realtors; others said they manage properties.
Any moratorium only would have applied in unincorporated Summit County and not inside any city’s boundaries. The council did not formally reject the proposal, but merely did not vote on the ordinance that would have imposed the moratorium.
There were several speakers from the Canyons Village area who asked the council to exclude that resort from any moratorium. Several others were from Summit Park and spoke about the harms of Airbnbs in their neighborhood.
Councilor Roger Armstrong was alone among his colleagues in vocally supporting the moratorium. He suggested that the prevalence of nightly rentals and second homes in Summit County is destroying any sense of community.
The other four councilors agreed with the need to regulate the industry but said a moratorium wasn’t necessary to do so, and would cause unnecessary harm while the county works to solve underlying issues.
Megan McKenna, a Park City High School teacher, supported the moratorium. She grew up in Park City but said the local cost of living has forced most of her family to move into surrounding communities. She said Park City needs more long-term rental options. Without the affordable home she was lucky to find in Park City Heights, she said she would have probably ended up in the Salt Lake Valley.
“I finished my basement recently and put it up for rent. It's a small 400-square-foot studio. I had to take it offline within 20 minutes because there was so much — so many responses to it," McKenna said. "I listened to a family of four pleading on the phone if they could take it. These are students, a mother and three students in our school district that were desperately looking for housing. And this is what we're pushing out when we allow for more nightly rentals.”
A public policy research institute said Summit County has the highest percentage of nightly rentals in the state. The county’s housing director estimated there are between 5,800 and 6,600 nightly rental units in the county. That includes 2,200 in the Snyderville Basin, about half of which are apparently unlicensed.
