On Wednesday, May 18, after hours of public comments, both in the board room and online, the Riverside County Planning Commission unanimously approved a revised Ordinance 927, “Regulating Short Term Rentals” (STR). The revision will be sent to the board of supervisors next month for adoption.

The commission reviewed a draft of a revised ordinance at its April 20 meeting and asked its staff to make changes and bring the new version back to the commission for last week’s meeting.

Changes to 927 from April meeting

Several changes resulting from public comments before and after the April 20 commission meeting were incorporated into the current draft ordinance. Among these changes, the minimum length of an STR will be one night and two days as originally specified in the 2016 adopted ordinance.

The maximum occupancy remains 10 people unless an application for up to 16 is approved. However, language was added that the maximum occupancy of an STR on a parcel of at least 5 acres will be 16 guests, subject to state building codes.

Properties that have been subdivided pursuant to California’s Senate Bill 9 (California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency [HOME] Act) will be restricted from providing STRs.

“Adequate parking” is defined as one on-site parking space for every four occupants. More parking must be “within an approved driveway, garage, and/or carport area.”

Noise monitors must be placed both within the STR and outside the house.

The outside signage, which must be visible from the street, requires the following information: STR certificate number, name and phone number of the responsible operator, maximum number of occupants and Code Enforcement’s call center phone number.

The written notification of obtaining an STR certificate is required to be given to all property owners within 300 feet of the STR property line. This is modified to specify that at least 20 surrounding properties are notified.

And the final change is including the “requirements for eligibility of an STR to obtain certification and maintain certification through the annual renewal process” in section 7.

Deferral of caps or limits

Beginning the discussion of the revised Ordinance 927, Planning Chair David Leonard (2nd District) stressed to the public that the comments about the presence of Code Enforcement staff in different localities is “… a budget and staffing issue, it is not within the purview of the Planning Commission. That’s the purview of the board of supervisors.”

Planning Director John Hildebrand began his comments, “This is one of the most challenging ordinances that the county has ever taken on … We’re not quite there yet but we have a working framework.”

After describing the changes incorporated into the new revision, he discussed the reasons for deferring any adoption of caps or limits on STRs in specific neighborhoods.

“This is a very complicated issue and there are many concerns and considerations when establishing limitations.” Among those he mentioned were the size of the area and criteria for limiting certified STRs. Once the rule for caps is agreed upon, how do you manage it for new STR applications and what is the priority for add(((APPEND)))ing or dropping an STR were other questions whose resolution is complex, he stressed.

Leonard advised his colleagues that planning staff was not recommending adopting any language implementing caps or limitations. However, if one were adopted, Leonard thought there would be a reduction in the number of legal STRs accompanied by an increase in the number of illegal STRs.

“This is an overriding issue in Idyllwild and the Wine Country,” said Commissioner Gary Thornhill (3rd District). He then asked Robert Magee, Code Enforcement director, “What are the number one issues related to STRs overall?”

“The number one issue is noise and the number two is parking,” replied Magee.

Public comments

Among the multitude of public speakers were Patrick Reitz, former chief of the Idyllwild Fire Department, and Sherry Edwards of Pine Cove. Both supported the suggestion to impose a cap or limitation on the number of STRs within some neighborhoods.

Reitz acknowledged the difficult position the commission had trying to find a single solution to the STR issues. However, he warned them of the fire dangers in Idyllwild of which many visitors from lower elevations were unaware.

In particular, Reitz urged the commission to ban charcoal barbecues. Idyllwild has taken this step, but in the county areas surrounding the community, charcoal grills and fires are permitted.

“Charcoal is a problem when lighted and again when dumped on the ground,” he stated.

He also repeated his concern from April. The draft includes insufficient penalties to significantly reduce the number of illegally operated STRs. He advocated higher fines and a tiered system for loss of an STR certificate opportunity.

“Illegals are the major problem,” he stressed to the commission.

Commission’s changes

During the commission’s discussion, all five seemed to have concern about how the draft ordinance treated two items — hosted versus unhosted facilities and whether unrelated multiple groups could be booked concurrently.

