While short-term rentals on AirBnB and VRBO offer convenient places for travelers to stay, neighbors say visitors can be noisy and take up their parking.
A short-term rental is technically a business that needs a license, but not every host gets permission from the county first, and that’s hard to enforce due to county laws some say are unclear.
At a meeting Wednesday, county council members and staff said regulations should be clearer, licenses easier to get, and enforcement more consistent.
“We need to realize where we live, and what's becoming of this valley, how fast it's going to grow, and we're already a county that has half of our homes as secondary homes,” Councilman Mark Nelson said. “That number’s probably not going to go down; that number’s going to go up, and so these problems will even be exacerbated.”
The council didn’t make any decisions during the talk. County Manager Dustin Grabau said he and staff would work on ways to tighten or clarify rules and offer ideas to the council at a future meeting.
After that discussion, the council moved to taxes.
Members of the Utah State Tax Commission attended the meeting. That agency’s responsibilities include helping local assessors statewide ensure their residents’ appraised property values are up to date and equitable.
It’s the first public meeting between the county and state agency since Utah State Auditor John Dougall published a letter in January that addressed Wasatch County residents paying unfairly high property taxes. The letter said the state tax commission failed to take corrective action or notify the state auditor about the inequities as required by state law.
Council members asked Joshua Nielsen of the tax commission what’s being done to address those criticisms. He said it comes down to collecting better data on all of the county’s properties so that everyone has an accurate appraisal value and pays their fair share in property taxes.
Nielsen said the audit helped his office find ways to improve the situation, and he’s working with County Assessor Todd Griffin to get caught up.
Nielsen credited Griffin for making progress to resolve the problem in 2022. He also questioned whether all the scrutiny against the offices overseeing Wasatch County property taxes is justified.
“The more technology you have, and the more transparency you have, the more you start to notice these things,” Nielsen said. “I think it's very, very fair to say that currently, this may be the best it's ever been in Wasatch County, but because of this transparency and the technology, everybody's putting out every single little flaw that's out there, whereas if this was around 10 or 15 years ago, how bad would it have looked? That's not, you know, an excuse; that's the situation we're in.”
Last year, some residents reported their property taxes as much as tripled since the year before. Griffin said it’s a result of his office being behind on assessments over the last decade, before he was elected.
In Utah, taxing entities collect fixed amounts of revenue each year. That means when homes go years without appraisal updates during a time of rising property values, more recently assessed homes get bigger tax bills.
Nielsen said there are other reasons for optimism. Those include the Utah Legislature requiring agencies to provide more property data on market values and a new employee in the state office to help county assessors with mass appraisals.
A video recording of the full meeting is available at wasatch.utah.gov.