“Hosted or unhosted is a key element in operations and should be addressed, the sooner the better,” said Commissioner Eric Kroencke (5th District). “Unhosted off-site management requires a different sort of rules.” Thornhill expressed similar thoughts, too.

In response, Hildebrand explained that the principal reason for limiting bookings to single parties or groups was STRs are in residentially built structures. The building standards for residential facilities are less rigorous than the commercial, and stricter, codes for hotels and motels. Booking unrelated parties or groups seemed to be for facilities such as motels.

After County Counsel Sarah Moore read the state code that defines hotels and motels as offering more than six rooms for rent and occupancy, the commission then agreed to change the proposed ordinance to allow facilities with an on-site host and five rooms or less to offer their occupancy to multiple groups concurrently.

The commissioners also accepted Hildebrand’s recommendation to modify sections 8 and 9 to delete the requirement that hosting platforms must display the certificate number for an STR and to collect the Transient Occupancy Tax. This will be encouraged, and he said the county already has an agreement with Airbnb to do that.

Both of these changes will be incorporated into the draft ordinance presented to the board of supervisors.

Future workshop topics

Hildebrand committed to an in-depth study of five more issues and to arrange a public workshop, perhaps within the next six weeks, to discuss them.

The five future changes include establishing caps or limitations for the number of STRs within a certain neighborhood, whether to regulate hosted sites differently than unhosted facilities, how to calculate occupancy and whether STRs in high-fire areas should be located on a paved road.

At the suggestion of Thornhill, the question of caps might be addressed with physical spacing or distance requirements. For example, county code requires a specific distance separating marijuana dispensaries, he noted. This potential treatment of limitations also will be addressed in the workshop.

Caps or limitations

The need for caps and limitations was a frequent public comment and request, which the commissioners recognized needed more focus, particularly on how to implement.

Both Leonard and Thornhill expressed lack of support for specific numerical limitations.

Speaking to this issue, Leonard said, “I hoped we wouldn’t go in that direction. No matter what limitation, somebody will argue it’s arbitrary and, to some extent whatever number you come up with, it is. I hope we can deal with [caps or limitations] through location policies.”

Near the end of the discussion, Thornhill offered his suggestion that Hildebrand study the possibility of using spacing or distance requirements between STRs as a way of limiting the proliferation of STRs.

Hosted versus unhosted management

In addition to its agreement to allow hosted sites with fewer than five rooms to book multiple groups, the commission was essentially unanimous that staff investigate whether hosted facilities should or could be regulated differently than unhosted sites.

Thornhill urged Hildebrand to try to differentiate between facilities where the owner or manager lived on-site from ones in which no one other than guests stayed on site.

Occupancy

How to calculate occupancy was another frequent public comment. Leonard noted that many speakers referred to how other jurisdictions calculated potential occupancy. He then asked Hildebrand to create a chart comparing the various methods of local cities and neighboring counties so the commission had a more informed and data-based choice.

Paved versus unpaved roads in high-fire areas

Early in his summary of the issues emerging from the public comments was Leonard’s concern about the location of STRs in high-fire areas.

“STRs in high-fire areas should be on paved streets. I’m not advocating for paved driveways,” he averred. “There should be paved access whether on a public street or not.”

Hildebrand urged more guidance from the commission on how this could be implemented, such as how close to a paved road a property had to be.

“Presumably the property has been legally subdivided and has a building permit. It should have sufficient access, but there may be circumstances where it may not be adequate,” he replied. “… we don’t know how many homes could be precluded because they’re not on a paved road in a high-fire area. If we restrict properties not in close proximity to a paved road, we’ll need to walk through the details on how it works.”

And Leonard agreed that “as it stands today, this topic needs to be evaluated in-depth and part of the phase 2 workshop.”

Commission vote

The commission discussed the issues surrounding regulation of STRs for more than an hour. At the conclusion, members unanimously approved sending the draft Ordinance 927 to the supervisors with the two changes to which they had agreed.

A workshop to discuss in further detail the five issues they could not resolve will be scheduled in the future. Hildebrand thought this might occur within a month or month and a half.